Warning of a “housing crisis,” a new Lake County coalition is taking a big-picture approach to try to address a 16,000-unit gap in the county’s affordable, market-rate and senior housing. Housing Lake is a coalition task force funded by the Schreiber Foundation and primarily organized by Lake County and the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning. Last month, more than 175 local leaders gathered in Lake Forest for the unveiling of its new initiative “Call to Action,” described as a roadmap for municipalities, developers, employers, nonprofits and other organizations in the housing ecosystem to try and address ongoing housing issues. It’s an effort kicked off, in part, by a 2023 study by Lake County Partners and Kretchmer Associates that warned of a serious lack of diverse housing stock and new housing construction “woefully” below projected population growth in Lake County. By 2027, the county could face thousands of missing units in key housing areas. Eric Waggoner, director of planning, building and development for Lake County, gave some of the numbers. Between now and 2027, the county will be running “significant deficits,” including 11,000 in market-rate and affordable housing, another 1,200 in senior housing, and 6,700 in affordable housing for families. And, according to a release from Housing Lake, the county’s median home values have reached $326,000, and the average rent is at $1,710, making the region increasingly unaffordable for those working in Lake County. Enrique Castillo, a principal planner at CMAP, said the region, including Lake, Kane and McHenry counties, is facing broad demographic trends. There’s an aging population, with more than half of the population stepping into their senior years by 2050. Millennials are also looking for housing, whether homes or renting, and the region has an older housing stock, which comes with its own challenges. Waggoner also raised the barriers to building new units, from rising costs to prohibitive regulatory processes. There can also be issues with community acceptance, popularly known as “NIMBY-ism,” an acronym for “not in my backyard.” The housing shortage is hardly just a local problem, with similar concerns mirrored across the country. But this understanding of the county’s housing shortage has driven the creation of Housing Lake, an unusually regional approach to housing. Call to Action CMAP is the metropolitan planning organization — a federal and state designation — for the region and works on various regional projects, providing technical assistance to communities. Historically, Castillo said CMAP hasn’t done much in regard to housing, but its partners had been asking it to step into the space. Housing Lake and its new “Call to Action” initiative is a pilot project, Castillo said, and it’s caused a buzz in other counties that CMAP collaborates with for housing-focused work. As Waggoner explained, it began with several meetings of stakeholders across the county’s ecosystem over months, establishing a “baseline understanding” of housing in the county, identifying areas of agreement and “establishing a framework for future action.” They’ve now established four key “pillars” —  policy and regulatory reform to update zoning codes and streamline approvals; funding and financing tools to create funding streams and employer partnerships; partnerships and development capacity to build regional coordination; and communication and education to educate the public and local government about the challenges and the need for more housing. Over the next several years, Housing Lake will host several workshop series centering around these pillars, bringing in subject experts, developing regulatory best practices and model ordinance language that local municipalities can copy, and looking at other ways to streamline the development process. Lake County is a region of wildly different communities, ranging from wealthy to low-income, urban to rural. Part of Housing Lake was acknowledging those differences, and providing a variety of tools and strategies that can work in different contexts, Waggoner explained. Some municipalities are highly urbanized, with regional rail, established downtowns and urban infrastructure. Others are rural and can’t build or sustain large-scale residential developments. Waggoner described a “patchwork quilt of strategies” that will be needed across Lake County. “Every community is ultimately responsible for its own future,” he said. “The benefit of a regional exercise like this is to find common ground on the challenges we’re facing.” With incremental efforts by numerous communities, the county will see the needle move, Waggoner said. Solving the housing crisis will take “time, collective energy and a lot of ambition.” “I think this exercise requires optimism — we are in a crisis in housing, to solve that crisis, we need to think big, and to think big, we need optimism,” he said. With such a large-scale and difficult issue as housing, the major question for the future of Housing Lake will be what it can actually achieve. Waggoner said it will be working with CMAP to create metrics of success, and his vision for the coalition goes beyond the “initial horizon” of the next few years. “We’re going to continue to monitor how we’re doing in each of those areas,” he said. “We’re not going to solve the housing crisis here overnight. It’s going to take time. It’s going to take collective energy, and a lot of ambition.” ...read more read less