>> Mayor Johnson's newest effort to reduce the city's massive, affordable housing shortage, ran into a wall of deeply skeptical city council members today who delayed a planned vote.

But the proposal may still be on track for a final vote next week.

Here's Alderman Brendan Reilly, a frequent critic of the mayor.

>> The concept, the idea is a good one.

But my God, the devil is in the detail.

I think this could be a great tool for Chicago, but we have to get it right.

>> W t Tw News reporter Heather Sharon joins us now with more.

Heather.

So this proposal would create a city owned nonprofit housing developer.

How would that work?

Well, if you remember about a year ago, the city borrowed 1.2, 5 billion dollars by ending a whole bunch of tax increment financing district.

>> This plan would take 135 million dollars from that fund and use it to set up the city's own Housing Development Corporation, which would have the ability to sort of fund these projects in the place of private equity or other service banks or financial institutions.

The idea is that since the city's, you know, a public entity, they won't be as concerned about their return on investments, which will lower the cost to build these apartments and it will help chip away at the city's shortfall of nearly 120,000 affordable units.

So if approved Chicago be the first big city to try something like this.

What concerns did we hear from City council members today?

Well, since this is really untested in Chicago and really nationwide, the older people have a lot of questions about the board that would run this nonprofit corporation.

It would be made up of the combination of city officials and real estate experts.

They wanted to know who this board report to what the city council or the mayor can do if they think that the board has made that And what about the state's open meeting law and for yeah, our favorite state law that make sure we get the documents to know what the state officials and city officials are doing.

So there are a lot of technical Exactly whether this would work to sort of build these units or re have existing units.

But I think there was a consensus on the committees today.

It was a joint session of the housing in the Finance committee.

But the city had to do something because there is not going to be federal money for at least the next 4 years to fund these sort of projects like Alderman Brendan Reilly said the devil is details.

Details So what happens next?

What does this delay mean for the prospects here?

Well, they didn't have the votes today because of all of those concerns.

But this delay until Monday gives the mayor's administration for days and the weekend to sort you know, talk through some of these issues and then they'll come back on Monday and maybe they'll be the votes advance That could set up a final vote on Wednesday at the full City council.

If they can't get it done, it will have to wait another month.

Okay Sharon.

Thanks so much.

Thanks.