Housing sits at the foundation of daily life. It provides shelter from the elements, but its role goes well beyond that. Housing is the base from which households build the rest of their lives — work, family, education, and community.
People’s housing needs evolve over time. A young adult may begin in a small apartment. A couple forming a household may buy a first home. As families grow, housing needs often grow with them — more space, different neighborhoods, different priorities. Later, when children leave home, many households downsize or move into something easier to maintain. A healthy housing market offers a range of housing types and price points that support these transitions.
Housing sits at the center of household finances. For most families it is the largest monthly expense, and over time it often becomes their largest source of accumulated wealth through home equity. That tension sits at the heart of the affordability debate. Housing is both shelter and, for many households, their primary financial asset. What benefits one side of that equation does not always benefit the other.
Housing also shapes the civic and economic fabric of a community. Every town depends on people with a wide range of incomes — teachers, firefighters, healthcare workers, municipal employees, service workers, and many others. These individuals keep schools running, public safety functioning, businesses operating, and civic life moving.
No community should expect every worker to live within its borders. But it is reasonable to expect that at least some of the people who work in a community can live there, or nearby. In that sense, housing is not solely a private good. It is also part of the basic infrastructure that supports the economic and civic life of a place.
For much of the post-World War II era, housing affordability in the United States remained relatively stable. Home prices, construction activity, and household incomes generally moved in the same direction. Over time, that began to change. In many parts of the country, housing prices started rising faster than household incomes, and entry-level housing became harder to find.
Chicagoland experienced the same pattern, albeit less dramatically than coastal markets. As suburban expansion matured, available land became more limited, development increasingly shifted from greenfield construction to redevelopment and infill, and housing supply often struggled to keep pace with demand in the most desirable communities.
By the late 1990s and early 2000s, housing affordability in Illinois had become a regional and state issue. In 2003, that concern led to passage of the Affordable Housing Planning and Appeal Act.
The Act divides municipalities into two categories: exempt and non-exempt. A community is exempt if at least ten percent of its year-round housing stock qualifies as affordable (based on a formulaic definition). If it falls below that threshold, it is classified as non-exempt and must prepare and submit an affordable housing plan.
One important point often gets lost in discussions about the law: the Act does not require municipalities to reach ten percent affordable housing. It requires non-exempt municipalities to articulate a plan for how they intend to make progress.
That plan must identify the gap, examine local barriers to development, identify land or structures that could support affordable housing, and lay out strategies or incentives intended to increase supply. The statute allows several possible goals, including progress toward the ten percent threshold, a five-percentage-point increase in the affordable share, or ensuring that at least fifteen percent of new development qualifies as affordable housing. Whether a municipality actually reaches those goals — or even makes measurable progress toward them — is not the main point of evaluation. What matters most is the existence of a plan and whether it checks the required boxes.
The law’s original enforcement mechanism was an appeal process. If a non-exempt municipality denies a qualifying affordable housing development — or approves it with conditions that make the affordable portion economically infeasible — the developer may appeal to the State Housing Appeals Board. In other words, the Act does not actively incentivize communities to build affordable housing but instead limits the extent to which they can block it. The law was later amended to allow non-compliant communities to be referred to the State Attorney General, though what that referral actually means in practice remains unclear.
Northbrook has long argued that affordable housing is not a new priority here, pointing to projects like Crestwood Place and earlier fair housing actions as evidence that the Village has been engaged on the issue for decades.
In response to the Illinois Affordable Housing Planning and Appeal Act, Northbrook adopted its first Affordable Housing Plan in 2005. At the time, the Village was at roughly 5.3 percent affordable housing under the state’s methodology, well below the ten percent benchmark. The plan acknowledged the goals of the state legislation and laid out strategies for encouraging affordable housing where feasible, but it also made clear that doing so in Northbrook would be difficult. The Village described itself as largely built out, dominated by detached single-family homes, and defined by a landscaped, low-density character that left limited room for significant residential expansion. While Northbrook maintained its position that, as a home rule municipality, the state law did not apply to it, the Village nonetheless adopted a plan designed to comply.
When the Village updated its Comprehensive Plan in 2010 — the culmination of four years of work to replace the oft-amended 1982 Comprehensive Plan — affordable housing was incorporated into a broader long-range planning framework meant to guide Northbrook for the next ten to twenty years. The plan reiterated the same constraints identified in 2005: limited redevelopment opportunities, strong demand for single-family housing, and a desire to preserve neighborhood character. The Village’s affordable housing percentage had not improved by that point; the 2007 state update still put Northbrook at 5.3 percent.
Redevelopment activity in the 2010s began to reshape parts of the Village, especially along the Skokie Boulevard corridor. Projects like NorthShore 770 and The Elaine showed that multifamily housing could be built in Northbrook when the right parcels became available. But while those developments may have broadened Northbrook’s housing mix, they did not add to the Village’s affordable housing stock as recognized by the IHDA. Despite the 2005 Affordable Housing Plan and the 2010 Comprehensive Plan, the housing that was added was still above the state’s definition of affordability. As a result, the state’s assessment of Northbrook’s affordable housing position was not improving. The Village’s affordable housing percentage fell to 4.4 percent in the 2013 analysis before rising to 5.7 percent in 2018, though much of that change likely reflected shifts in home values and area median income rather than any meaningful local policy success.
Whatever the explanation, the plans Northbrook had in place since 2005 did little to increase the affordable housing stock. That long stretch of limited progress helps explain why things came to a head for the Board during the Northbrook Court redevelopment discussion in June 2019.
After a 5-2 vote to approve a Redevelopment and Economic Incentive Agreement that included a provision for the developer to pay $750,000 to the Village for future affordable housing, one trustee remarked, “We appreciate the $750,000, but giving money isn’t good enough. I cannot vote for this because there are no affordable housing units.” The Village President publicly stated that it was time for the Board to have a serious discussion about affordable housing in Northbrook and said she had already spoken with developers of projects expected to come before the Village about including affordable housing in their plans.
As a result, affordable housing was immediately elevated to the Board’s top priority. Staff prepared a detailed housing report that summer, laying out Northbrook’s history, housing conditions, and policy tools used in other communities. Through the second half of 2019 and into 2020, the Board and Plan Commission spent a long series of fourteen public meetings studying those tools. Nonprofit housing organizations were brought in. Public comments were generally supportive.
The Board and Plan Commission moved quickly from philosophical discussions — full of civic idealism and good-faith concern about younger families, older residents, teachers, firefighters, police officers, and other workers who might want to live in the community they serve — to implementation: how the program should work, what the affordability bands should be, what fees should be charged, and which suburban models Northbrook should follow, with particular emphasis on the approach Highland Park had adopted and refined.
In the fall of 2020, the Plan Commission held formal public hearings in September and October to debate the framework. Larger new residential developments would generally be required to provide 15 percent affordable housing. Smaller single-family subdivisions could satisfy the requirement through a fee in lieu. A housing trust fund would be created, and demolition taxes would help fund affordable housing initiatives. Rental and ownership housing would operate under different affordability bands.
Notably, during this process, the Village did not abandon its long-standing view that, as a home rule municipality, it was not bound by the state statute. Northbrook was moving forward because it believed this was something it should do, not necessarily something it had to do.
In December 2020, the Village Board adopted the new framework. Residents who spoke at the meeting were largely in favor of moving forward with the updated policy. Trustees expressed optimism that Northbrook might finally begin to address a problem it had been discussing for years. The Patch described the vote the next day with the headline, “‘Historic’ Affordable Housing Plan Passes In Northbrook.” In early 2021, the Illinois Housing Development Authority acknowledged the plan as acceptable under the statute.
A new era of affordable housing policy was beginning in Northbrook, with the Village at 5.7 percent affordable housing.