CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- The Chicago City Council’s Housing Committee is set to consider Mayor Lightfoot’s plan to increase affordable housing in the city on Thursday afternoon. But advocates said it falls short of what’s needed.
North Side activist Nicholas Ward said you can illustrate the problem of affordable housing by looking at all the luxury apartments being developed near a local school. Some, he said, have rents upwards of $3,000 a month. People already living in the area can't afford that.
Mayor Lightfoot’s plan would require developers of new rental properties to set aside 20 percent of their units that lower-income people could afford.
Don Washington, Director of the Chicago Housing Initiative, suggested there are differences over what’s really affordable.
"The gap between what needs to be in the Mayor's ordinance and what's in in right now is actually not infinite, it's pretty small," he said.
A coalition of groups also want an ordinance banning landlords from evicting tenants without justification or compensation, something that almost happened to Geneva Norman.
"My daughter had been laid off from her job. My son was sick, and now I was being evicted from our home, where we had paid rent without ever missing for 25 years," she said.
Advocates want a hearing on a measure to address that.
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