Volvo and SUV owners Unite!

Affordable housing advocates claim they want to help make housing more affordable. So why are they applauding a new Cook County tax that penalizes homeowners and benefits landlords?

With an eye toward encouraging rental housing development, the Cook County Board on Wednesday will consider slashing property taxes for apartment buildings through lower assessments.

To make up for it, however, the total tax bills for homeowners in the county would rise about 2 percent.

The measure is part of a complicated tax picture in Illinois. It is relatively rare for the County Board to shift the tax burden from one group to another, although it approved a similar measure four years ago that cut taxes for rental buildings and boosted them for other taxpayers, including homeowners.

The proposal, backed by affordable housing advocates and pushed by Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and Assessor James Houlihan, hasn't generated significant opposition, although some question the fast track the measure is on.

"It has all the earmarks of a gift to apartment complex owners," said County Commissioner Carl Hansen (R-Mt. Prospect), who wants a public hearing on the issue.

Proponents say the tax cut for landlords would help the apartment sector while building owners are facing higher costs from utilities and property taxes, and units are being lost to condominium conversions.

Homeownership is at an all time high, due to low mortgage rates and a growing economy. Renters have increasingly switched to owning their own home, putting that monthly payment toward building up equity and their American Dream.

Meanwhile, other government-subsidized apartments are falling apart, and are being transferred to yet another group of landlords, with yet another batch of subsidies, and now this tax break, presumably with the same miserable results:

Officials are calling the transfer, which involves more than 1,000 subsidized apartments and $33.5 million in promised federal grants for renovations, the largest such rescue of troubled private housing ever.

It comes more than a year after city inspectors cited 1,800 code violations in the development. That spurred the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development to foreclose on the properties, taking them from the limited partnership that owed $51 million on the North Lawndale buildings.

In a federal foreclosure sale earlier this week, the properties previously owned by Lawndale Restoration LP--a limited partnership that includes the Chevron oil company and smaller local concerns as investors--were sold to the city for $10 each, officials said. In turn, the city arranged for those parcels to be transferred to a previously screened group of developers.

"This is by far the largest kind of rescue and rehabilitation of a troubled Section 8 property in the country," said Jack Markowski, commissioner of the Chicago Department of Housing. "We're just really happy we've reached a conclusion to the whole saga of these 104 buildings."

There's a bright spot though, for Volvo and SUV owners alike, you can "make a difference":

That saga came to light in the fall of 2004, when a suburban woman backed her car into a pillar and caused a partial building collapse.

City inspectors investigating the crash site discovered a festering nest of housing woes, including rats, ceiling leaks, exposed electrical wiring and no heat.

Four of the buildings were in such bad shape that they were demolished last year, officials said.

Next time, though, maybe just let Mayor Daley make a park out of it and have the money go to help needy families buy homes in the exurbs where the jobs are.