Protect people now.
Essential for households the private market can’t serve. It is also expensive: recent city-supported projects in Chicago cost roughly $679,000 to $747,000 per unit, which limits how many we can build.
Deep impact · limited volumeHow affordability is made
Today’s “luxury” housing is tomorrow’s affordable housing.
Oak Park’s own history shows how housing becomes affordable and how decades of anti-development sentiment have broken the cycle.
SCROLL TO BEGIN ↓Almost all of Oak Park’s affordable housing started out as ordinary market-rate housing, built by private developers, for a profit, decades ago.
As newer buildings went up and drew the higher rents, older ones slid down the market and became a major source of lower-cost housing.
OAK PARK HOUSING BY DECADE BUILTHousing ages into affordability
1980–20193,368units builtvs 6,681 in the prior four decades
ACS 2024 five-year estimate · year built of current stock
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New housing starts out expensive.
Between land, labor and financing, a newly finished apartment almost always rents near the top of the market.
Decades later, those apartments serve the middle market.
Most of the ordinary housing around town today started life as new construction in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.
Building slowed for four straight decades.
Starting in the 1980s, Oak Park added housing at roughly half its earlier pace. The units that never got built would be reaching middle age, and middle-market prices, right about now.
We’re missing decades of older housing.
Measured against the earlier pace of building, that’s about 3,300 missing units of what would now be affordable housing.
THE LONG GAME
The expensive building of today becomes the ordinary building of tomorrow.
But we don’t have to wait for buildings to age into affordability.
New construction opens up existing housing right away.
ONE NEW APARTMENT · THREE MOVESNo vacancy
NEWJUST BUILT
2000sA LIVES HERE
1980sB LIVES HERE
1960sC LIVES HERE
AHOUSEHOLD A
BHOUSEHOLD B
CHOUSEHOLD C
NEW APARTMENTS BUILT0
HOUSEHOLDS THAT MOVED0
OLDER APARTMENTS OPENED0
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Every apartment is occupied.
Three households live in three existing buildings. Nobody can move without competing for an available apartment.
Household A moves into the new building.
A gets the newest apartment, and the one A leaves behind is now empty.
Household B moves into A’s former apartment.
B gets a newer place, and B’s old apartment becomes the available one.
Household C moves. An older apartment opens.
The new building never had to be cheap itself. By setting off three moves, it eased competition farther down the market. Economist Evan Mast traced these chains of moves and found that for every 100 new market-rate units, roughly 70 open up in below-median-income neighborhoods within about five years.
Read the study ↗5–7%
NEARBY RENT EFFECT
Rents fell near new buildings.
Across 11 cities, rents within roughly 800 feet of new market-rate apartments fell 5–7% relative to comparable buildings a little farther away.
This works
here, too.
Oak Park’s own numbers show the same pattern.
OAK PARK · THE LOCAL RECORD
1,751
NEW MULTIFAMILY
1,751
50
+1,350
Scroll to follow the numbers.
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Since 2012, Oak Park has built 1,751 multifamily units.
Nearly all of them opened at market rate.
Only 50 of those new units were deed-restricted affordable.
Those units matter, but they’re a small slice of everything that went up.
Meanwhile, IHDA counted 1,350 more affordable units.
The count rose from 3,991 in 2013 to 5,341 in 2023. Fifty restricted units can’t account for a change that size.
TWO COMPLEMENTARY TOOLSBuild more housing.
Build more housing.
Subsidize housing for people who still can’t afford it.
Make room at scale.
Creates choices now, sets off chains of moves, and becomes the older, cheaper housing that future Oak Park residents will rely on.
Broad impact · scalableINCLUSIONARY HOUSING
A requirement can’t create an affordable unit in a building that never gets built.
Inclusionary rules can produce reduced-rent units. But if the requirement makes new construction infeasible, it shuts off the very supply those units come from.
San Francisco’s 2026 feasibility analysis found nearly every tested housing type infeasible even at a 0% requirement. The city then moved to cut its on-site requirement from 15% to 5% while seeking broader affordable-housing funding.
THE LESSON
Start the engine again.
New market-rate construction protects the affordable housing we have today and, as it ages, becomes the affordable housing of tomorrow. It’s the engine of a diverse and healthy housing stock. We’ve shut down that engine for far too long. It’s time to start it up again.