With many decades of community development success as their guide, particularly in neighborhoods where foreclosure crises are not new, Chicago’s leading housing practitioners and policy experts meet to discuss solutions for how to right the nation’s housing sector — and the national economy along with it.

Trickle-down market approaches and over-zealous ownership initiatives have destroyed the historical stability and economic prosperity of middle-class home ownership. To restore stability and prosperity many feel that a bottom-up approach, which recognizes affordability as the linchpin, is required.

Chicago has been particularly hard hit by the housing crisis. More than 1,000 foreclosures filings are recorded each month and the rental housing inventory, a mainstay for Chicago’s workforce, has accounted for a third of foreclosed households.

Panelists include:
Hon. Jan Schakowsky, Congresswoman
Peter Fugiel, economist and housing market expert
Dennis Rodkin, Deal Estate columnist at Chicago magazine and chicagomag.com
Joy Aruguete, Executive Director of Bickerdike Redevelopment Corporation
Andy Geer, Executive Director of Heartland Housing Development
Ben Applegate, President of Illinois Housing Council
…and many other housing and community development professionals.

Moderated by Thom Clark, President of Community Media Workshop.

The Chicago Rehab Network (CRN) is a citywide coalition of more than 40 housing neighborhood and community based development organizations representing over 60 city neighborhoods. CRN’s members have created tens of thousands of affordable housing units. They have made profound impact on some of Chicago’s most disinvested communities, while preserving affordable housing in some of its most rapidly gentrifying ones.

Recorded Monday, January 12, 2009 at Roosevelt University-Congress Lounge.