Chicago’s Regional Housing Solutions

Since 2005, a partnership between three Chicago agencies ran a program called Homes for a Changing Region (HCR) which responded to requests for housing plans, strategies, and solutions, at the request of municipal clusters and regions. Due to time and staffing constraints, from 2005–2015 only 43 of 283 communities obtained successful plans from the program.

The HCR team decided to address this backlog by creating Regional Housing Solutions, an online portal which brought many disparate datasets together to create a holistic snapshot of the Chicago housing market. This tool allows users, whether policymakers or residents, to identify discrepancies in different municipal housing markets in and around Chicago, draw out trends and patterns, and identify municipal clusters where similar housing problems exist. Additionally, this tool is meant to help identify solutions to tackle existing housing challenges, and provide communities with the information, data, and other resources to develop their own housing policy plans.

This new digital tool is intriguing from a planning perspective, because it lends a whole new definition to the idea of community-led planning. It is a great example of community empowerment and a solid step towards reducing government backlog and bureaucracy. Elizabeth Scott, Associate Planner for the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, readily admits that some of the data is several years old and therefore doesn’t capture the latest neighborhood trends, such as the onset of gentrification in any one geographic area, so this is one way this tool can be improved upon. That being said, I am interested in following this tool’s trajectory and see if communities do decide to take on the challenge of creating their own housing policy plans.