Suburban communities in Illinois are failing to meet the requirements set out for them in a 22-year-old law aimed at increasing the state’s affordable housing supply.
The Illinois General Assembly passed the Affordable Housing Planning and Appeal Act in 2003 to “address the shortage of affordable, accessible, safe, and sanitary housing,” the law says. It requires eligible municipalities to submit reports to the state every five years, detailing their plans to build more affordable housing units.
A new report found only around a quarter of submissions were compliant, according to Impact for Equity, a nonprofit focused on legal and policy issues in Illinois. All but one of the 44 jurisdictions that need to submit plans are located in the Chicago area.
“The law is … not doing what it needs to do to get us to a place that we need to be as a state,” Suni Kartha, coauthor of the report and attorney at Impact for Equity, said. The organization successfully advocated to amend the law in 2023, in an effort to boost compliance.
The Illinois Housing Development Authority is in charge of creating its list of communities every five years that have less than a 10% share of affordable housing in their jurisdiction. The communities must have populations equal to or greater than 1,000.
The agency determines affordability by calculating the number of housing units that are affordable to renters making less than 60% of the area median income, or homeowners making less than 80% based on U.S. Census Bureau data. This means monthly rents below $1,181, or monthly mortgage and property tax costs below $1,575 in the Chicago area, according to the development authority.
In 2023, legislators amended the law to allow the development authority to refer noncompliant communities to the Illinois Attorney General. Jurisdictions that fail to submit a plan or who submit a plan that wasn’t “prepared in good faith should expect to be reported,” according to the authority.
The report said the law is vague about “what that referral should recommend or what capacity or interest the attorney general’s office has in prosecuting enforcement.”
“We are eager to see how it works in practice,” Marty Cozzola, coauthor of the report and attorney at Impact for Equity, said.
Andrew Field, a spokesperson for the Illinois Housing Development Authority, said in a statement that before the agency notifies the attorney general’s office, it works with communities to “help get their plans filed/compliant.”
Once plans are submitted, the agency’s review process kicks in and lasts up to 30 days. But Field said the agency works with municipalities past those deadlines, as it wants local governments to be compliant. No communities have been referred to the attorney general, including those that missed the June deadline. He said the agency hasn’t decided when it will start referring noncompliant communities to the attorney general.
“Our goal is to find the most effective path to full compliance,” Field said.
A 2021 amendment clarified that home rule municipalities — communities of over 25,000 residents with greater authority over their own governance from the General Assembly and the governor — are required to submit plans under the law. Many communities had previously argued that they didn’t have to comply with the law due to the home rule, the report said.
The communities that didn’t submit plans this year include: Barrington Hills, Campton Hills, Elmhurst, Inverness, Lake Forest, Oak Brook, Prairie Grove, South Barrington, Geneva, Hawthorn Woods, Lily Lake, River Forest and Third Lake. The majority of these communities also didn’t submit plans in the last cycle, which was 2020.
The jurisdictions whose plans were noncompliant include: Deerfield, Deer Park, Frankfort, Glencoe, Glenview, Homer Glen, Lake Bluff, Lakewood, Lincolnshire, Lincolnwood, Long Grove, North Barrington, Spring Grove, Timberlane, Tower Lakes, Wayne, Western Springs, Wilmette and Winnetka.
Homer Glen submitted its plan late, and it’s under review.
Deer Park, Glencoe, Lakewood and Lincolnwood submitted second plans that are under review.
Noncompliant plans could mean that the communities didn’t include details such as a proposed timeline to implement the items and/or identification of land for development or rehabilitation.
Impact for Equity’s report said the state agency’s methods to determine compliance is “inconsistent” and “unclear” and said the standards “likely overestimate actual compliance.”
“There are plans that fall under the compliant category but are missing elements in whole or in part,” Kartha said. “Others that seem to have those elements were deemed non-compliant.”
Kartha and Cozzola said the Illinois Housing Development Authority should provide greater clarity around how municipalities can meet the requirements.
Field called Impact for Equity’s assessment “regrettable,” saying the authority has engaged with the nonprofit in “good faith” in the last several months while the organization was putting together its report.
“What we can agree on is our shared goal: expanding access to housing in every community across Illinois,” Field said. “Despite rising construction costs, inflationary pressures, local zoning challenges and constrained resources at every level of government, progress is being made.”
The state agency offers one-on-one meetings with counties and local governments and offers free “tools, technical assistance, and insights on what is available in order to create more housing for all incomes in their communities,” Field said. He said the type of affordable housing provided in a community is “entirely a local decision.”
In 2018, the beginning of the last cycle for the law, there were 46 communities on the list, with 19 that didn’t submit an affordable housing plan, according to the state authority. Ten years ago, the list had 68 communities.
Since the law passed, around 560 affordable homes have been built with low-income housing tax credits in communities subject to writing affordable housing plans, the report said. The federally-funded tax credit program is the nation’s primary mechanism for building affordable housing.
Developers applying for tax credits in jurisdictions on the development authority’s list also receive points in the application process for their proposed plan’s location. Plans that score the highest are awarded the limited supply of tax credits.
Illinois has a shortage of about 142,000 housing units and must build 227,000 in the next five years to keep pace with demand, a number that would require recent annual production rates to double, according to a joint study published this summer by the Illinois Economic Policy Institute and the Project for Middle Class Renewal at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.