Mayor Brandon Johnson turned up the heat on the City Council Tuesday on the eve of a pivotal vote on his plan to confront Chicago’s affordable housing crisis — amid pushback from his most powerful ally.
Johnson’s “green social housing” plan would create a city-owned, nonprofit developer to issue $135 million in loans to developers who build affordable housing and sell their environmentally-friendly buildings back to the city.
Ald. Pat Dowell (3rd), Johnson’s handpicked Finance Committee chair, said the plan would simply benefit affluent communities and do little to uplift marginalized African American communities because of the economics of how the deals are structured.
According to the plan, 70% of the units would be market rate, and 30% would be affordable.
“In communities like mine and other marginalized areas, affordable rent is the same as market rent. So this is going to take place in more affluent areas,” Dowell said. “It may work in the South Loop. But it’s not going to work in Fuller Park. … This particular tool will not create affordable housing … in more marginalized communities.”
Dowell noted that Housing Commissioner Lissette Castaneda has openly acknowledged that it would take “about 10 years” for communities like South Shore, Grand Boulevard, Roseland, North Lawndale and Fuller Park to see the results of the new strategy.
That’s how long it would take to build up the revolving fund to the point where money could be redirected “to subsidize, even deeper, those areas that are not going to benefit from this strategy,” Dowell said. “The only way the base can be built up is by having lots of development in the more affluent parts of the city.”
Johnson and Castaneda argued that Chicago desperately needs to find “a different way to build affordable housing” at a time when President Donald Trump has proposed a budget that cuts federal housing subsidies and eliminates community development block grants.
“We cannot rely upon the federal government to come and do the right things. We have to have a tool in place that creates affordability across the city,” Johnson said Tuesday at his weekly news conference.
Castaneda said she is “very confident that, across the city, there are many communities where this will work, including in communities where private market equity … has not taken the chance that we are willing to take because we are looking for a different outcome.”
The mayor is pushing for approval of his green social housing ordinance at Wednesday’s joint meeting of the Finance and Housing committees. That will be followed by a full Council meeting Wednesday to tee up the ordinance for a final vote next week.
Dowell questioned the need to move “at breakneck speed.”
She argued that the money and effort would be better spent driving development at the Chicago Housing Authority, which is behind in delivering on the promises of the “Plan for Transformation” made after CHA high-rises were demolished.
“The CHA needs some attention. We’re doing a third, a third, a third in the CHA Plan for Transformation. But that plan is moving very slowly. We don’t have an executive (director). There’s no director of development. I want to see some focus placed on those things,” Dowell said.
“The same kind of energy we’re seeing put forth on this green social housing initiative should be the same kind of energy and speed that we need for the Chicago Housing Authority and other affordable housing development projects that move so slowly through the Department of Housing.”
During the news conference, Johnson was asked to comment on the deal he crafted last week to “loan” the statue of Christopher Columbus that former Mayor Lori Lightfoot removed from its pedestal at Arrigo Park to a civic group for display at a new Chicago Museum for Italian Immigration on Taylor Street.
The Joint Civic Committee for Italian Americans hopes that deal will be a prelude to returning another Columbus statue to Grant Park.
But the mayor appeared to throw cold water on that idea when asked to explain the difference between controversial monuments and the puppet display that he refused to remove at the city-owned Cultural Center, even after influential Jewish leaders complained it was antisemitic.
“Art can be controversial, but I believe there is a distinction between art and monument,” Johnson said. “Art can depict a moment in time or where we’re trying to go, where a monument solidifies a position that, by this monument in and of itself, we are honoring this particular” person.