{"id":1032866,"date":"2026-08-30T11:43:25","date_gmt":"2026-08-30T11:43:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/1032866\/"},"modified":"2026-08-30T11:43:25","modified_gmt":"2026-08-30T11:43:25","slug":"opinion-how-chicagos-housing-policies-can-better-support-public-safety","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/1032866\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion: How Chicago\u2019s housing policies can better support public safety"},"content":{"rendered":"

We have a mayoral election coming up. Whoever runs the city next will have little money to throw at solving the top concern of Chicago voters: gun violence. In a recent op-ed<\/a>, my team at the University of Chicago Crime Lab outlined four ideas that would cost little and together could cut the city\u2019s number of shootings by up to half. Here\u2019s another idea: Reorient Chicago\u2019s housing policies to better support public safety.<\/p>\n

American housing policy for the poor is guided by two quite natural intuitions. The first is that housing is expensive. The second is that there are many families with low incomes, year after year, that will struggle to afford a place to live.<\/p>\n

The result has been housing policies that give people benefits that are very generous by the standards of U.S. social policy (the average housing voucher subsidy in Chicago is nearly $15,000<\/a> per year), to solve the problem of how expensive housing is. And to solve the problem of many families being persistently poor, these vouchers, unlike social programs such as the state-run Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, aren\u2019t time-limited; people can keep them for as long as their incomes are low enough. Plus, federal rules require cities to prioritize housing help for the poorest families.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s been some debate<\/a> about whether this is the best way to help low-income Americans with their housing. Given the limited housing dollars, nationwide only around 1 in 4 poor families get any help with their housing. We could in principle give each low-income family a smaller subsidy in order to give help to a much larger share of the poor.<\/p>\n

But I want to focus on a different concern with the current approach: The biggest housing programs, such as vouchers, don\u2019t seem to do much to improve public safety<\/a>. We could \u2014 perhaps counterintuitively \u2014 get more public safety benefit by focusing a larger share of housing dollars on short-term help to people who aren\u2019t necessarily the poorest of the poor, or the persistently poor, but instead are suffering from more time-limited budget problems.<\/p>\n

For example, research by the Lab for Economic Opportunities at the University of Notre Dame<\/a> looked at what happened with people who received assistance several years ago from Chicago\u2019s Homelessness Prevention Call Center. The HPCC helped people suffering from \u201ca significant but temporary crisis\u201d make rent and keep their utilities on, for example.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The result? People going through an unemployment spell, divorce or short-term cash crunch caused by an unexpected expense or emergency were prevented from becoming homeless, and the rate at which people were arrested for a violent crime fell by fully 51%. The lesson is that being doubled up by living on someone else\u2019s couch or living in a tent on the street exposes people to situations in which violence is much more likely.<\/p>\n

A second example is with victims of domestic violence, which surged during the pandemic here in Chicago. Help with housing is one of the top needs of domestic violence victims<\/a>. The fear is that many women stay with abusive partners for lack of anywhere else they can afford to go. Fast-turnaround, temporary housing assistance may allow many more women<\/a> to escape from dangerous situations more quickly. Changing the balance of our housing dollars a bit and better connecting housing programs to other social service entry points that work with domestic violence victims could potentially save many lives.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For example, our research team at the University of Chicago linked data from medical records with police records and found that there are subtle signals in medical data<\/a> such as X-ray images that doctors and nurses miss but that indicate domestic violence victimization \u2014 that is, these subtle signals help predict whether someone will go on to report domestic violence to the police in the near future. Having social workers in the emergency room connect victims to short-term housing help is just one example of a low-cost way to potentially save many lives.<\/p>\n

The problem isn\u2019t that we\u2019re not doing any of this right now, but rather that we don\u2019t seem to be doing nearly enough of it. For example, statewide, there seems to be a shortage of tens of thousands<\/a> of shelter beds plus other sorts of short-term housing help for people all across Illinois. Here in Chicago specifically, we are seeing a growing number of calls by people to 211<\/a> for quick turnaround help to avoid homelessness. While federal rules impose real constraints on how much we can repurpose federal dollars, Chicago does have some extra flexibility given that we\u2019re one of the cities that\u2019s a Department of Housing and Urban Development \u201cMoving to Work\u201d program site.<\/p>\n

A city drowning in money would have lots of options for reducing gun violence. But Chicago is not drowning in money right now, nor are we likely to suffer from that problem anytime soon. We need to be thinking of concrete, actionable, evidence-based ways to get more public safety from existing city dollars \u2014 including, as I argue here, getting more of a public-safety double dividend from our housing programs.<\/p>\n

Jens Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman distinguished service professor at the University of Chicago, Pritzker director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and author of\u00a0\u201cUnforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here<\/a> or email letters@chicagotribune.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We have a mayoral election coming up. Whoever runs the city next will have little money to throw…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1032867,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5124],"tags":[960,93682,413257,32551,5386,1818,96125,4748],"class_list":["post-1032866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-chicago","tag-chicago","tag-chicago-housing","tag-chicago-public-safety","tag-domestic-violence","tag-il","tag-illinois","tag-temporary-assistance-for-needy-families","tag-welfare"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117184286249925416","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1032866"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032866\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1032867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1032866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1032866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1032866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}