Homelessness is directly tied to housing underproduction, as the 2022 Harvard Institute study, “Homelessness is a Housing Problem,” indicates.
Homelessness has always been present in Bloomington-Normal and McLean County, but it has not been since the pandemic that so much attention has been placed on it and the increase in the number of unhoused individuals and tent encampments. As the study points out, two factors consistently correlate with a region’s rise in homelessness: rapidly escalating rental costs and declining rental vacancy rates.
Data for McLean County since 2019 clearly show that this has held true. According to CoStar, rental housing rates skyrocketed by 43% from $0.80 effective rent per square foot in 2018 to $1.14 in 2023. Multi-family vacancy rates plummeted, starting in 2018 at 8% to 3% as of 2024. Since 2020, homelessness rose by 10% between 2019 and 2023, according to PATH. At the heart of it, we must view our tent encampments and stories of “doubling-up” as a systemic failure, not an individual failure due to dependency or addiction, but rather a lack of sound public policy and a lack of public and private funding for affordable housing and more collaboration across the board.
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Let me be clear — the lack of affordable housing in Bloomington-Normal is both a supply issue and lack of a social safety net in our community. I applaud the efforts that are underway from community organizations such as Habitat for Humanity of McLean County for their new construction, Bloomington Revivalists with their advocacy for citizen-based development, and the Bloomington-Normal Community Land Trust for their work that intersects housing rehabilitation and community revitalization while also providing a sustainable solution to the affordable housing shortage in Bloomington-Normal. Yes, we can do it. We must take care of our neighbors and the “least of these.”
Mark Adams, Bloomington
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