Solving the affordable housing crisis nationally and locally is extraordinarily complex, but participants in the third-annual Housing Summit on Thursday morning agreed it must be addressed by people, organizations, and governments working together.
Project NOW hosted several discussions at the downtown Rock Island Holiday Inn, to present an overview analysis of what the Quad Cities’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and challenges are in providing safe, secure, and affordable housing for those who need it.
“Let's be clear about the reality we face today. The housing challenges before us are significant and they cannot be ignored,” said John Chow, CEO of Rock Island-based Community Home Partners (CHP), a nonprofit that develops affordable housing for a wide range of residents, including low-income families, seniors, people with disabilities, and veterans.
“We're looking at approximately $25.6 billion in deferred maintenance and capital expenses. That will never get funded,” he said of housing needs nationally. “Across the country, we continue to lose affordable housing units at an unsustainable rate.”
Nationwide, there's an estimated shortage of over 7 million affordable housing units. In Illinois alone, the shortage is estimated to be well over 300,000, Chow said, noting in the QC that number is at least 7,000.
“Now those aren't just statistics, right? They represent families, seniors, veterans, individuals, and communities that need real solutions,” he said. “But even in the face of those challenges, we remain optimistic. If there's light, we'll reach for it. If there's momentum, we'll walk. So where do we go from here? As we evolve, as we reimagine, as we transition, as we continue to advance the affordable housing mission, we must be intentional about the relationships that make progress possible.”
“We must build strong foundational partnerships. with our state and local officials,” Chow said. “We must forge public-private partnerships that are truly mutually beneficial, especially with private investors and financial institutions.”
“Solving our national, state, and local housing crisis will take commitment, partnership, courage, and persistence,” he said. “But isn't that what we do as housers? You know, we keep showing up, we keep reaching for that light, we keep building on momentum that we have. And most importantly, we keep doing the right thing for the people and community who depend on us.”
“Even though our mission is noble and our work is necessary, it’s never been easy,” Chow said. “We continue because the need is urgent, the purpose is clear, and the people we serve are counting on us.”
CHP is currently building 25 small homes for military veterans at 950 31st Ave., Rock Island, at a cost of $9 million.
Along with that development, we have a 3,000-square-foot community center, onsite service that we can provide, not just to the veterans that live in the development, but service can be expanded to the entire community,” Chow said.
“That's the only way that we need to look at seeking opportunity -- establish relationships, all the relationships that we talk about with city government, local government, with financial institutions, with community stakeholders, all that has to be established, to be successful in terms of moving our mission forward,” he said.
Examples of partnership
Community Home Partners is partnering with The Arc of the Quad Cities on the new $10-million Heritage Homes development, at 4601 53rdSt., Moline.
A 24-unit affordable housing complex, it’s made possible through funding from the Illinois Housing Development Authority (IHDA), and will provide 24 permanent supportive housing units for individuals with diverse needs (including eight for people with disabilities).
“What this new site is going to be is we've got a 24-unit supportive housing community that will be intentionally inclusive,” The Arc president/CEO Micharl Glanz said Thursday, noting it will be staffed 24-7.
“And so there'll be one-bedroom units, and so you'll have your own unit, you'll have your own autonomy, you'll have your own dignity. You can live there, and so instead of living with roommates, you're living with neighbors now. And so you're in this inclusive community, and then it's inclusive neighbors.”
It took three funding requests to make it happen, he said, noting working with Community Home Partners was the charm.
“So if you've got a vision, hold on tight to it because it was— I mean, we got told no 3 times until we got told yes,” Glanz said. “So keep holding on to that vision and keep doing it.”
Stacy Kiser, executive director of Vera French Housing Development, also stressed the need for supportive services.
She called Vera French as a “landlord plus,” offering housing to people with mental health needs, and access to care, but renters do not have to be diagnosed with any specific condition or be seeing someone to qualify for housing.
Last November, they opened Carol’s Village Gardens, a four-story, $10-million affordable rental housing complex at 820 Harrison St., Davenport.
Fittingly located next to the Vera French Community Mental Health Center’s Carol Center, the nonprofit agency’s 30-unit complex is comprised of six supportive units for people moving from homelessness; four two-bedroom apartments and 20 one-bedroom units.
Keys and money
Each table Thursday in the second-floor ballroom included several keys and $100 bills, with the former representing “turning the key of opportunity” and the latter the local and state resources available, said Project NOW executive director Dr. Dwight Ford.
“We wanted people to know that there is an abundance of resources. We may not always see them and in our budgets, but we believe the Quad Cities is a gracious place,” he said.
“We believe that there are willing people to assist. We try to materialize what abundance looks like, in the bills on the table, but it could show up as someone lending themselves and their expertise to you and saying, I know how to pull that project off. I've been a developer. Let me help you start your first reentry home. Let me assist you because I know what it means to try to get a domestic and sexual violence shelter off the ground and what it's going to take."
“We want people to know whatever housing initiative you want to be a part of, someone else has already done it. Someone else can assist you in it,” he said. “And there's always room for you to add to the current inventory of commitment. I don't want people to ever think that if I do this, I'm going to step on their toes because they're doing it."
"We have so much need in the Quad Cities that none of our individual efforts can overcome separate and apart from the collective effort to end what we now know as homelessness, the affordability crisis, and a lack of homeownership opportunities.”
“We know we have an unhoused reality that is unacceptable in numbers alone, just the stark reality of so many people struggling,” Ford said. “We know we have to work with mental health providers and those that work with sobriety and substance abuse. We know we have to include that."
"We also work with domestic and sexual violence and trafficking because that's a part of the population," he said. "And then we have to deal with the lack of affordability, the high rate of evictions, the challenges that come with, well, how does a person then take their home or household from the starter house and they've grown too big for it, household continues to expand, but the next level of opportunity is not there that they can afford?”
“We try to end with the idea of someone else owning a home, and the same person that was once unhoused can, if it is so their desire, with enough supports, could actually be in a home that, that is theirs, that they have the key in,” he said.
“Affordable housing and rental properties are in the middle of this. where people can live their entire life in a rental property. We want to make sure that they are affordable, accessible, safe, and human dignified so that people don't have to endure other traumas by living in substandard housing. So we have our work cut out for us.”
The solution has to be a public-private partnership, as a region, Ford said.
“We have to absolutely do this as a region. There's no way to pull it off without it. Two is how do we find the flexible resources to be able to take a person that is on the street right into affordable property or rental property that they could occupy,” he said. “We see the overflow shelter as still a need for several years. You're going to need a pressure relief valve.
There are far too many people. The shelters are already at capacity with waiting lists that are in this region.”
In his intro before the morning panel discussions, Ford said these challenges can’t be solved by one city.
“Housing essentially is the core, I believe, to the first expression of one's humanity outside of the family network. We believe at Project NOW, and I believe you believe something I'm saying, that housing is the anchor to all other opportunities,” he said.
“Once housing is secure, a person doesn't have to run and live like a ferret, trying to scurry and carve out a little space to sleep at night.
“Once housing is secure, people can come out of their cars and stop resting for the night with a family of 4 in a Walmart parking lot because it's well-lit. They can actually stop having to wash their children up in a Casey's bathroom before they send them to school to sit next to our children,” Ford said.
“They can actually stop running from the fear that someone will make a phone call and their children will be taken from them. Once housing is secure, people can start thinking about what type of employment, what college, what trade school, what branch of the military may they consider. Housing is the anchor to all other opportunities.”
Regional solutions addressed
The Downtown Davenport Partnership and Quad Cities Community Foundation in April led (with Clutch Consulting) two days of meetings with over 100 area leaders, with a shared sense of urgency and possibility to focus on one question: how can we move faster and more effectively to reduce unsheltered homelessness across our region?
Their report said: “What became clear is that our community is ready to act together. Service providers, local governments, philanthropy, business leaders, schools, healthcare partners, and community organizations all came prepared to listen, collaborate, and build practical solutions. The conversations reflected both honesty about the challenges ahead and optimism about what is possible when we align around shared goals.
The group report (see it HERE) says the QC area can become a region where homelessness is rare, brief, and non-recurring -- and where sleeping outside is no longer accepted as the default response to a housing crisis.
“That vision requires both hope and strategy,” the report says. “Hope keeps the region moving. Strategy makes the work real.”
The strategy must include:
• Laser focus on the people who are already sleeping outside or cycling through shelter without a path out.
• Fast, practical exits for households newly entering homelessness before a short-term crisis becomes a long-term condition.
• Clear standards for maintaining public spaces, paired with real housing, shelter, treatment, and stabilization pathways.
• Regional action and accountability, recognizing people move across city, county, and state lines in search of help and a city-by-city approach will simply move people from one jurisdiction to another.
Approximately 1,200 single-adult households in the QC enter homelessness annually; about 120 are long-term stayers, the report says. Approximately 360 family households enter homelessness annually; about 15 are long-term stayers. Most households are newly homeless: 81% of single adults and 88% of families.
The response is uneven across the region, with Iowa carrying an outsized role because family services are limited on the Illinois side, the report says.
Davenport mayor and downtown partnership respond
On Thursday, Davenport Mayor Jason Gordon said he was happy to work with Clutch Consulting on the issue, which has helped many bigger cities like Houston and Cleveland.
Beside the moral obligation to reduce homelessness, he said there’s “an economic case to be made, an economic vitality case to be made, that this is good work and it helps neighborhoods and communities grow and be more vibrant and brings more people into an experience of being more economically safe and viable and supported,” Gordon said. “So I think those 2 cases are aligning. We need to really capitalize on that while we have that moment. It may not always be there."
"And, you know, I know my city wants to be involved and make an investment, and that is going to happen fairly soon, I believe.”
Getting everyone to work together in a strong, unified way is the biggest challenge, though, said Kyle Carter, executive director of Downtown Davenport Partnership.
“I think it's like close number 2 behind that is just the trust, period. Trust that the business community has its heart in the right place,” he said. “These are people who actually care about this just as much as some folks in the social service area, and vice versa. You talked about running toward each other, not away from each other. That's gonna have to happen. There will be uncomfortable conversations about how these dynamics play out in spaces where you've got very dynamic, different interests.”
“One of the other things that I find most difficult about this conversation is the deeply mentally ill and those that are a danger to themselves and others,” Carter said.
“I've learned through the last couple of years that many of you offering the incredible services you do to individuals who need homes is that your resources are often immensely drained trying to deal with individuals that are far beyond even the capacity for those institutions to help," he said.
"Where we're falling short in kind of the hospital realm or like the realm of what used to be kind of help long-term, like where somebody's getting 12 to 18 months or 2 years or even permanent support," Carter said. "We don't have those resources.”
“Conversations like this give me hope,” he added. “Secondly, it's been done. I mean, I think that was where I started the conversation. I was like, there's other really complicated places that are doing better. That gives me hope. I've seen it work. I know we can do better. We will do better.”
“If we really work together, we actually could make a difference,” said Kelly Thompson, vice president of strategic initiatives for the QC Community Foundation, said there is a commitment to work together now.
“I feel like it's different right now. It's different right now in part because of people like Annika, because of the groundswell of public attention that has not waned over the course of the last 2 years, that's saying we're not going to allow this to be just the way it is, that someone's only option when experiencing a housing crisis might be to live outside,” she said, crediting guest speaker Annika O’Melia, founder of the Rock Island Line podcast and website.
“So why now? Because there's the opportunity, because of that public attention. which is buoying, I think, the attention you all have kept on for decades,” Thompson said, noting they were inspired by the Clutch Consulting sessions.
“We know those same messages have been heard from the people in this room, again, as long as anybody has been doing this work,” she said. “We have the capacity, we have a long history of supporting different areas in housing and homelessness."
"Again, not only me personally, but the organization. And so we believe this is the right place to put our efforts because of the opportunity now, because of the respect that we bring for all the players involved, and because we think now's the time," Thompson said.
Humanizing the unhoused
O’Melia displayed photos of homeless people she’s met in downtown Rock Island, and urged everyone to treat the issue with humanity, that affects real people.
“When you’re looking at them from far away, you just see the same blob of humans that you think are static, but there’s actually quite a bit of movement and positive developments and goodness happening in this community,” she said.
Seeing people up close “invites a sense of love and protection and kind of community care,” O’Melia said, noting local and state laws should not be used to punish vulnerable people in need, nor the organizations that work to serve them.
“And as I got to know people, I just – that’s what this was about. It was just like, how could you harm this person?” she asked. “How could you try to tell them where they can and can’t be when they have nowhere on earth to go? So what do we do to someone’s humanity when we move them away?
“You know, if we’re successful in hiding the unhoused, we can forget about the problems and the suffering that they endure,” O’Melia said. “When we write policies with people up close, interesting things happen.”
“We just need to find a place for everyone to live. Yes, we do,
and we need to be addressing the real issues in the community that hurt people. Because when you love someone, you want to also protect them from being preyed upon.”
“The problem is growing, and the resources are diminishing,” O’Melia said, noting there is also a meth and sex trafficking “epidemic” in Rock Island.
“This isn’t going anywhere, even with all the heavy lifting that nonprofits and regional leaders and business people are trying to accomplish,” she said. “We are in a gap. How are we going to treat humans while we exist there? And I would encourage all of you, which – this is a crowd I’m preaching to the choir – but to do that from up close, because when you do that from up close, it changes the outcome.
“Because dehumanization is easier from 1,000 feet away.”
Others who took part in the Housing Summit included Cecelia Bailey, executive director of Quad Cities Open Network; Joe Jackson, VP of capital development and asset management for Aurora-based Association for Individual Development; and representatives of Illinois Housing Development Authority and Community Foundation of Greater Muscatine.
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