Homes for a Changing Region: Expression of Interest, 2025
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Summary
Please fill out this Expression of Interest form if your municipality is interested in receiving assistance for local housing planning assistance via the Homes for a Changing Region program. Homes helps municipalities identify solutions to their most pressing housing challenges, create a balanced mix of housing types, and serve the needs of multiple generations of residents and workers. Homes is a partnership between the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus and Brick Partners.
About Homes for a Changing Region
Homes for a Changing Region helps municipalities understand the state of their market using data, regional expertise, and case studies from peer communities to identify solutions to their housing challenges.
Homes has been designed to provide a fast-moving technical assistance process to help municipalities identify housing issues and move quickly to readily implementable action steps. This occurs via a three to four meeting process, which will include the following components:
- A housing needs assessment: This data analysis will identify key housing trends in the community. The Homes team will use it to facilitate a kickoff meeting of key stakeholders, such as elected officials and staff, to identify 2-4 short term housing challenges to address.
- Focus group meeting: A focus group meeting will bring together community members, such as local commissioners, developers, realtors, nonprofits, and landlords, to further discuss needs and challenges.
- A community survey: This survey will directly contact residents and determine key housing issues they face. This survey will help municipalities understand their market in real time and will be managed by IHDA.
- An expert panel: This event will bring in expert panelists to address the key issues identified in the assessment and survey and recommend targeted steps to address them.
- A housing action plan: This final action plan will summarize the findings of the data assessment, survey, and expert panel and identify 2 to 4 steps that the municipality can take, including through existing grant programs via IHDA and other entities. The action plan will be briefly summarized in a presentation to elected officials.
Guidelines and Deadline to Apply
Due to generous funding from IHDA, the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus has the ability to offer local housing planning to municipalities between February of 2025 and February of 2026. Assistance is free and slots are limited. Assistance is available to any municipality within northeastern Illinois. Communities that have previously participated in Homes are not eligible for assistance.
Interested municipalities may fill out this short form to express interest. You will need to create an account in Submittable to register. All assistance is provided through the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus and Brick Partners, and funded via the Illinois Housing Development Authority.
Please complete this form by Friday, February 28th to be considered for this free assistance. For more information, please contact Ben Schnelle at bschnelle@mayorscaucus.org.