Randy Jacobs ’86, M.S. ’95, occasionally punches his address into an online real-estate marketplace to monitor his home’s value. What he’s witnessed the past few years has been staggering.
“I could sell my house now for nearly double what I paid for it,” said Jacobs, who brings 20 years of construction industry experience to his role as an instructional assistant professor of construction management at Illinois State University. “But then where would I go?”
The housing market in Central Illinois is largely representative of what’s happening across the country. Home values have soared, which means the cost of buying a home has priced some potential buyers out of the market. Meanwhile, some homeowners are feeling financial strain due to related rises in property taxes. It’s all happening while population growth outpaces housing availability, leading to what some have called a “housing crisis.”
“The cost to build a home is increasing, and the median price of a house is increasing,” Jacobs said. “The ability of new college graduates to buy homes is changing.”
But the crunch is felt by more than just prospective first-time homebuyers. It runs the spectrum from young adults struggling to keep up with rising rent to older adults unable to afford assisted living accommodations to everyone in between. The housing shortfall has contributed to rising homelessness rates both locally and nationwide.
There is varying thought on how to address the housing problem because “it’s not just one thing,” Jacobs said, that’s causing it. The rising cost of doing business in the construction industry has been transferred to buyers.
“I don’t know how you build a $200,000 house anymore,” he said. “Not many builders are able to take that risk.”
Jacobs proposes incentives to building more affordable housing. Alternative materials and more pre-fabrication should be explored, too, he said, along with repurposing existing structures.
Jacobs isn’t the only Redbird pondering solutions. Solving the complex housing problem requires enterprise and ingenuity, and Redbirds near and far are leading the way.
Designing a blueprint
Noah Tang ’19, M.S. ’23, sits outside a downtown Bloomington coffee shop and points across the street at boarded-up windows of vacant apartments. “We’ve made these apartments illegal,” he says, matter-of-factly.
Tang is founder and president of the Bloomington Revivalists, a grassroots nonprofit seeking community improvement through “bottom-up solutions.” The Revivalists do a monthly trash pickup, host community meetings, and advocate for responsible growth through incremental improvements. A study of downtown buildings, including housing, is one of the Revivalists’ active campaigns.
Tang is a student of history. He researched housing and urban planning in grad school, and his architect father passed along knowledge and interest in structures. Tang believes single-use zoning and an accumulation of building codes are at the root of the housing shortage.
It’s exacerbated, he said, by two opposing views of home ownership: One group views housing as shelter, the other considers it an investment. Tang says the latter sometimes takes a “NIMBY” (“not in my back yard”) stance in resisting change as it protects its investments.
Housing and building codes have compounded the housing shortage, Tang explained, by making the rehabilitation of existing properties, like the many empty shophouse apartments in downtown Bloomington, a tough sell to prospective developers.
“Changing zoning is a prerequisite,” Tang said. “People expect their neighborhoods to be built to a complete state, but that is not historically how cities have grown over time.”
Tang is also a teacher of history, specifically American and world history, at Bloomington High School. He’s witnessed the impact of the housing shortage on his students, some of whom have experienced homelessness.
“There’s an analogy of the housing market as musical chairs when you don’t have enough housing stock,” Tang said. “It’s a race to get those spots, and if there’s something that precludes you from getting a chair, you’re going to fall through the cracks.”
Tang and the Revivalists have advocated for easing zoning restrictions that prevent accessory dwelling units, often called “in-law suites,” which property owners might construct for aging relatives. Tang endorses homeowners taking on boarders—he does—and would support a local housing cooperative to increase the inventory of affordable housing.
There’s no quick fix to the problem, Tang said.
“I have this old quote in my head that goes something like, ‘You have to plant trees that you’ll never see the shade of,’” he said. “Easy solutions are a mirage. You have to work hard.”
Doing the work
The “symphony of hammers” is sweet music to the ears of Lindsey Jarboe ’13.
Jarboe is the volunteer coordinator of Habitat for Humanity of McLean County, an organization that’s addressing the housing shortage one nail at a time. She accepted a job at the nonprofit the day after her Illinois State graduation. Some of her colleagues and many of her volunteers are Redbirds. She enjoys orchestrating it all.
“It’s one of the coolest sounds to hear,” Jarboe said. “It’s people working together toward one goal, people working together to better their community.”
Habitat for Humanity acquires land that’s often discounted or donated where it builds houses that are “decent, safe, and affordable,” according to Jarboe. Applicants for Habitat homes qualify based on housing need, ability to pay, and willingness to partner. The latter involves “sweat equity” hours, where they work alongside volunteers in constructing their own home. McLean County Habitat requires 250 sweat equity hours from each adult living in a home, which includes 25 hours at another build and 25 at its retail location. Selected applicants receive zero-percent mortgages.
“The purpose of sweat equity is to partner with future homeowners to teach them necessary skills,” Jarboe said. “Hopefully that knowledge can help them repair and maintain their homes, which will allow them to stay in their houses longer.”
McLean County Habitat will build its 200th home before celebrating its 40th anniversary next year. A former collegiate chapter, composed of student volunteers from Illinois State and Illinois Wesleyan University, built one house every year for 25 years but has become inactive since the pandemic. Jarboe hopes it can be revived. The need for housing remains; McLean County Habitat maintains a waitlist of about 300 applicants.
The growing housing shortage can be discouraging for those addressing it, but hope is restored when a new Habitat home is blessed and a first-time homeowner’s sweat—and usually a few tears, too—earn them a place they can call their own.
“I enjoy this because it’s such a community-based thing. It’s people helping people,” Jarboe said. “I’m from a small town, and Bloomington feels like a small town, and it really feels like people here genuinely care about their neighbors. So, I’m happy to work for them and with them.”
“I enjoy this because it’s such a community-based thing. It’s people helping people,” Jarboe said. “I’m from a small town, and Bloomington feels like a small town, and it really feels like people here genuinely care about their neighbors. So, I’m happy to work for them and with them.”
Building a foundation
Donsia Strong Hill ’83 knows the transformative impact of housing. She’s lived it.
“This is personal for me. I grew up in subsidized housing,” Strong Hill said. “The success I’ve had was built on the foundation of my family having safe, sanitary, and affordable housing.”
An inaugural inductee into Illinois State’s College of Applied Science and Technology Hall of Fame, Strong Hill has a master’s in public administration from Harvard and a law degree from the University of Illinois Chicago. As a finance lawyer, she’s done wide-ranging work in Chicago, Milwaukee, Dallas, and Washington, D.C., but a focus on housing development has been a constant.
Strong Hill is a member of the executive team of Cinnaire, a national nonprofit, low-income housing tax credit syndicator and community development financial institution. She recently structured and supported a $55 million fund that invested in developers from traditionally underrepresented groups structured to leverage tax credits while mitigating Cinnaire investor risk in developing five multi-family housing developments across three Midwest states, including one in Illinois.
“If we are truly focused on solving the housing problem, we can’t afford to leave anyone on the bench,” Strong Hill said.
Strong Hill’s work also includes supporting “missing middle” or “attainable” housing, affordable to those below or slightly above the area median income, which is in high demand but low supply. “We had stopped building housing like this in the U.S.,” she said. “We’ve got to catch up.”
Innovation is critical to solving the housing shortage, Strong Hill said, and that includes revisiting housing codes that have made rehabilitation of existing housing nearly impossible. “We need to have community conversations about smart code enforcement and allow housing to be remediated in a way that doesn’t dissuade those who want to do so,” she said.
Strong Hill has seen the housing shortage from all angles and knows the problems well. Yet she remains hopeful.
“Housing is a totally solvable problem,” she said. “We just really need to put our foot on the gas with respect to our desire to solve it.”
