Council: Dixon dealing with housing shortage

DIXON – Creating incentives to spur landlords to maintain their rental properties and increasing housing stock are among measures Dixon city officials are considering in an effort to improve housing opportunities throughout the city.

“I know this is a hot-button topic, and I know there’s a lot of feelings either way, but it’s something a lot of communities are having to address right now, and why I think that this is important to really talk about,” Dixon City Council member Mary Oros said during a council retreat Tuesday at Sauk Valley Community College.

Oros said her hope is to incentivize landlords to maintain their properties in Dixon – a city with a housing stock of a little more than 50% rentals.

“It’s not coming in, at least from my perspective of what I wanted to share, to drive the hammer down on landlords and what they have to do and all of that,” she said. “I think that that’s the wrong mindset to go into a program like this or to look at adopting something like that.”

Dixon Mayor Glen Hughes agreed that “incentive” is the key word.

“We’re looking at packaging some sort of incentives,” he said, “[such as] ‘If you do this, we may be able to help you with this,’ rather than if you just said, ‘We’re just taking a stick approach,’ though in some cases that is something that I would like to do.

“But at least we’re looking at it, and looking at some opportunities to assist the landlords and motivate them to maintain it. And based on the degree of rental houses and the need for additional housing in this community, it would literally be a crime to let the properties continue to deteriorate, and it’s not helpful for the tenants or this community as a whole.”

Maintaining rental properties and adding to the city’s housing stock is imperative, Oros said. She said that during meetings with two manufacturers she was told there’s not enough housing to bring people in to work.

“If you don’t have somewhere to live [in Dixon], you’re going to be hard-pressed to find somewhere to live,” Oros said. “That sounds dire and extreme, but it truly is. Look at what we have available right now. Even rental properties, look at what we have available, and so, that is, if we are walking out of this conversation, we have to start right now looking at.”

One of the challenges is Dixon not being a home-rule city. Oros said City Attorney Rob LeSage will need to look at legalities when creating a landlord inspection program.

LeSage agreed with Oros that housing is a hot-button issue. He said Sterling is pretty far down the road in developing housing programming, and Dixon has the benefit of watching what that city does and how the community responds.

“So, the timing is probably very right for you raising this, Mary,” LeSage said. “And the time is also right for us to sit and watch a little bit.”

Oros responded: “I think that we can. Why reinvent the wheel when we have a community next to us that’s going through this process as well?”

Learning how various interest groups respond to such programs, developing public outreach and learning to work with all of the people involved also will be key as the city deals with housing issues that can have a very difficult political dynamic, LeSage said.

Oros said housing discussions need to start now and continue into the future.

“This is on the peripheral for us as we continue to grow,” she said. “And we’ve already deployed dollars to looking at our housing study and looking at all of those things. I guess what I don’t want to do is to continue to kick it five to 10 years down the road and not have these hard conversations. And they’re going to be hard.”