Recognizing the need to tackle affordable housing at the state level in Illinois, 46 organizations joined together in 1986 and decide to campaign for a state housing trust fund. Our founders formally incorporated as the Statewide Housing Action Coalition (SHAC) in 1987.

Our first major win was the establishment of the Illinois Affordable Housing Trust Fund. It facilitates nearly all public, private, and nonprofit affordable housing activity in Illinois by providing grants and loans to home developers and rehabbers. As of 2022, the fund has distributed more than $939 million in funding, leading to the creation of 74,725 affordable housing units.

In the early 1990s, seeing a need within the state, we expanded our services to include comprehensive training for developers and assisting organizations in securing Community Housing Development Organization (CHDO) status with HUD to access HOME funds for real estate development projects.

We started engaging in advocacy at the federal level by becoming a state partner of the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), a relationship that endures through today. Together, we campaigned for tenant representation on Public Housing Authority Boards, property tax exemptions for affordable housing owned by nonprofits, and minimum standards for private housing.

We co-led the It Takes a Home to Raise a Child campaign with the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, successfully advocating to create the state Homeless Prevention Program. This fund provides rent and utility assistance to individuals and families at risk for homelessness and has prevented homelessness for more than 120,000 households.

After a multi-year coalition campaign, we successfully saw Tax Increment Financing (TIF) reform legislation signed into law by Governor George Ryan to increase transparency, require impact studies, and mandate compensation for displaced households. We then began outreach to educate community members about how to make use of the new law’s protections.

Seeing a need for data-driven state housing policy, we began partnering with UIC Voorhees Center and different peer organizations, including Latino Policy Forum and the Shriver Center, to research affordable housing issues affecting Illinois and publish our findings. IHARP also created the first comprehensive digital database of assisted housing units in Illinois.

We mobilized over 500 advocates to call for statewide hearings, which lead to the creation of the Governor’s Housing Task Force, an annual state housing plan, and committees on housing in the state House and Senate. We also secured a $4 million increase in the Homeless Prevention Program budget.

We launched the Community Housing Developers Institute (CDHI), a workshop series that helped hundreds of housing developers throughout Illinois enhance their skills and knowledge.

After a three-year campaign, we successfully advocated for the Rental Housing Support Program, which was established with a dedicated funding stream of $25 million in its first year. This rent subsidy program continues to assist 2,500 extremely low-income households afford their homes each year.

2006 was a transformative year for us; we changed our name from Statewide Housing Action Coalition (SHAC) to Housing Action Illinois. This was also the year that we again expanded our Capacity Building services, this time to provide education to housing counselors.

In response to the 2008 financial crisis, we increased our housing counselor trainings to ensure consumers facing mortgage delinquency and default could turn to trusted, knowledgeable sources of assistance. In the next few years, we expanded our support of housing counseling agencies as co-facilitator of the Home Ownership Counseling and Legal Aid Task Force of the the Regional Home Ownership Preservation Initiative, a Chicago Metro initiative to support homeowners and stabilize communities.

Hearing a need from member organizations, we became an AmeriCorps VISTA Program Sponsor in 2010 to help our members build sustainable capacity with full-time, one-year VISTAs. Since this program’s beginning, our VISTAs have raised more than $3.5 million in cash and in-kind donations, recruited and managed thousands of volunteers, and worked on all kinds of projects to fight poverty and help communities to expand and improve their supply of affordable housing.

By advocating with allies after funding cuts, we secured $45 million in federal funding for HUD-certified housing counseling agencies and restored $4.7 million to the Emergency and Transitional Housing Program in Illinois’ budget. We also began providing statewide training and programmatic assistance for foreclosure prevention efforts.

To enhance our capacity building efforts and assist our housing counseling members, we became a HUD Housing Counseling Intermediary in 2014. We now secure and distribute pass-through funds from HUD to an affiliate network of HUD-approved housing counseling agencies, growing from an initial award of $307,000 for 26 agencies, to $1.3 million for 33 agencies located in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Missouri.

We worked to pass the stopgap state budget, which rejected previously proposed cuts and included $77.4 million for programs to create affordable housing and end homelessness. We mobilized supporters to call for an end to Illinois’ state budget impasse.

Partnering with the Rural Community Assistance Corporation (RCAC), we expanded our housing counseling training nationwide and conducted the first series in Arizona.

We launched our Summer VISTA Associate program, which places nearly 30 VISTAs with host sites for 8 – 10 weeks to tackle capacity-building and direct service projects.

We were awarded a grant from HUD to provide national housing counseling trainings and began hosting workshops to help housing counselors better serve communities around the country.

We worked to build support for investment in affordable housing—and successfully secured $200 million in the first capital budget in a decade. We also secured a $4 million—more than 80%—increase in funding for the Homeless Prevention Program, resulting in a total of $9 million in available funding.

We co-led the campaign to pass the Just Housing Amendment, a groundbreaking measure that will ensure housing providers in Cook County do not discriminate against applicants with records.

As part of the steering committee for a strong coalition of allies, we successfully advocated for the Cook County Residential Tenant Landlord Ordinance, which extends basic renter protections to more than 245,000 suburban households.

We helped housing counselors and agencies meet new professional certification standards by an August 2021 deadline by providing online study groups and one-on-one support. Illinois consistently ranked in the top 5 states for HUD-certified housing counselors as the new standards rolled out.

We successfully advocated for the landmark Affordable Housing Omnibus bill, which creates new resources for affordable rental housing and property tax policies to keep rents affordable, and for the COVID-19 Emergency Housing Act, which creates protections for Illinoisans struggling to pay rent or a mortgage and seals all eviction records from March 2020-2022.