Mayor Daley doesn't expect affordable-housing subsidies to be repaid
Mayor Daley said he doesn't expect the city will ever be reimbursed by people who got government subsidies to purchase "affordable" housing, only to flip the property for a profit.
A Chicago Sun-Times investigation revealed that 50 taxpayer-subsidized affordable homes at University Village were resold -- often within just months -- for huge profits.
(Jean Lachat/Sun-Times)
At a news conference Saturday, Daley said the resale of "affordable" homes is something that has happened for a decade across the country and has become a national problem. He said Chicago made changes years ago to no longer allow people who buy affordable units to flip those properties for huge profits.
"That's all over the country where you could sell [affordable] housing. We changed that," he said. "Every [affordable housing] development, all developments did it in the country. That is not acceptable."
Three years ago, the Daley administration helped create the not-for-profit Chicago Community Land Trust to keep taxpayer-subsidized property "permanently affordable." Buyers get subsidies and lower property taxes in exchange for signing a 99-year contract that limits the profit a seller can make. So far, the trust controls 31 of the 4,354 affordable homes built under Daley citywide.
Daley said the federal government should impose similar restrictions nationally.
"Black, white, Hispanic, they all sold. You buy an affordable house and sell it next week, that was the whole thing going on in America. ... We put restrictions on us. But there should be restrictions across the country."
In other news, Daley took the blame for the abrupt privatization of parking meters that riled so many drivers:
"There should have been a better transition. There should have been a two-to-three-month transition. . . . The transition did not go well. I kinda fault ourselves."