Skokie Village Board votes to create fund, land trust to support affordable housing

The Skokie Village Board voted unanimously on Monday to create two new initiatives aimed at fostering more affordable housing in the village: a housing fund and a Community Land Trust.

The housing fund, which will pay for the acquisition and rehabilitation of homes in the trust, will accumulate from donations, grants and the payments private developers are required by Skokie law to provide the village in lieu of offering affordable housing units in residential projects. 

The Community Land Trust will own land on behalf of the village, oversee the acquisition and rehabilitation of homes on that land, and work with low- and moderate-income applicants who will purchase those homes from the trust, according to village documents.

Village staff will now seek a nonprofit that will serve as a partner to manage the Community Land Trust. 

The ordinance that created the two new entities states that Skokie “recognizes the need and interest” to support a stock of affordable housing units in the village because those homes strengthen “economic vitality” and foster an “equitable, diverse, and inclusive community”.

When the ordinance was under first review on April 20, Trustee Gail Schechter, a longtime housing advocate and executive director of a nonprofit focused on housing the elderly, said it took three years of multiple iterations to arrive at the initiatives’ current design.

“We’ve gotten ourselves to the point, thanks to everyone’s input, where we’ve got something that will provide us with the tools, the flexibility to increase our supply, preserve our supply and also help people on the demand side who might need some subsidies. So I’m really excited about this,” she said.

Trustee Jim Iverson said on April 20 it’s important for Skokie to have an “affordable community” and that the board’s ordinances are “living documents” that may continue to evolve and improve. 

‘Safe, sanitary, and appropriate’

Skokie now defines affordable housing as: “Safe, sanitary, and appropriate housing that low- and moderate-income households can own or rent without having to devote more than approximately 30 percent of their gross income for monthly Housing Expenses.”

The housing fund will put money toward constructing, acquiring and rehabbing homes, but it may also support weatherizing existing affordable homes, paying for housing-related support services like financial counseling, and providing grants to nonprofits engaged in addressing affordable housing needs, village documents say. 

The Community Land Trust will aim to preserve affordability by “separating ownership of land from ownership of improvements,” ensuring there are “continuous ownership cycles” of property, and preventing the “displacement of low- and moderate-income residents … due to increasing costs of land,” the ordinance states. 

People seeking to purchase a home in the trust will need to apply and meet qualifications established by Skokie and the trust’s nonprofit managing partner, according to village documents.

Those qualifications reportedly could include gross household income limits, debt to income ratios, asset limits, whether applicants have cash for down payments and mortgage eligibility.

The village qualifies households with annual income less than 60% of the area’s median income as low-income, and households with less than 80% of the area’s median income as moderate-income.

Skokie is part of the Chicago-Joliet-Naperville Housing and Urban Development Metro Fair Market Rent Area, Meredith Gioia, the village’s communications manager said in an email.

For 2026, the area’s median family income was measured at $121,500, a federal webpage shows.

Skokie will not be responsible for “the transactions associated with individual homebuyers and sellers” engaging with the Community Land Trust, the documents say.

Instead, the nonprofit, and its board of community members, experts and people using the land trust reportedly will facilitate governing and overseeing the trust. 

Inclusionary Housing Ordinance

Skokie’s Inclusionary Housing Ordinance, which the Village Board passed in May 2024, requires new residential developments provide a specific percentage of their housing units at a rate in line with the area’s median income, or else request to pay a fee-in-lieu to the village. 

The only development that has been officially subject to Skokie’s Inclusionary Housing Ordinance since it was created in May 2024 is the 68-townhome project set to enter the site of a vacant Hebrew day school at 4600 Main St., said Patrick Deignan, Skokie’s communications director, in an email. 

In that instance, the Village Board voted to allow the project’s developer, Fulton Street Companies, to pay Skokie $450,000 instead of including the four affordable housing units otherwise required by the ordinance.

Fulton Street Companies has not yet paid Skokie that sum because payments-in-lieu are given prior to the issuance of building permits, Deignan said.

Other developments that the board has approved since May 2024 began their process prior to the Inclusionary Housing Ordinance’s adoption so they were not subject to its requirements, Deignan said. 

That said, Zeller OOT, the developer behind a project set to put 245 residential units in the vacant office buildings at 5202 and 5205 Old Orchard Road, still agreed to pay a $1 million affordable housing contribution to the village even though the trustees first approved the project in April 2024.

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