“While building affordable housing is a hot topic, new buildings only account for about a quarter of the affordable housing market. The rest is comprised of Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing, or NOAH, which falls between subsidized housing and high-rent buildings. However, that too is that risk. In Chicago, 10% of NOAH housing was lost from 2012-2019.
“One Chicago CDFI has been working to preserve that housing for decades. Called Community Investment Corporation (CCI), they have a wide range of programs, including their Troubled Building Initiative, to support the acquisition, rehabilitation and preservation of affordable rental housing.
“They also offer a suite of services to support and educate the landlords who borrow from them, including training on best practices, resources and building code updates. The goal is to help landlords serve as better stewards of affordable buildings. Young says a survey found that half of their borrowers are people of color, and many are local.
“‘We usually don’t think about landlords as businesses, but they are,’ Young says. ‘They need the same support.’
“Their 20-year-old Trouble Buildings Initiative (TBI) is aimed at unresponsive landlords. Instead of the city of Chicago filing code violations, TBI pulls together multiple city departments including housing, police and building, to identify at-risk structures and appoint CIC as a stakeholder to make repairs.
“Here in Chicago, we’re looking at rents of $800-$900 a month for neighborhoods without subsidy,” Young says. “And in higher-cost neighborhoods, they’re going up to $1,200-$1,700 a month. This tax incentive is a way for owners to keep rents affordable in those higher-cost markets where the rents are going up.” (Patterson, Urbanist News, 6/8/22)