Reports

The Preservation Lab is an initiative co-directed by the Institute for Housing Studies at DePaul University (IHS) and The Preservation Compact that aims to investigate complex and timely affordable housing topics and inform affordable housing policy through applied research and stakeholder engagement.

Through the City Tech Connect Chicago Innovation Program, the Institute for Housing Studies at DePaul University (IHS) and MAPSCorps teamed up to create data indicators, sustainable processes, and tools to help community organizations access, analyze, and compare neighborhood-level data that can be leveraged to support local policies and issues.

This report goes “under the hood” of our Mapping Displacement Pressure in Chicago data to highlight how house prices are changing in the neighborhoods around The 606 and identifies potential opportunities to preserve affordability in surrounding communities.

This analysis examines IHS’s updated displacement pressure maps and ways that market pressure may be changing in Chicago neighborhoods. The goal is to give neighborhood stakeholders a timely resource to understand shifting levels of market activity and highlight which areas in the City of Chicago may be experiencing increased displacement pressure.

The City of Chicago commissioned the Institute for Housing Studies to develop data to guide conversations around developing Chicago’s 2019-2023 Five-Year Housing Plan.

Measuring the Impact of the 606: Understanding How a Large Public Investment Impacted the Surrounding Community examines how the housing market responded to the development of The 606 linear park, Chicago's recent addition to the growing number of "rails to trails" projects nationwide.

In light of the continued acute need for affordable rental housing in Cook County, the latest report from IHS examines a key challenge to maintaining and increasing the supply of affordable rental units: access to credit for multifamily properties in the county's lower-income communities. This report builds on the findings from the 2013 State of Rental Housing in Cook County using mortgage data released in October of 2014.

The research brief, “The Impact of Lock-In Effects on Housing Turnover and Implications for a Housing Recovery” summarizes a new working paper by IHS researchers Patric Hendershott, Jin Man Lee, and James Shilling. It finds that rapidly increasing interest rates, along with negative equity, “lock-in” households to their existing mortgages and residences, which reduces housing turnover.

Written to inform the development of the City's 2014-2018 Five Year Housing Plan, the Overview of the Chicago Housing Market contains a comprehensive set of maps, charts, and tables meant to both provide background data for the city's housing plan and a comprehensive view of neighborhood housing markets. This book was used to facilitate advisory group discussions of the housing market needs of Chicago’s neighborhoods and to craft the new Five-Year Housing Plan that will guide the City’s policy and investment related to housing from 2014 to 2018.

This brief highlights the key role the two-to-four unit housing stock plays in Cook County and the challenges facing the stock.