Newswise — Chicago is gaining low-income households, including many large Latino households, much faster than it is gaining housing they can afford, a University of Illinois at Chicago report says.
If current trends continue through 2010, the city will see a marked increase in overcrowding, homelessness, and households burdened by rents they cannot afford, said Yittayih Zelalem, research assistant professor and co-director of UIC's Nathalie P. Voorhees Center for Neighborhood and Community Improvement.
"The housing stress is extremely acute for households earning less than $20,000, which is 25 percent of all Chicago households," Zelalem said. "Seventy-two percent of those households spend more than 30 percent of their gross income for housing."
The UIC study estimates available housing more realistically than previous studies because it considers the size of both households and housing units. The researchers categorized households by size and income, matched them to units by size and cost, and estimated the potential mismatch between demand and supply five years from now.
"Building for the high end of the market isn't working. High-income people don't necessarily want to buy or rent the most expensive units," said Janet Smith, UIC associate professor of urban planning and policy and co-director of the Voorhees Center.
"Housing is seen as a commodity -- buy low, sell high," Smith said. "Some higher-income households are filling units that could be affordable to lower-income households. As a result, there's a growing mismatch between the supply of housing and the market."
Among the report's findings:
-Families increasingly are being pushed out of central neighborhoods because most new units in growing neighborhoods like the South Loop have no more than two bedrooms and are relatively expensive.
-An estimated 31,000-37,000 subsidized units could be lost as public housing is demolished and privately owned subsidized units are converted to market-rate.
-When Chicago's 77 community areas are categorized as being gentrified, mid-gentrification, gentrification-pressured, crowded, accessible, mixed-income or stable homeowning, a gap in low-income housing arose in all categories.
The full 54-page report, "Affordable Housing Conditions and Outlook in Chicago: An Early Warning for Intervention," is available on the Voorhees Center web page at http://www.uic.edu/cuppa/voorheesctr.
The study was supported by the Woods Fund of Chicago.
UIC ranks among the nation's top 50 universities in federal research funding and is Chicago's largest university with 25,000 students, 12,000 faculty and staff, 15 colleges and the state's major public medical center. A hallmark of the campus is the Great Cities Commitment, through which UIC faculty, students and staff engage with community, corporate, foundation and government partners in hundreds of programs to improve the quality of life in metropolitan areas around the world.
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