The state should follow others by passing reforms that would make building housing easier and cheaper.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s plan to tackle housing affordability includes bills that would help and others unlikely to work well.
The General Assembly should pass the measures that remove regulations adding unnecessary costs and imposing challenges to building housing. But lawmakers should let other proposals die.
Illinois is short 142,000 homes, according to a report last year from the University of Illinois. To meet its growing demand, the state needs an estimated 227,000 new units over the next five years, the report said.
The shortage has made housing more expensive. Since February 2019, home prices have jumped nearly 50%. Rent increases in Chicago and Central Illinois are some of the highest in the country, according to a report from ConsumerAffairs.
To reverse this housing cost trend, Illinois must build more homes. That requires loosening government restrictions that have artificially depressed construction.
Pritzker’s Building Up Illinois Developments (BUILD) Plan has good ideas to address the state’s housing problem and others to view with caution.
Among the positive proposals is Senate Bill 4063, which would set deadlines for permit reviews and inspections so housing projects can’t be indefinitely stalled by bureaucracy. It would also let builders hire third-party reviewers when cities miss those deadlines.
Other states have shown that kind of reform successful at resetting otherwise complicated local processes. In Arizona, the Permit Freedom Act has cut permitting and development times by as much as 17.7%. Similar progress is expected from reforms recently enacted in Virginia and Idaho.
Another improvement would be Senate Bill 4062, which requires a re-evaluation of impact fees paid to municipalities to ensure they are calculated using a transparent statewide formula. That would prevent costs from being unpredictable or unnecessarily inflated.
Senate Bill 4071 would be another positive reform, allowing homeowners to build an accessory dwelling unit on their property by right while requiring that they follow local protocols.
But not all the BUILD Plan proposals would move Illinois in the right direction. One would provide $100 million “to remove upfront infrastructure barriers that prevent otherwise viable housing projects from breaking ground.” Another bill would provide $150 million to support down payment assistance programs.
These sorts of measures have generally not proven effective at addressing housing crises.
What’s more, these bills are expensive. Illinois taxpayers are already severely burdened by government spending.
Illinois lawmakers should pass bills that will make it easier to build housing and let die those that would put taxpayers on the hook for more government spending in an effort to address supply problems best solved by the private sector.
