Rental Housing Support Passes

With all of the potential cuts in the Housing Choice (Section 8) Voucher program, passage of Senate Bill 75, which creates the Rental Housing Support program, could not have come at a better time. Originally introduced in 2004 by a partnership of over 150 organizations, the bill establishes a state-funded program that gives housing subsidies to very low-income families.

The Rental Housing Support program was a concept developed around 1998 by the It Takes a Home to Raise a Child Campaign, spearheaded primarily by the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless and the Statewide Housing Action Coalition (SHAC). The program targets households earning less than 30 percent of the area median income, which in Illinois is approximately $19,000 for a family of four.

The Rental Housing Support program, sponsored by Sen. Iris Martinez (D) and Rep. Julie Hamos (D), passed out of both the House and the Senate by large margins, with bipartisan support. On April 14 the Senate passed S.B. 75 with a 36-to-22 vote. The bill was sent to the House for consideration and quickly passed out of the Housing and Urban Development Committee (10-3). S.B. 75 came to a full vote on the House floor on May 4 and easily passed with 72 members voting in support of the legislation. The bill has since been sent to Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s desk and is awaiting the governor’s signature.

Funding for the Rental Housing Support program comes from a new $10 fee for filing real estate documents; one dollar from each transaction is given to county recorders of deeds and county government budgets to cover any administrative costs associated with collecting the money for the program. Because it is not funded by the state’s budget, the program puts no additional cost burden on Illinois.

The program will be administered statewide. As required in the language of the bill, Chicago will receive only 30 percent of the subsidized units; the remaining 70 percent will be distributed throughout the state. Preliminary estimates suggest that the Rental Housing Support program will subsidize housing for 5,500 Illinois families by raising around $30 million annually. This comes at a time when over 77,000 households are on Illinois public housing waiting lists and 400,000 families spend over half their income on rent.

When asked how this victory feels after years of struggle, Bob Palmer, Housing Justice Organizer for SHAC, said, “It feels great, like we have accomplished a lot. Of course, it is a small amount of the overall resources needed. It is a sign that, as a state, we are headed in the right direction, but we have much farther to go.” The Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law supported the campaign to pass S.B. 75 and will continue its work on developing solutions to Illinois’s affordable-housing crisis.

For more information, contact Raj Nayak at 312.263.3830 ext. 243.