Sure. I get that. Last year, a group of activists bussed about 100 Venezuelan migrants into Oak Park, and we allocated a bunch of money towards housing and services for them. The math worked out such that we could have instead bought most of the families a free-and-clear house in a neighborhood like Dolton.
The problem as I see it is intensely localized to the inner-ring suburbs, which exist pretty much entirely to siphon money out of the Chicago school systems. Those suburbs are engines of middle-class opportunity, and they're deliberately designed to lock out the kind of people who would consider buying affordable houses in Chicago proper.
My only point in this is that, to the extent it exists, the housing affordability problem in Chicagoland is not primarily driven by availability of land. If it was we’d just do what we did in the past and make more.
It’s driven far more by history and public policy and the ugly confluence of those 2 things.
