Housing and the workforce -- December Voice 2022

Housing and the workforce

Rockford’s residential struggles

By Andrew Wright, Director of Strategic Initiatives, Rockford Chamber of Commerce

Gary Anderson held a microphone in one hand and gripped the rail of the bus with the other as his guided tour took a turn onto Rockford’s Seventh Street.

“Ahead, you’ll see the landmark clock tower of the National Lock Building, built so that the workforce who lived in the neighborhood knew when to come to work,” he said.

As the bus, filled with professionals in the Leadership Rockford program, rolled through the neighborhoods in Rockford’s southeast manufacturing corridor, it passed boulevards and streets with rows of houses built for the workforce in the early 1900s, some still well-kept and occupied and others showing years of neglect.

Anderson, founder and principal architect of the Rockford architectural firm Studio GWA, is a diligent student of Rockford’s history and can see how that past will intersect with the future.

“In the 60s and 70s and a little bit in the 80s, we started seeing our neighborhoods segregating by income levels. Prior to that, Rockford had mixed income neighborhoods where the middle class lived closer to people with higher income,” Anderson said.

This mixture of income levels often brought with it better schools, more parks and better living conditions.

“But that period [the 1960s through the 1980s] is when we started seeing more subdivisions with built-in exclusivity. These discriminatory practices, that really was the undoing of a sense of community. That’s part of Rockford’s DNA, unfortunately,” he said.

This separation by class of Rockford’s housing markets between exclusive subdivisions and older, decaying neighborhoods has complicated an already complex modern problem—workforce housing for first-time home buyers.

Searching for a habitat

In 2022, Rockford’s Habitat for Humanity built a record number of new houses for applicants with seven completed homes. Its aim for 2023, given enough volunteers and resources to meet their challenge, is to build 10 houses for home buyers who have met the requirements to be eligible for a new Habitat home.

According to Monique Brown, volunteer manager for Habitat for Humanity Rockford Habitat opened its application process to the community in August 2022 and received 279 applications.

To put this housing crisis in perspective, applicants nationwide must show proof of a minimum income threshold and commit to hours of involvement in the construction of their new home to be selected.

Even though Illinois has a higher minimum wage than neighboring states, and with the 2023 state minimum wage increasing to $13 per hour, a housing applicant working a full-time, 40-hour per week job at that rate would not earn enough to qualify without added overtime or taking on a second job.

Even Brown herself is experiencing the difficulties of home-buying, “I’m currently shopping for a house, and the inventory in my budget and price range is almost nonexistent. I find something in my budget and it’s gone in the snap of a finger.”

Zabs Avery and Jodi Stromberg, realtors with Berkshire Hathaway Home Services in Rockford, agree there’s a home shortage in Rockford, and it’s affecting everyone.

“There’s a shortage of affordable shared living spaces for independent seniors, which means that seniors are staying in their homes longer than ever,” Stromberg said. “That trickles down to people my age and younger new in the housing search. We don’t have the housing turnover necessary for people in their early 30s and 20s coming in when they’re looking for a new house, partly because seniors are staying put and those homes aren’t coming to market.”

A national problem; a local crisis

The demand is there, and it isn’t unique to Rockford. Articles this fall in both the New York Times and The Atlantic underscored the worsening housing situation nationwide and suggested that demand for construction supplies will continue to keep costs elevated.

In December of 2020, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development reported that in the Rockford metro area, new housing sales dropped from 20% of all housing sales in 2005, representing 1,950 homes, and fell an average of 35% per year over the next eight years. In 2020, only 2% of all homes sold were new construction, far short of a national average of 11% new construction per municipality. From 2017 to 2019, Rockford added on average only 100 new homes per year to the market.

Aging houses and infrastructure are also seeing an increase in total cost of ownership. Rockford’s historic economic boom times were in the 1920s and again in the 1950s, when planned neighborhoods were built to accommodate workers for large manufacturing companies. Entire neighborhoods were built around boulevards for company management, flanked by houses of varying sizes for the workforce and their families. But today, these houses are frequently lacking in modern amenities, have insufficient utilities and insulation or require a significant cost to renovate.

“We are in a crisis, said Elias Soria, family self-sufficiency specialist with the Rockford Housing Authority. “The American dream is to buy a home, have a yard, family, maybe a dog and to pay your mortgage. But once you’re a homeowner, there’s not enough support for many people to fix their houses.”

Shared efforts to build, rebuild and renovate

The city of Rockford and Habitat for Humanity are working on programs to assist residents coping with the housing crisis.

Sarah Brinkmann, housing and program manager for the city’s Community & Economic Development Neighborhood Development Department, said there are public and private funds available for homeowners looking to improve aging houses.

One issue that homebuyers may have getting assistance from the city for home repairs is federal laws about lead abatement. In 1994, the Federal threshold for repairs funded through the HUD program was $25,000. Anything above that threshold meant that many government programs would require that the whole project meet code, including a lead abatement plan.

“We would see a request to replace an electrical panel that might start at $6,500 balloon into a project that included a required $45,000 lead abatement,” Brinkmann said.

But the city collaborated with Habitat for Humanity, Winnebago County, the Community Foundation of Northern Illinois and private investors to create a Critical Home Repair program to help homeowners avoid complicated and expensive red tape.

“There are so many people in Rockford that own homes but don’t have the income and ability to maintain their homes, and that’s where we come in,” Brown said. “Whether it’s a leaky roof, a wheelchair ramp or a walk-in shower, we can help.”

According to Brinkmann, seniors are the largest demographic using these programs.

“My staff has a real heart for these seniors, because where would they go? They can’t get a second job to keep up with the maintenance, that’s not possible. And so, their house is starting to decay,” Brinkmann said. “Even if they could move to a senior living space today, the house will need $20,000 to $40,000 in rehab to catch up to what the market demands. And you can’t just sell the property and move to an apartment, because rent is often higher than a mortgage.”

One way Rockford can address the needs of the community is to identify vacant and abandoned properties. Several undeveloped or depressed properties in Rockford and surrounding communities are being returned to the market through a land bank program managed by Region 1 Planning Council.

“Rockford is experiencing an influx of workers filling new jobs at places like the Chicago-Rockford International Airport and the new Hard Rock Casino. At the same time, we’re losing housing to fires and other damage. And we’re not building enough houses to keep up with demand,” said Mike Dunn Jr., executive director of Region 1 Planning Council.

In addition to periodically losing houses to fires, Rockford and Machesney Park have demolished dozens of houses that have flooded over the past 20 years, both along the Keith Creek waterway and along Shore Drive on the Rock River.

Dunn, who joined the planning council in 2015, has led the movement to reclaim vacant and abandoned properties and put them in the hands of people intending to develop them, with the idea that they’ll better serve the community and return to generating property tax income for the city.

“A land bank is a unit of government that has a restricted form of home rule power that allows us to dispose of [publicly-owned] property the way the land bank board wants it to, rather than to go a traditional municipal route. We can be a lot more deliberate and creative in how we dispose of these properties,” Dunn said.

Putting the land bank to work

On a cold November afternoon, Dunn, along with Rockford Mayor Tom McNamara, Sen. Steve Stadelman, Rep. Maurice West and Keri Asevedo, executive director of Habitat for Humanity, stood in an empty lot on the Rockford’s west side, wind whistling through the trees that separate the lot from Wyeth Stadium at Auburn High School. There, they celebrated the latest use of the land bank resource—housing for teachers and opportunities for students in Rockford Public Schools.

“Years ago, I remember being in a room with a teacher from Guilford who was looking for construction projects for his students. I immediately raised my hand and said ‘I do,’” Asevedo recalled of an early opportunity to partner with the district. “That very first year, Guilford students in the construction trades program built the walls for one of our homes. The following year, they agreed to come out on site. The superintendent agreed to both staff and transportation to bring students to a Habitat worksite. We were able to build eight homes for Habitat for Humanity families partnering with Rockford Public Schools.”

Asevedo explained how the partnership extended to help employees of public schools become home owners and the important role land banks play in helping Habitat find lots to build on and improve for their programs. She talked about their partnership with energy provider ComEd to ensure that houses built for their programs are energy efficient, using highquality windows, modern insulation, highefficiency air conditioning and innovations like geothermal energy.

“We literally have hundreds of students who now have authentic college and career readiness skills and life skills [because of the partnership],” said RPS Superintendent Dr. Ehren Jarrett. “This does make a difference in the lives of our students.”

Looking around the lots in the proposed subdivision, the program partners can see how the new houses built by Habitat will blend into a modern neighborhood, with new residents entering an established neighborhood. In addition, faculty and staff at Auburn who move into the houses will enjoy walking access to their classrooms and tailgating for the Knights on autumn Saturdays.

And while there’s great promise this program will provide future homes for several Rockford families, the demand for workforce housing doesn’t appear to be going away.

“Of the 279 applicants for our Habitat housing in August, more than 170 of them had met the income requirements,” Asevedo said as looked out on the open field west of Auburn where 30 new houses will be built over three years.

“We obviously need more and more safe and affordable housing,” Mayor McNamara said. “This is a really unique way for all these [organizations] to come together and help create this program.”