You can read Habitat's excerpt below! To read the full story in the Chicago Tribune, please click here.
"Chicago is 120,000 units short on affordable housing. Here’s how the city and developers hope to fix that gap.
The shortage of affordable units is something developer and property manager The Habitat Co., whose affordable housing arm manages more than 13,000 affordable units, is trying to address. Its latest endeavor is 43 Green — a $100 million mixed-use development of three buildings next to the 43rd Street Green Line stop in the Grand Boulevard community area. The first building will contain 99 apartments, half with market-rate rents and half for residents earning no more than 60% of area median income, which is $55,920 for a family of four. The ground floor will contain retail space. Construction is expected to start later this year.
The development is part of Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Invest South/West initiative to boost investment on the city’s South and West sides. It coincides with a draft of the city’s first plan for Equitable Transit-Oriented Development, also known as eTOD, which the city defines as “development that enables all people, regardless of income, race, ethnicity, age, gender, immigration status or ability, to experience the benefits of dense, mixed-use, pedestrian-oriented development near transit hubs.”
“Affordable housing cannot be cured without financial support, ultimately financial support of all levels of government,” said Matthew Fiascone, Habitat’s president. “Between the Great Recession and the pandemic, if you look where transit-oriented development occurred, it was primarily in areas that were high cost, or they quickly became high cost because they had transit. It became exactly the opposite of affordable.
“Part of eTOD is put it in neighborhoods and manage it, so the transit-oriented aspect doesn’t end up pricing people out.”