Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle cut the ribbon on the first two of 120 planned modular-built houses Wednesday morning, part of a sweeping $12M affordable housing pilot program.
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The program is designed to add affordable housing across Cook County in Humboldt Park, Chicago Heights and Proviso Township. The Cook County Board of Commissioners approved the plan just over a year ago, allocating funding for what works out to $100K per unit.
The first two finished homes are on Homan Avenue in Humboldt Park, each built in a factory 3.5 miles away in North Lawndale, Crain's Chicago Business reported. Preckwinkle was set to attend the ribbon-cutting alongside other county officials, the Cook County Land Bank and Tim Swanson, whose firm, Inherent L3C, built the three-bedroom houses.
A dozen total modular homes, comprised of a first and second floor delivered in two pieces, are slated to go up in Humboldt Park. Work will start on homes in Chicago Heights and Proviso Township in late fall, Crain's reported.
“If we're going to meet the housing crisis in this country, we're going to have to invest a lot more in modular housing,” Preckwinkle told Crain's. “It takes less time than stick-built, and they're built in a controlled environment where there's no rain or snow that takes extra time.”
Yet the new construction will help cover merely a fraction of the projected housing shortfall facing Illinois over the next five years.
The state has a current deficit of 142,000 units, according to a joint report from the Illinois Economic Policy Institute and the Project for Middle Class Renewal at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign last week. It will need to build about 230,000 more between now and 2030 to stabilize the market and address a growing housing affordability crisis, they said.
Meanwhile, the modular housing industry has long battled a negative perception from some that its products are of lower quality than traditionally constructed homes. But natural disasters have presented new opportunities for those developers.
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