Comment to zoning committee about why a full ZBA is important

April 17, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Oral public comment given on April 9, 2024

Hello members of the Chicago city council committee on zoning, landmarks, and building standards. My name is Steven Vance. I am a resident of the city of Chicago and an urban planner. I regularly consult on projects that require zoning approvals from this committee, as well as the Zoning Board of Appeals, and the Zoning Administrator. I am here to urge the City Council to amend the zoning ordinance to ensure that the Zoning Board of Appeals can function when there are not enough board members.

The City’s Municipal Code requires that the ZBA has five members and two alternates. Alternates fill in for members when they are unable to attend meetings, due to illness or personal matters. Currently, however, the Zoning Board of Appeals has only three members. This status puts the timely approval of dozens of applications for special use, variation, or other forms of relief at risk. 

This shortfall at the ZBA materially jeopardizes new development, especially matters involving new housing. At the ZBA meeting in February a proposal for shelter housing in Uptown failed to receive three votes required to be approved. The project received two affirmative and two negative votes. The project could have passed if the board had all five members. 

The ZBA’s current state is bound to affect more projects. At least two other shelter housing applications that have support from the Chicago Department of Housing are intending to be heard this year at ZBA. However, these proposals may be forced to wait until the ZBA has a full membership or else suffer the same fate as the shelter that failed at the ZBA in February. This could push back construction and operations of the shelter, and further exacerbate the housing and homelessness crisis in Chicago.

The Mayor and City Council should take meaningful steps to address housing and homelessness in the City. Rather than wait for the mayor to appoint additional members to the ZBA, the City Council should amend the code to allow alternates to sit in when there are fewer than five regular appointed ZBA members. The current code only allows alternates to sit in for regular members who are missing that day. 

I urge the committee to consider an amendment to the Code to allow ZBA to operate during a time like this when the board has too few members. Additionally, the mayor’s Cut The Tape initiative includes strategies to change zoning codes to ensure shelters are allowed to be built in more places and circumstances. I would urge the committee to support adopting the ordinance needed to effect that strategy.

The progression of development and housing for vulnerable Chicagoans depends on your actions.

Comment to Chicago’s committee on zoning about expanding ADUs

April 16, 2024 / / 0 Comments

This doesn’t fully match with what I spoke at the Chicago City Council committee on zoning, landmarks, and building standards on April 16, 2024 (meeting agenda), because it was written for about two and a half minutes but due to the high number of public commenters Vice Chair Lawson (44th Ward) reduced everyone’s maximum speaking time from 3 minutes to 2 minutes so I made some on-the-fly cuts. Ordinance O2023-2075.

My name is Steven Vance. I am a Chicago resident and a land use consultant. In two weeks the city will reach the three-year anniversary of when Chicagoans could start applying for building permits to build accessory dwelling units, otherwise known as ADUs. Locally we call them garden apartments and coach houses.

In that time, the city has permitted approximately 237 projects comprising 275 new ADU homes. 75% of these are or will be in basements, and a little less than 20% are or will be in backyard or “coach” houses. 

11% of these homes are required to be rented at affordable rates set by the Department of Housing each year.

That’s 271 new homes that are or will be providing housing for family members, providing new income for property owners, and picking away at the city’s housing shortage of 120,000 homes. But the opportunity is not available to everyone, and the number of ADU permits issued each quarter has been declining since December 2022. 

The number of ADU permits has been declining. I include the graph here to illustrate my point but I did not present the graph during my comment.

City Council adopted five pilot areas, a limitation that doesn’t need to stick around. Hundreds of currently interested property owners are prohibited from building an ADU. Their current alternative is to undertake a costly zoning change process to gain the privilege of building one or two more units on their properties. (However, shoutout to the few alderpersons who facilitate this process on behalf of their constituents.)

I operate Chicago Cityscape, a real estate information website that also has advice on building ADUs and a tool to look up if a property is in an ADU pilot area. 

As of last week, people have looked up 815 addresses in 48 wards…but…70% of those addresses were not in a pilot area and those people will not be able to build an ADU at this time.

I believe those permitting and address lookup statistics show that ADUs, while representing less than 3% of new construction homes, are popular. They allow for Chicagoans to modify their properties to age in place, fund renovations and property taxes, or move a family member to be closer. Now is the time to expand this benefit to all of Chicago and I urge the City Council to drop the geographic ban as soon as possible.

Finally, Mayor Johnson’s Cut The Tape initiative includes citywide ADUs as a phase 2 strategy, so ADUs are something City Council should support. [This part was added last second.]

The best ideas from Mayor Johnson’s “Cut The Tape” initiative

April 5, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Mayor Johnson and staff in the Mayor’s Office announced today at the Chicago Cultural Center the finality of administrative and legislative strategies – called “Cut The Tape” – developed for the development process executive, EO2023-21.

Mayor Brandon Johnson
L-R: Bonita Harrison, Phil Beckham, Juan Saldana

What I think makes the “best” are the strategies that I believe will increase housing abundance (a phrase that made it into the vision statement) and reduce development costs. To explain why I picked it, I added a “Why?” statement to each.

A good portion of the 107 strategies are solutions to issues that I’m not familiar with [1], and for now I will be skipping those until I learn more about them.

The best publicly-visible strategies

  • 4. Design a process for expedited review of affordable housing development projects. [Why? Affordable housing already has high costs, some of which are extended carrying costs due to the lengthy review and approval process.]
  • 7. Convene a working group to explore consolidating the Community Development Commission (CDC) and Chicago Plan Commission (CPC) into a single body or to have joint meetings to streamline processes. [Why? Certain project types have to be approved by both commissions, which have different schedules, different application and documentation standards. Approving a project in fewer meetings saves time and effort from staff and applicant.]
  • 9. Propose that the City only present City-owned land sales to the Chicago Development Commission (CDC) if the land has acquisition, remediation, or vertical construction that is subsidized with TIF dollars. [Why? ChiBlockBuilder and similar sales should be able to be done with fewer necessary approvals. City Council would still have to approve these sales.]
  • 17. Reduce the number of internal design review meetings from 3 to 1 and assess how to best engage DPD’s Committee on Design going forward. [Why? Fewer meetings is better – I’m not sure what else to say.]
  • 20. Finalize pre-approved designs to create faster options to build more affordable housing. [Why? Come Home Chicago was a pretty good idea from the Lightfoot administration and it needs a conclusion, in the form of a catalog of pre-approved designs that home builders can license to get permits faster. If the post-TIF Bond gets adopted by City Council then the pre-approved plans will coincide with a missing middle initiative called “pad ready” in the Bond that will prepare city-owned lots for construction of houses in the plan catalog. Learn about how the pre-approved plan program in South Bend, Indiana, is going.]
  • 28. Expand the pilot program for cash advance payment options. [Why? A lot of grant programs are only paid as a reimbursement which makes it harder and sometimes more expensive for small businesses to execute on the reason they’re receiving the grant; this program would offer cash ahead of time with appropriate guardrails to protect potential taxpayer loss.]
  • 59. Expand the City’s Encumbrance Ordinance to enable the clearing of City fines and fees from City-owned vacant lots; to include any debt owed to city, including but not limited to: water or sewer assessment; money owed to the City pursuant to a court order or an order from the Department of Administrative Hearings (DOAH); or demolition liens. [Why? The city has liens on properties it owns, due to acquisition since those liens, for unpaid water and sewer bills, which it expects the acquirer of city-owned land to pay rather than the entity that generated the debt. In many cases, it’s faster and cheaper for the new owner to pay the old debt that belongs to someone else.]
  • 67. Eliminate Zoning Board of Appeals (ZBA) approval of a special use permit to open a hair salon, barber shop, body art shop, or nail salon. [Why? This one makes it into my top three. I don’t think there’s a valid argument for these types of businesses to have to obtain a “special use” from the ZBA. It’s regressive, it wastes everyone’s time, and the ZBA approves every single one of them.]
  • 68. Explore Universal Affordability Preferences that would allow buildings to add more housing by-right without triggering a planned development, but only if the additional units are affordable. [Why? Affordable housing – really, any new housing – should not be subject to community approval, and this would help overcome aldermanic privilege/prerogative while also generating more housing.]

List continues below

  • 69. Revisit zoning code elements that functionally require all shelters and transitional housing developments to seek approval from ZBA, regardless of building size, form, or underlying zoning designation. [Why? Shelters are necessary, should not be subject to local community approval, and the current system is ridiculous in that a shelter can fail to be approved because a ZBA member seat is unappointed or a member and an alternate didn’t show up to a meeting.]
  • 70. Amend the Chicago Zoning Ordinance to allow applicants for Type 1 zoning changes to incorporate requests for variations and administrative adjustments into Type 1 zoning change applications – eliminating the duplicate review processes. [Why? It lowers the cost of doing business in the city, and lowers the cost and speeds up the acquisition of certain approvals that the zoning code mandates. EXAMPLE: developer proposes a building that needs a 5′ reduction in the required rear setback; rather than see two different boards or committees and prepare two different sets of documentation and analysis, the developer bundles the setback variation request into the “Type 1” zoning change request. IN FACT, this strategy is complete and it’s been in use since February’s zoning committee meeting.]
  • 76 and 77. Allow commercial-to-residential conversions of ground floors while exempting those conversions from additional residential parking requirements. + Allow ground floor residential uses on commercial corridors with excessive vacancy. [Why? Housing abundance, and this would enable more accessible homes, a priority of AARP, Access Living, and others.]
  • 79. Pass ordinance to allow for up to four issues to be heard as administrative adjustments before a ZBA hearing is required. [Why? The documentation burden and the required “findings of fact”analysis for appearing in front of ZBA is unnecessary for the kinds of changes that really should be approved as administrative adjustments.]
  • 80 and 81. Create an interdepartmental working group to streamline special uses and variations by shifting most applications to administrative review processes, while retaining the ZBA’s more in-depth evaluation for applications that warrant an increased level of public scrutiny. + Allow multiple administrative adjustments to not be reviewed as variations, allowing certain parking reductions by right, and investigating whether other variations needed for housing projects may be addressed via administrative adjustment. [Why? Basically the same reason as 79.]
  • 82. Eliminate minimum off-street parking requirements on new developments citywide. [Why? Parking requirements increase development costs, are carbon-intensive, facilitate higher levels of car ownership in urban areas, and “free” spaces causes more traffic.]
  • 83. Remove zoning barriers to City’s Non-Congregate Shelter acquisition program, allowing existing buildings to be repurposed as shelters or transitional residences. [Why? Zoning shouldn’t be used to inhibit new housing, especially for the most vulnerable Chicagoans – see also 69.]
  • 103. Support third-party organizations to develop technical assistance and capacity building programs for emerging and MWBE developers. [Why? Chicago benefits if more people are capable of developing property – see CEMDI for an example of a capacity-building program.]

There are a ton of additional strategies that are largely internal processes but with clear benefits to city staff and the applicants that represent what’s sometimes meant as “streamlining” a process. For example:

  • 46. Explore technology platforms that will allow departments to better organize and track closing documents, beyond the current exchange of documents via email
  • 52. Explore the feasibility of using electronic signatures on contracts.

Honorable mentions

  • 56, which I would like to know more about: “Align Chicago Construction Codes with current national model codes and standards, including modernizing the Mechanical Code in 2024 and Building Code in 2025.”
    What is in the current versions of the International Building Codes that have been adopted since Chicago’s IBC 2018 that would reduce housing costs, or make it easier to build housing?
    According to a contributor, items in the ICC’s mechanical and plumbing codes should make construction more affordable, and updating to the latest IBC allows for more mass timber.
  • 78. Explore options to post DPD’s special use recommendations online at ZBA website seven days before hearing date. [Why? Transparency.]
  • 86. Explore options for ZBA to post applications, plans, findings of fact, and staff recommendations to its website. [Why? Transparency.]

Missing

Other land use and zoning reforms that are on the level of “eliminating parking mandates citywide”:

  • Allowing accessory dwelling units (basement units and coach houses) citywide.
  • Allowing two and three-flats in all residential zoning districts.

Want to organize around these policy changes? Join Urban Environmentalists Illinois.

[Notes]

[1]. For example, I am not familiar with what this strategy is referring to, or the impact it could have, but I trust – based on the overall quality, expansiveness, the expertise of the focus groups who were consulted, and personal familiarity with most strategies – that it’s important: “47. Consolidate DPD Capital Grant funding requirements, structures, and sources of three programs into two grant tracks: Medium and Large”.

Why Chicago should have a rental registry

March 20, 2024 / / 0 Comments

This is a publicly accessible scratchpad of what I’m thinking. As I already said, Chicago should have a rental registry, a database of dwelling units that are rented to tenants, for at least two reasons:

  1. The city can know things about the rental units, including how much they cost, where they are, and if any are vacant and could be occupied if only people knew they were available and how to get in touch with the owner. 
  2. The city can know who the owners are and contact them to issue citations or advise them, or fill out for them, emergency rental assistance during pandemics and other times of necessity.
Who owns and rents each of these buildings, and are they providing a quality apartment to their tents?

Rationale for a rental registry

  • It could improve the quality of housing by forcing renovations when tenants are not making complaints due to the potential for retaliation or eviction.
  • Chicago’s complaint-based inspection system misses a lot of life-threatening situations (Illinois Answers Project, article 1, 2023; and Illinois Answers Project, article 2, 2023)
  • Tenants should be able to know who owns the property they rent. Under the current data regime in Illinois, it’s unreasonable to expect a tenant to know how to look up this information. Of course, someone could use my Chicago Cityscape platform to look up property ownership and transfers.
  • Chicago could put bad landlords out of business (Illinois Answers Project, 2021).

What do you think forms the basis for Chicago to have a rental registry?

How many more homes does Chicagoland need and is it 120,383?

March 11, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Up For Growth, a national “moar housing” research group, publishes an annual report about underproduction of housing in 193 regions, including Chicagoland. In their 2023 report they found that there’s an underproduction of 120,383 homes in the Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN-WI metropolitan statistical area.

This graphic shows how U4G derived that figure of missing homes.

Housing underproduction as a narrative formula:

((existing households + missing households) * 1.05 [1]) - (total housing units + second/vacation homes + uninhabitable units) = underproduction

[1] means a 5% target vacancy rate

The novel metric here is “missing households”, which are households that haven’t formed due to a lack of housing. The report’s definition:

Missing Households. Households that may not have formed due to lack of availability and affordability, e.g. households with children over 18 years of age still living with their parents or individuals or couples living together as roommates at levels exceeding historical norms.

In the Chicago region, 120,383 homes represents 3.1 percent of the housing stock in 2021, meaning we need to grow the number of homes in Chicagoland by 3.1 percent to accommodate these emerging families, graduating students, roommates, and doubled-up tenants. The necessary expansion of housing is greater than 3.1 percent, however, to accommodate migration and homes no longer in the market due to various forms of vacancy.

We also need more housing to help prices flatten or go down, and reduce the number of households that are cost-burdened. Among the top 10 cities with the most housing underproduction, Chicago has the lowest share of households which are cost-burdened, at 46.0 percent.