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Originally Posted by ardecila
LVDW, the ARO requirements only apply when a developer is seeking a zoning change or city subsidy. If you build as-of-right, you are not required to comply with the affordable mandate.
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And we all know as-of-right in Chicago is a joke. They've downzoned almost everything to an unreasonably low zoning and aldermen will take away as-of-right zoning anyhow if they don't like what you are doing.
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Also, I don't think it's possible to design a system where low-income people can afford new construction unless you have some form of subsidy. New construction is expensive, especially in developed urban areas. It sounds crass to relegate poor people to old buildings, but that's the only "free market" way.
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I fail to see why low-income people should be able to afford new construction units. There is nothing wrong with the thousands of older buildings in this city aside from the building code, which I'll expound on below.
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I've heard people making grand claims about how affordable housing will sprout up naturally if constraints are lifted. That's total BS. Nobody ever chooses to build affordable housing unless they have access to subsidy or they are complying with a mandate. If the supply of high-end housing grows faster than that segment of the population, then some older buildings will depreciate and become affordable over time. Call it trickle-down housing policy. Ideally the city would have a robust code enforcement to prevent safety and sanitation issues in those depreciating buildings, and landlords would invest in their buildings continuously in pursuit of slightly higher rents.
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That's the problem, Chicago's building code. The city code has a variety of features that are "make work" provisions designed to rack up hours for union tradesmen at the expense of literally every other person in the city. The fact that the city does not allow PVC stacks and requires archaic, less durable, iron is a massive waste. The fact that the city doesn't allow new materials like PEX plumbing exists again to make it more labor intensive to build here. I could list dozens of similar examples. If the city just reformed the building code and streamlined the permitting process, the costs of rehabbing older buildings here would drop substantially and all housing would become more affordable, particularly on the lower end where slumlords tend to just sit on their buildings because a renovation can't be justified by the rents.
It's a lot easier to pull new PEX plumbing through a wall than it is to rip the walls open and add expensive copper. It's a lot easier to run new, safer, PVC insulated wires through old walls than it is to bust them open and use all rigid conduit and BX wiring. You aren't even allowed to use more than 5' of BX wiring off a junction box! That's absurd overkill. Nearly every suburb around Chicago allows PVC insulated wiring, but we don't even allow more than 5' of flexible BX conduit wiring. It's a lot cheaper, easier, and more durable to use PVC pipes for a plumbing stack and you don't even have to use lead to melt the sections together, but PVC doesn't rack up enough union hours. The fact is affordable housing doesn't naturally spring up here anymore because the city has in essence outlawed it. Again, this makes the market more bifurcated. Instead of spending $40/SF to rehab and older building, you have to spend $80/SF because you have to gut all the walls and use obsolete, labor intensive, materials that are derivatives of prices commodities like copper which are in ever shorter supply rather than just pull new wiring and plumbing through them.
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