A brief on emerging affordable rental housing trends in economically stressed Chicago communities

For decades, nonprofit housing and consumer-focused organizations have worked in low- and moderate-income (LMI) areas to address improvident mortgage lending practices that have led to high rates of vacancy and unstable neighborhoods. Questionable lending is not a new problem in LMI areas, in short, but the pace of this lending in LMI areas increased as the last decade?s housing bubble inflated. Many unsound lending practices (including failure to prevent fraudulent use of primary residence mortgages to finance investment property1) spread to mainstream housing markets in the first half of the 2000s, and ultimately led to an unprecedented wave of foreclosures and an economic crisis. But like all economic downturns, the crisis hit LMI areas the hardest, and they, as always, look to be the slowest to recover. The foreclosure crisis has changed the housing landscape in Chicago, claiming many of the city?s smaller rental buildings, and thereby much of the affordable rental housing stock in communities that were economically struggling even before the crisis.