As part of its broader comprehensive plan, the village of Lincolnshire is participating in the Homes for a Changing Region program, joining a growing list of Chicagoland municipalities looking to address housing stock and affordability concerns.
What could the program, created from a partnership between the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning and the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus, and funded by the Illinois Housing Development Authority, mean for Lincolnshire and other communities?
Ben Roesler, Lincolnshire’s community and economic development director, said the village updated its comprehensive plan in August of 2024, capping off 18 months of feedback from the community on future developments throughout the village.
A “key element” of the comprehensive plan is looking at housing throughout Lincolnshire and finding potential needs and housing deficiencies, he said, as affordable and attainable housing is a “focus” for the village. Shortly after adopting the plan, the Village Board approved a memorandum of understanding with the Mayor’s Caucus to participate in the Homes for a Changing Region program.
The state of Illinois has the Affordable Housing Planning and Appeal Act, which requires municipalities with under 10% affordable housing to create a plan to increase that percentage.
“We’re striving to meet that goal as best we can through housing development projects as they come forward,” Roesler said. “We don’t know how that’s going to happen, or what that will look like yet.”
That’s where the Homes program comes in. Lincolnshire will get research and policy recommendations, Roesler said, which village staff plans to present to the Village Board within the first quarter of 2025.
Ben Schnelle, manager of housing initiatives with the Metropolitan Mayor’s Caucus, said the Homes program was launched in 2004 by a coalition of regional business and municipal leaders. Since then, it’s worked with about 60 municipalities, with another five planned for 2025.
“It was really grounded on the shared belief that for the Chicago region to be as competitive as possible in the global economy, it’s helpful and important to have a housing stock that matches,” he said.
According to the Homes program’s website, the program team develops a needs assessment, which includes data analysis of housing trends and key issues, organizes focus groups and expert panels to provide input and recommendations, and writes a housing action plan summarizing the findings. It’s a roughly six-month process, Schnelle said.
He emphasized the value of the program’s “peer-to-peer” aspect, where local leaders of communities that have already worked with the program and implemented policies work with new participating communities. By learning from others, leaders “don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”
“It helps municipal leaders gain clarity on the local housing needs in their community, and a greater understanding of how their peer municipalities in the region have successfully addressed similar needs,” Schnelle said.
The exact solutions for housing vary widely by community, he said. For some, it is an issue of rising housing costs eating away at existing residents’ budgets, or high housing prices keeping out young people, or a slow housing market that requires encouragement.
Schnelle said they were “especially proud” of the program’s track record for turning “what can sometimes be a contentious issue into just a healthy, productive dialog.
“It’s something we’ve witnessed in the process of working with municipalities,” he said.
In the two decades since its launch, the program has seen vast shifts in the housing landscape. Schnelle said the Homes program’s original report in 2005 actually warned about the growing housing bubble, which would crash just a few years later and dramatically transform housing developments for decades to come, including in Lake County.
Schnelle said the program helped work on developments in the post-crash environment to positive results according to recent feedback gathered from more than 30 communities.
“They said by being a little more flexible in allowing some smaller-lot, single-family homes and townhomes, that actually helped kickstart their housing development after that market crash,” he said.
While the market has seen other changes since the housing crash, the program offers “forward-looking” and “actionable” plans that can respond to the moment, he said.