Everything is connected, including housing issues

 

Panel (from L): Kennedy Moehrs Gardner, Sheila Sutton,
Meleah Geertsma, Cyatherine Alias

In Cahokia Heights (formerly Centreville), Illinois, there is a crisis that illustrates the gaps in the silos that inform our local policy discussions. As discussed by the "Housing, Water and Flooding" panel at the Center for Neighborhood Technology in Chicago this week, there is an ongoing problem there with houses flooding during and after any measurable rain, including overflowing sewers. It's a multidimensional catastrophe that defies neat assignment of responsibility:

• As an ongoing situation, it's not a big storm that would call in the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency
• it's exacerbated by climate change that brings more severe weather events, but it predates the current emergency
• the Clean Water Act of 1972 is focused on water quality, not the quality of life of people nearb
• addressing its impact on the community is complicated by our characteristic view of housing as an individual concern
• the situation was exacerbated or at least complicated by the 1980 routing of I-255 through town
• the low property values (FEMA could offer $20,000 per house) as well as the perilous finances of both town and sanitary district (neither of which can afford the $70 million cost of sewer repairs) are a legacy of decades of racial discrimination.  

Flooded area in Centreville IL
(Flickr photo by Anstr Davidson)

The panel included representatives of agencies focused on housing or climate change: Kennedy Moehrs Gardner is an attorney for Equity Legal Services in southern Illinois; Meleah Geertsma is a policy analyst-advocate for the Chicago Area Fair Housing Alliance; and Sheila Sutton, formerly with the Natural Resources Defense Council, is an attorney for Alliance for the Great Lakes. The panel was moderated by Cyatherine Alias for CNT, ably so in what she said was her first moderating experience.

As they discussed this case, and examples from Chicago, East St. Louis, Zanesville Ohio, and other places, it became clear that housing issues are inextricably connected to climate change, transportation planning, and even political dysfunction. All are "variations of the same (structural) problems" (Geertsma). The Chicago Area Fair Housing Alliance, Geertsma's organization, published a report, entitled A City Fragmented, that found City Council member prerogatives in Chicago decreased land available for multifamily housing between 1970 and 2016; when only 20 percent of land is available for multifamily housing, it drives up rents and reinforces historic inequities that began with redlining. Affordable housing tends to be in areas that are environmentally vulnerable (cf. Keenan and Bautista 2019). 

Climate change is already driving up the cost of homeowners insurance, which is an additional obstacle to affordability (Sutton). The South Side of Chicago has seen more house flooding since the reconstruction of the Dan Ryan Expressway in 2006. Housing issues themselves include both "historic destruction of black homeowner wealth" and housing supply and construction. Since disaster aid is based on property values, it tends to make white communities whole while leaving black communities worse off (Geertsma).

The key to addressing complex problems is complex conversations. Moehrs Gardner noted that "the law can only do so much," but that "getting everyone to the table could drive solutions and funding" for repairing affected neighborhoods. These conversations could be supported by the national government, which funded remedial sewer projects across the country in 1986 (Geertsma), but need to be locally-driven; as Pete Saunders points out, housing needs differ across cities and metros, and so certainly do environmental issues and racial histories.

SEE ALSO:

"Seattle Considers More Design Review Changes That Could Cap Number of Meetings, Create Quicker, Cheaper Process, and Let More Buildings Go Without Review," Capitol Hill Seattle, 11 November 2024

David Wessel, "Where Do the Estimates of a 'Housing Shortage' Come From?" Brookings, 21 October 2024

Everybody there was there