BPI hosts several law students as summer interns, so, as the intern without legal training, I worked primarily on the more policy-oriented Regional Affordable Housing Initiative (RAHI). The RAHI team is currently focusing its energy on several legislative proposals that will increase the supply of affordable housing. The first, and perhaps the most important, is inclusionary zoning. Inclusionary zoning policies, which require that developers include a certain percentage of affordable housing in their projects, are currently in place in hundreds of municipalities across the nation. However, Illinois lags behind the mostly coastal trend, and, despite facing an increasingly unaffordable housing market, Chicago has no such policy. BPI has been working with a coalition of Chicago housing advocacy groups to get an ordinance passed in the city. My job this summer was to become the resident expert on the variety of policies that exist around the nation. To that end, I read dozens of policies, spoke with urban planners in city and town halls, and put together memos addressing some of the more difficult issues that inclusionary zoning policies must confront. I researched and wrote about creating workable resale protocols for ownership units, allowing developers to pay fees-in-lieu of building the units, accounting for fluctuating homeowners’ association fees, and including condominium conversions under the policies.
The second major use of my time this summer was research on BPI’s proposal for changes to the Real Estate Transfer Tax, half of the revenue from which goes into Illinois’ Affordable Housing Trust Fund. BPI is looking into the political feasibility of various changes to the tax structure which might raise more money for the fund. On this project, I tried to ascertain how much money various proposals would create. I also did research on the regional impact of changes within Illinois so that we could begin to formulate a sense of which state legislators might support which types of changes, writing a memo on which proposal seemed most likely to gain widespread support. I then sat in on meetings when staff members spoke with BPI’s lobbyist to discuss a strategy for implementing changes and learned about how the process of building coalitions for legislative advocacy works.
I also worked on several smaller projects. I did some preliminary research on municipal bond volume cap and how it is allocated in Illinois. That work may eventually lead to plans for obtaining more bonding authority for housing development authorities. I also did some writing on recent changes to the Affordable Housing Planning and Appeals Act, BPI-initiated legislation which requires all Illinois communities to work towards a 10% affordable housing level. I wrote up plain-language explanations of the policy so that non-lawyers working in municipal government could understand their options and responsibilities. Finally, I participated in BPI’s summer intern brown bag lunch series, which allowed me to learn about all of the exciting projects going on within the organization.
Although there were many significant moments in my work this summer, it’s hard to pick one inside of work that sums up my experience neatly. What was most transformative about the summer was the way it shaped my looking at the world outside of the office. I had just moved to Chicago when I started work at BPI, and I had not previously given much thought to the nuts and bolts of urban planning and housing. Over the course of the summer, I noticed my understanding of the city being shaped by my understanding of the buildings themselves and how those buildings shape lives. Riding on the bus became a fascinating experience as my looking out the window was shaped by my newfound sense of the importance of policy. I saw not just blocks of wealth and poverty, but the legal paradigm that creates socioeconomic and racial segregation. Where gentrification had previously been important only inasmuch as it affected which neighborhoods I and my friends felt comfortable living in, I now understand some of the demands of balancing economic development with maintaining healthy, long-term communities for lower-income folks.
Before BPI, I had worked mostly on justice issues on the federal, top-down level. Thinking about housing and working within a city helped me to understand the importance of the grassroots. I see now how communities are built, quite literally, from the ground up, and how the quality, safety, and availability of decent, affordable housing is perhaps the foundational issue in working towards strong communities. I also understand how working on the more microcosmic community level can be emotionally satisfying in a way that more abstract, macrocosmic work has seldom been for me.
I will be staying in Chicago this year, working for the University of Chicago. Specifically, I’ll be working on research on efficient health care delivery in hospitals, investigating all kinds of issues including racial disparities and family impacts. My current plan is to apply to law school in the next couple of years, and possibly to add a Master’s in Public Policy to the JD. That impulse is new, and comes entirely out of my experience this summer.