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PART ONE: The Homes for All Ordinance
The Homes for All Ordinance will help make Chicago’s public housing system work. Specifically, it intervenes in current and long-standing redevelopment patterns to preserve Chicago’s dwindling supply of public housing on a one-for-one unit basis, and ensure a future where public housing is integrated into all 50 wards by placing a system of checks and balances around Aldermanic prerogative. The procedural changes will protect due process and ensure that evidence-based decision-making--- rather than prejudice and fear-mongering--- are used to inform key votes on affordable housing proposals in wards with little to no affordable housing currently.
PART TWO: The Development for All Ordinance
The Development for All Ordinance will help dramatically strengthen access to affordable housing by fixing problems with the City's Affordable Requirements Ordinances (ARO) that have been undermining access to affordable housing in Chicago since 2007. The Development for All Ordinance amends the ARO to close fundamental loopholes that have rendered the ARO incapable of delivering what it was intended to do---- create balanced and inclusive patterns of development that chisel away at the City’s intractable segregation, lessen gentrification spirals, and provide for development without displacement.
A Chicago Tribune front page expose’ documented pervasive developer opt-outs crippling affordable housing production under the ARO, which produced only 441 affordable apartments on-site in the decade between 2007 and 2017. Making affordable housing "optional" fatally undermined a key element of the Mayor Rahm Emanuel's affordable housing plan. The ARO only generated 22 three-bedroom apartments from 2007 & 2017. Until we start creating family affordable housing, the ARO is worth very little to Chicago's families.
Meanwhile, the city's so-called "affordable" rents under the ARO keep "affordable" apartments vastly out of reach for the average black or latinx family, people with disabilities, and all full-time minimum wage workers. Finally, Aldermanic prerogative often functions to block the integration of affordable housing into white wards, retrenching patterns of segregation laid down decades ago.
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