Put your money where your mouth is

Do Black lives really matter to suburbanites?

If you have seen the nearly-lily-white Black Lives Matter marches in several nearly-lily-white Chicago suburbs, you may wonder when all these suburbs got religion.

They didn’t.

The marchers live in villages that do pretty racist stuff. That’s how the towns get to be as racially diverse as a  bottle of homogenized milk. 

“Displaying BLM signs and holding rallies, such as the one planned for tonight in Wilmette, are feel-good gestures, but they don’t easily translate into policy,” Wilmette resident Sherry Medwin recently told her village’s trustees. 

“What our village government can do – and clearly should do -- in response to the cries for help is to restore the dismantled Housing Commission and to meet, at minimum, the state’s requirement to provide 10% affordable housing.”

The village currently has less than half that much.

Patrick Hanley spoke similarly to the Winnetka Village Council June 16: “Ten days ago, we walked because our values called on us to be counted -- that diversity is a public good,” he said.  “We must reconcile the values we walked for and the policies we live with.”

What Medwin and Hanley were both saying was that if you think Black lives matter, you should try to live alongside living Blacks.

That’s just not done in Winnetka, where Blacks represent three-tenths of one percent of the population. Hanley used to live in Northbrook, which has a whopping six-tenths of a percent. In both places, Blacks are so rare that people are likely to call the cops when they see one on their block. 

The simplest way to change that is to promote affordable housing. “Social justice begins with who you’re living next door to,” said Dan Lauber, a fair and affordable housing expert who lives in River Forest, a town he wants to see have less than 91 percent unaffordable housing. 

There are opportunities to increase affordable housing, but mostly, they’re not taken. 

June 28 is the state deadline for Illinois towns with less than 10% affordable housing to file plans to show how they’re going to get there. As of this writing, 45 cities should be filing, and only five have done so, according to the Illinois Housing Development Authority (IHDA).

Most of the towns probably won’t file, since the Illinois Affordable Housing Planning and Appeal Act doesn’t have any teeth. And they really don’t want more affordable housing.

That may be because of the widespread belief that affordable housing will reduce existing home values. There are many studies that show that’s about as reasonable a belief as insisting that if you step on a crack, you’ll break your mother’s back. 

Such mythology is significantly impacting the most important urban and suburban issue of our time. 

Why so important? We’re never going to accept each other as human beings unless we know each other. 

When white people don’t know any Black people, they’re likely to foster all kinds of notions that make it harder for Black people to live. It’s easier when you don’t have to look a Black neighbor in the eye. Segregation means never having to say you’re sorry.

And, of course, people who can’t afford good housing are probably also sending their kids to schools that are underfunded, and living where other opportunities are fewer, too. That’s because we don’t require that the good stuff be spread around.

But just any affordable housing plan is not good enough. You have to mean it. 

River Forest’s plan commission labored through four long, agonizing meetings to create a plan, and then the Village Board listened to people talk about it for more than five hours one recent night. Almost everybody who approached the virtual podium decried the plan, saying it guaranteed no progress. They wanted to try for something much better, no matter that they’d blow the IHDA deadline.

“We are at this pivotal point in American and River Forest history where it appears the nation’s finally willing to address social injustice and inequities,” Lauber said. “The bottom line: Who can live in our community is at the core of social injustice and inequity.”

He noted that not only did the new plan guarantee no new affordable housing, but it failed to protect the village from losing dozens of existing affordable units to new village-fostered development.

He and most of the speakers wanted the River Forest board to send a letter saying they had scrapped the plan that was on the table, but a better one was on the way. That would have been reasonable, said Gail Schechter, who holds the affordable housing seat on the Illinois Housing Appeals Board, administered by the IHDA.

But the village board passed their weak plan anyway, 4-3. Trustee Res Vazquez, probably the deciding vote, said he thought the plan was inadequate, and being a first generation American, he gets it. But he wanted to make sure that something got done by the deadline, because he is a lawyer, and he likes things just so. The plan could be improved later, he said. 

He voted after the village board seized excitedly on the idea of solving the problem by allowing accessory dwelling units. 

ADUs are mainly backyard cottages and home additions. So River Forest is going to solve its affordable housing problem by letting people build mother-in-law houses? That’s probably not going to increase diversity unless mom looks a lot different from her kids.

For many affordable housing proponents, one solution is simple. Require that new housing developments include affordable units. Period.

There’s a catch: developers sometimes claim that such a demand is an unconstitutional taking of property under the 5th Amendment. So municipalities make a trade: more unit density and extra size for developers’ buildings in exchange for doing the right thing.

River Forest officials maintain that they have to give those sorts of breaks to developers just so they’ll agree to build housing of any kind.

This is somewhat insane, because it means the town is allowing buildings bigger or taller than otherwise acceptable in exchange for nothing other than getting something, anything, new. 

River Forest resident Heidi Kieselstein told trustees that worrying about “reacting nimbly” to what developers want is unlikely to ever result in the kind of town the people who live there want.

“We’re not centering on people, we’re centering on economics,” she said. “A developer won't do this, and a developer won't do that. We've stopped talking about people.”

Affordable housing is not exactly economically impossible for a developer to create, anyway. The IHDA says as much as $1,203 per month can be charged to a renter of a two-bedroom apartment and still be considered affordable. An affordable home for a family of four can sell as high as  $198,056.

River Forest’s new plan is largely patterned after Wilmette’s 2004 plan, which was so toothless that residents and officials laboriously rewrote it three years later, creating one of the most progressive plans in the area. The Wilmette Village Board, sickeningly, then “accepted” it instead of approving it.

A tough plan is much better than handling it case-by-case, which is the way Wilmette has to bring in affordable units now. More than five years of struggle have brought what may amount to 30 units, none of which are completed. The village approved a 16-unit all-affordable building in 2018, after over three years of negotiations. When talks failed to convince a builder to include affordable units in a 7-story, 108-unit downtown development, Optima, Inc. promised early this year to donate $1.6 million toward construction of units elsewhere in town. 

One of the chief activists behind that shunned 2007 plan, then-Village Trustee Lali Watt, recently told the current Village Board that she had just received an email from Village President Bob Bielinski “reiterating his support for diversity and for all residents of our village.”

She added, “The way to actually show support for diversity is to take steps to ensure we can have a broader range of economic groups calling Wilmette home.

“The development of an actionable affordable housing plan with teeth is very important to this.”

Schechter was also pushing for a better plan in 2007.

“Years ago, I asked a group of Wilmette religious leaders why it was so difficult to get the village to make mixed-income housing a policy,” she said. “One minister responded that I was messing with the brand -- that Wilmette brand of lake, trees, and great schools. Well, why can’t that brand also be about racial and economic diversity and inclusion?” 

Whenever Schechter talks about affordable housing -- and she talks about it a lot -- she tries to remind her listener that cheaper housing alone won’t attract minorities to white suburbs.

She told the Wilmette leaders that towns committed to increasing racial diversity should show it, and “put up banners, put the welcome mat out” for not only builders of affordable housing but the diverse future residents themselves, regardless of income.

“It’s time to stop the nonsense of treating everyone who is not rich or white as ‘other,’” she said. “So you’ve got to be welcoming, so people will move in. And when they’re here, you have to stop treating them like garbage.

“You have to stop clutching your handbag, saying, ‘What are you doing here?’”