Five cool things Chicago has done to make housing better

1) Neighborhood Stabilization Program - If you're in the housing world, everyone calls this the NSP. It's one of those things they say to let each other know that they're in the wonk club. It sounds vague and boring, but it's really pretty interesting.
 
So, there were all those subprime loans which led to like a billion foreclosures, right? Yeah, foreclosures suck because they mean houses and apartments go unlived in, attracting crime and blight. Not good for neighborhoods, especially since a lot of these neighborhoods had it tough to begin with.
 
And NSP is one solution to that. NSP means dollars from the federal government to buy up some of these foreclosed properties, rehab them and make them into affordable housing. So blight gets turned into bright and shiny new houses for everyone. Nice.

And Chicago had a special plan when it came to NSP. I talked to Katie Ludwig, who works on the city's NSP plan, and she said there were a ton of places the fed's money could have gone - 25 communities, in fact, that showed the greatest need.

 "55 million is a lot of money but it's really just a drop in the budget when you consider the scope of the problem in Chicago," Katie told me.

So instead of just dividing up the cash, their team came up with an interesting strategy. The city already had spent money in some of these areas - new parks, libraries, schools, police stations. Why not target those areas and try to do the most good in these 25 neighborhoods where the city has already invested?

So, that's the plan. Good strategy. 

Another cool thing about NSP is that a lot of these neighborhoods have been struggling with foreclosures for decades, not just in recent years, says my friend Mandy Burrell Booth from Metropolitan Planning Council. So the housing market crash might actually have a big positive effect long term on these communities.  

2) Whew. NSP's a big one. Here's an easier topic: "green buildings." But while I think green buildings are cool, we hear about them a lot. So, I'm going to use my space to direct your limited attention span onto number 3.

3) NSP in the South Suburbs - So, now you already know what NSP is. But in the South Suburbs, they did another cool thing with their money. Down there, they only had $28 million to spend over 42 towns. And while $28 million sounds like a lot of money to my bank account, it's not that much when you're talking about doing stuff like this. As Robin Snyderman of the Metropolitan Planning Council told me, "You could spend $28 million a town and not even be able to tell a difference."

So, what they did was that the got together and figured out who needed it the most. They narrowed down the list to 18 towns, and together submitted one proposal for what should be done.
 
What mayor or politician do you know that would turn down money coming in to their district so that someone else could have it? And when you consider that the recession has hit everyone pretty hard, that's no easy task.
 
Robin says what these guys have done has become a national model. Way to go, South Suburbs.

Reconnecting Neighborhoods inspired the building of this new bridge over Lakeshore so that Hyde Park residents can access the lake.

4) Reconnecting Neighborhoods - MPC did this whole big campaign to help these new public housing communities. A lot of the old high-rises existed on what they called "super blocks," off the regular Chicago street grid. This wasn't so good because it meant it disconnected residents from the rest of the city and vice versa. So, now that we're redoing public housing, we're redoing the streets and the transit too.
 
What Reconnecting Neighborhoods did was bring those communities together for a series of painstaking meetings where they went over everyone's ideas for what needed to happen to connect these neighborhoods with the street grid and the city at large. They made lists and discussed them. They voted on this remote control voting thing. And now they're taking those plans to the city planning commission.

So, instead of the big wigs deciding what happens, the rest of us got to help. Cool, huh?

5) North Shore - So, Highland Park has a pretty awesome housing department. Four full time staff working on cutting edge programs. Nearby Lakeforest has a pretty good housing department, but Highwood doesn't have the same resources. So, all three departments are pooling their resources to serve their communities. Sharing is caring.

So now you saved yourself conference fees, hours of networking and a tote bag you're not going to know what to do with a year from now. And learned about cutting edge housing policy!

Dude, go have a cookie. You deserve it.