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A weeklong series from the WGLT newsroom about the housing shortage in McLean County. New stories published daily starting Jan. 27, 2025.

'Too high': Rents — and property costs — have risen in the Twin Cities

As a single parent with a full-time job, Anthony Overton is responsible for much of the decision-making in his household.

Anything from what's for dinner to how to pay the bills falls on his shoulders.

"At the end of the day, what I bring home and what I can bring in the house is what we eat with. I have to make sure that all the bills are paid — sometimes the bank account gets a little close to zero. Sometimes it goes into the negative until I can balance it back out," Overton said in an interview for WGLT's Sound Ideas.

When every dollar counts, there isn't a lot of wiggle room.

Lately, the dollars have especially counted for rent at Overton's apartment at The Arbors at Eastland in Bloomington, which he says has increased over the years since a management change at the complex.

"The increase in price they assure me is for improvement. At times, I question if they are even cleaning the lobbies," he said. "Would I love to move somewhere cheaper? Yes, but there's the cost of moving that I have to add in. Any increase in my actual wages seems to get eaten up by the new increase [in rent] by my lease every year. So it leaves things in a tough position."

A man poses for a photo in a radio studio
Lyndsay Jones
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WGLT
As a single parent with a full-time job, Anthony Overton is responsible for much of the decision-making in his household — including how the rent gets paid.

Overton is one of thousands of renters in Bloomington-Normal who have seen their rents increase over the past few years, as more renters have moved into the market and housing options have largely remained static.

In 2022, the average rental rate per month for a non-student rental housing unit in Bloomington-Normal was $1,078, according to data from the McLean County Regional Planning Commission. By August 2024, that had increased to $1,414. The increases are similar when just student housing units are considered: The average rental rates for student housing were $1,414 in 2022 and $1,739 by August 2024.

"Within the past 3-4 years, I would say, or ever since COVID happened, rent has gone up at a quicker rate that we haven't seen before," said Ryan Curtis, vice president of commercial lending at First Securities Bank in Danvers. "I can understand the perspective of a tenant or a renter that would say, 'Wow this is crazy, rent prices are so high.'"

Ashli Whitton is eating the increased cost of her rental house in Normal, which is now $1,350 — $100 a month more than it was in 2022.

"It's definitely frustrating, but I'm always willing to pay the required rent because it's hard to find housing in Bloomington-Normal that's within a good school district. Trying to find a security deposit and things like that to move is not within means. So I just accept the increase and continue on," Whitton said.

Alex Duffy is a recently-elected McLean County Board member for District 6 and senior at Illinois State University. Last year, he took out student loans to cover his housing costs at The Flats at ISU; this year he moved to subsidized housing.

"I think people have this perception of electeds that they're very wealthy, powerful people. I can attest that this is not the case with me personally," Duffy said. "A lot of students are in that position where they have to take out loans or they've got to do something like Section 8 housing, which is fine and I think is a good resource. But I think the rent [overall] is too high."

Regional planners estimate 44% of people in McLean County who rent are considered "cost-burdened" — meaning more than 30% of their monthly income covers housing costs.

Why the rents have climbed

Commercial lending is just one of the lenses through which Curtis views the Twin City rental markets. He's also a private landlord and currently the secretary for the McLean County Area Landlord Association. And as a former ISU student and renter himself, he also understands that prices can wear on tenants.

"There's a lot of factors that go into rent prices," he said. "We live in a very interesting time as far as the economy as a whole, [increased] minimum wage and rent prices — they all kind of don't go together well."

As a lender, Curtis said Bloomington-Normal's housing shortage is playing into rent prices. Higher property values mean a potential landlord has to put more money toward a given property. If the goal is to recoup those funds or make a profit, the rents will reflect that. That comes in conjunction with higher mortgage interest rates of around 7% to 7.5%, he said, about double what they were in 2020.

"Within the past 3-4 years, I would say, or ever since COVID happened, rent has gone up at a quicker rate that we haven't seen before," Ryan Curtis, a commercial lender with First Securities Bank, said. "I can understand the perspective of a tenant or a renter that would say, 'Wow this is crazy, rent prices are so high.'"
Courtesy
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Ryan Curtis
"Within the past 3-4 years, I would say, or ever since COVID happened, rent has gone up at a quicker rate that we haven't seen before," said Ryan Curtis, a commercial lender with First Securities Bank. "I can understand the perspective of a tenant or a renter that would say, 'Wow this is crazy, rent prices are so high.'"

And all of this is on top of increased home insurance premiums which, in Illinois, rose by 45% between 2017 and 2023, according to a U.S.-based analysis from the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, which studied the rising premium rates as a consequence of climate-related disasters.

Earlier this month, Glenview-based Allstate said Illinois homeowner insurance rates would rise by 14% this year, fresh off a 12% increase last year; Bloomington insurance giant State Farm also increased rates by about 12% last year.

"The problem we're in, in my opinion, in the Bloomington-Normal market is that a lot of tenants may have been in their housing for a long time or coming from different areas and they're seeing what looks like an extremely high price. It may be a high price, but it's not necessarily gouging," Curtis said. "I don't think the whole industry, the rental market in Bloomington-Normal, is gouging everyone. While there might be a few outliers, I think the market has just really gone up in cost and they have to pass that along to the consumer — which in this case would be the renter."

Andy Netzer, the president of Young America, distills the matter to one question: Does the market allow the prices? So far, the answer has been yes — and some companies or landlords have responded accordingly.

"If the market is strong and the demand for housing is strong, then landlords will be able to get rent increases whether their expenses are up or not. Right now, they certainly happen to be up," Netzer said. "It's the supply of housing [and] the demand for housing that's going to determine the rental rate."

As the largest provider of student housing in Bloomington-Normal, Young America has been the subject of ire from rent-burned students for years, along with SAMI and First Site, which also reserve units within their overall portfolio for students.

On average, student housing tends to be more expensive than other, residential rental options in Bloomington-Normal: Data from the McLean County Regional Planning Commission showed nearly half of all student housing cost $1,600 or more in rent, compared just 31% of all non-student rental housing. The planners said that could be related to nearly half of student listings including services (such as utilities and full furnishings) and are also often rented per bedroom, which can increase the rate per unit.

Alex Duffy is a recently-elected McLean County Board member and senior at Illinois State University. Last year, he took out student loans to cover his housing costs at The Flats at ISU; this year he moved to subsidized housing.
Courtesy
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Alex Duffy
Alex Duffy is a recently-elected McLean County Board member and senior at Illinois State University. Last year, he took out student loans to cover his housing costs at The Flats at ISU; this year he moved to subsidized housing.

Duffy, having shopped for student housing himself, said he believes the larger companies that rent to students have raised rents beyond what they actually need to function, a practice he called "predatory." By the time he left his apartment at The Flats at ISU in Normal, he had already been presented with a potential $100-a-month rent increase if he were to resign his lease, he said.

"It's happened to me. It's happened to my friends, loved ones, where they're increasing their rents at 15%, 18% or 20%," he said. "There's a lot of greed from these companies. I'm unapologetic about saying it; I say this time and time again: I won't accept any campaign contributions from these companies."

SAMI and First Site did not respond to a request for an interview.

Overton, too, said he believes rates have risen too high at The Arbors at Eastland to be due to costs alone — though he has lost a State Farm employee discount after switching to a different job. Five years ago when he moved in, he said, he paid $600 for a two-bedroom. The same unit is now nearly $1,000.

"It's like you're increasing it to make a profit, not just because your costs increase, which could be acceptable and understandable," he said. "I understand some increases come from certain other things that we have, such as insurance increasing, but those don't match the increases that we're facing."

Not all landlords are feeling flush with cash. Curtis said he's seen about five people leave the local landlord association after deciding it was the right time financially to do so. The reasons may vary, he said, but as the market has cooled, some have decided to exit the market partially, by selling off a property or two, or leave it altogether.

'We definitely need more affordable housing'

One thing everyone can agree on: The short supply of housing in Bloomington-Normal has allowed rents to be able to rise at all.

"We definitely need more affordable housing because as we increase the supply, that will decrease the demand and naturally kind of bring down rent prices a little bit, but not drastically," Curtis said.

The community, however, is nowhere close to filling that need. An analysis from the Bloomington-Normal Economic Development Council said the Twin Cities are short 4,500 units. By 2030-2035, the area would need 16,000 more units to meet the housing demand.

In 2024, Bloomington and Normal only issued permits to 124 single-family homes. Bloomington only permitted 22 multifamily (apartment) units. Normal permitted 271, but only four of those units actually got done in 2024.

In the meantime, some people, including Duffy, are pursuing other measures. Duffy said he began support a movement that would lift a statewide, legislative ban on rent control that would allow municipalities to set their own policies on rent control, if they were to choose to do so.

"I think this is when the government needs to come in and do something, especially with rent, because if they're going to do this and they want to capitalize on it — that's fine. We live in a free market. But you can't be raising the rent on your tenants 15-20% in a given year. That's kind of where I'm at personally and as an elected official," he said.

Woman standing speaking into a microphone with a large projection screen behind her with an image of a house and the words "Life the Bab, Bloomington-Normal Town Hall September 7, 2024
Ben Howell
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WGLT
McLean County Board member Krystle Able was one of the presenters at a town hall of rent control in September 2024 at the Bloomington Public Library.

For Overton, the solution is two-pronged. He spoke out about increased rents, he said, because he believed it was the right thing to do in the face of a system that prioritizes "maximizing their profits." While he'd like to see something done about that, he'd also like to see the housing market grow so that he could have options.

"I doom-scroll Zillow enough... where I check to see if there's something that's popping," he said. "Every once in a while, there's something that seems like an option, but by the time I can get things together, it just wouldn't be feasible for me, and it normally never lasts more than a month at best."

It is partially a lack of choice, an inability to exercise agency in Bloomington-Normal's housing market, that has kept him living where he is at.

"The people who have the power to do something about it are the people who don't live in that situation and often times they are out of touch on how that feels," he said. "Helping people helps the economy — always. One correlates directly with the other. I think a lot of people don't see that correlation, that they could help and make things better overall."

Lyndsay Jones is a reporter at WGLT. She joined the station in 2021. You can reach her at lljone3@ilstu.edu.