A four-story red brick apartment building with ornate white terra cotta diamond and scroll details on the facade, viewed from a corner sidewalk. An elevated train structure is visible behind the building on the left. A large evergreen tree stands to the right, and brick gate pillars with decorative urns flank the building's entrance. Shrubs and an iron fence line the front of the property.

Built in 1912, banned in 1957: the courtyard homes at the Damen station

June 11, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Finding an affordable home near the Brown Line in Ravenswood is hard. Not having enough homes to rent or buy creates cutthroat competition and drives up prices — wait lists for apartments, offers over asking for anyone trying to buy. The retail and day care workers who serve this neighborhood face the same shortage as everyone else: too few homes that meet their needs and budgets, too close to where they need to be.

Half a block from the Damen station there’s a building that shows how local zoning codes can inhibit and prohibit multifamily housing from being built, and how the BUILD plan was designed to start allowing lower-cost housing types again.

The building

The courtyard building at 4615-33 N Damen Ave has 45 homes: studios through three-bedrooms, wrapped around a landscaped courtyard, a few hundred feet from rapid transit that connects to jobs across the city. It went up around 1912 (the Cook County Assessors’ Office’s records also say 1914) more than a decade before Chicago adopted its first zoning ordinance. There was no restriction on how many homes could fit on the lot, no required parking, no formula setting a minimum amount of land per apartment required before a permit could be obtained.

(This attached courtyard building is also known in land use and architecture as a point access block because there is a single block of housing with multiple points of access, where each point has a level of two to four apartments sharing a single stair core.)

You could not build this kind of housing on this block today. The law has not allowed it since 1957.

A Sanborn fire insurance map excerpt showing the area around N. Damen Avenue in Chicago's Ravenswood neighborhood, approximately the 4600 block. The Chicago Rapid Transit Lines Ravenswood Branch elevated rail runs east-west across the upper portion of the map, with a station visible near N. Damen. B
Sanborn map showing the Brown Line station and the courtyard building.

Evolution of Chicago’s housing suppression rules

Each time Chicago has revised its zoning rules, the housing capacity of this lot has shrunk:

  • 1912: 45 homes built. Chicago had no zoning ordinance — no parking requirement, no cap on homes per lot, no minimum-lot-area formula.
  • 1957: The city’s first major zoning rewrite added off-street parking requirements and a minimum-lot-area formula. Maximum allowed on this lot: roughly 33 homes. The parking requirement was just as prohibitive: nowhere on this lot to add it without tearing out apartments to pour concrete.
  • 2026: The current code is stricter still. Maximum allowed: 30 homes — three fewer than the 1957 ban permitted, and 15 fewer than actually exist.

You can see it in the property report on Chicago Cityscape: a building fully occupied for over a century, serving its neighborhood, standing half again as dense as current rules in the B3-2 zoning district would allow on its own footprint.

This is what a ban on affordable home choices looks like in practice. The courtyard building style didn’t fall out of fashion. People still choose to live in them. The bans on building new ones were written in 1957 and have only tightened since.

What the BUILD plan would do

The BUILD plan is relevant to this specific address. The plan’s provisions don’t simply gesture at more homes. They name the specific home types that municipalities would be required to allow, and courtyard apartments are on the list. The kind of homes here, in the kind of community that needs more home choices near transit, is the kind of flexibility for responding to housing needs that the bill specifically restores.

Pair that with the BUILD plan’s investment to actually finance construction, and you have a path to more homes — near the jobs, the schools, and the transit that the people our communities rely on need to reach.

Illinois already knows how to build this housing. It’s standing half a block from the Brown Line, a century old and against the rules. Pass the BUILD plan.

a vacant lot next to a house in Bronzeville - the vacant lot is being prepared for new housing construction

Chicago’s Protecting Renters Ordinance would create the rental registry the city needs

June 5, 2026 / / 0 Comments

I’ve written twice about why Chicago should have a rental registry — first proposing a kludge using existing county databases in 2023, then laying out the full rationale in 2024. Now, Mayor Brandon Johnson has proposed a rental registry as part of the Protecting Renters Ordinance, or PRO.

PRO is a comprehensive modernization of the Residential Landlord and Tenant Ordinance — the RLTO. That law was first enacted during the Harold Washington administration and has hardly been updated since. Chicago’s rental market in 2026 looks nothing like it did in 1986: according to a fact sheet provided by the mayor’s office 622,000 families rent in Chicago today, about 54 percent of all households. Nearly half of them — 48 percent — are cost-burdened, meaning they spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Rents have risen 10 percent year over year.

And 12 percent of Chicago’s 2-to-6-unit buildings — the city’s classic two-flats and three-flats — are now owned by LLCs, a share that has grown as corporate investors have entered the market. Housing costs have now surpassed crime as the top concern among Chicago voters, with 41 percent naming affordability as their primary issue in a March 2026 Illinois REALTORS poll — compared to 23 percent for crime.

The city has no rental registry and no just-cause eviction protection. PRO proposes to change both, and more.

Five components

  1. Rental registry — Requires annual registration of all non-owner-occupied rental units, creating a citywide data infrastructure and connecting LLC entities to the real people behind them.
  2. Bureau of Rental Housing Services (BRH) — The city’s first dedicated office for RLTO code enforcement. Right now, tenants who want to enforce their rights have to hire their own attorney. The BRH would handle complaint processing, investigation, and enforcement coordination. It would also provide compliance support for small landlords. It would be funded by rental registry fees — not the general fund.
  3. RLTO modernization and tenant rights — Updates the underlying law and cleans up its language. Bans junk fees. Caps application fees at $20 (unless a credit or background check costs more). Addresses utility pass-throughs, known as Ratio Utility Billing Systems (RUBS): landlords could only charge tenants the exact utility cost. Reforms security deposits and administrative fees. Consolidates existing tenant rights into a Tenant Bill of Rights — none of these rights would be new, but the consolidation would make them easier to understand and enforce. Maintenance and upkeep costs could not be passed on to tenants as fees.
  4. Eviction Counsel Program — Codifies the existing Right to Counsel pilot program, giving it permanent legal authority. The program is currently run by the Law Center for Better Housing at an annual cost of about $4 million. It returns an estimated $2.75 to $3.35 in fiscal benefits for every $1 invested — about $13.6 million in cumulative benefits since 2022. This piece would not be funded by the rental registry and would need a budget appropriation starting in 2028.
  5. Just Cause for Eviction — Requires landlords to provide a valid reason for eviction or non-renewal, with relocation assistance required when tenants are displaced without cause. The city estimates this would protect about 10,000 families per year.

The rental registry in depth

The rental registry is the component that makes many of PRO’s other components workable. Right now, Chicago has no comprehensive record of its more than 500,000 rental units — who owns them or how many there are in a given building. As I noted in my 2024 post, the city’s complaint-based inspection system misses dangerous situations in part because tenants fear retaliation. A registry shifts the city from being almost always reactive to possible being more proactive.

The registry would require landlords to renew annually and pay a fee ranging from $20 to $60 per unit, scaled to building size, according to The Real Deal. The city estimates this would generate about $20 million annually — enough to fund the Bureau of Rental Housing Services and its enforcement work without drawing on the general fund. Owner-occupied 2-to-6-unit buildings, CHA housing, and nonprofit affordable housing would be exempt from fees, but not from the registration requirement itself. The distinction matters: the city still wants to know those units exist, even if it isn’t charging those owners.

The registry would give the city a tool it currently lacks for understanding patterns: tracking building violations over time, identifying landlords with repeat problems, and spotting speculation in gentrifying neighborhoods where investors are acquiring properties without maintaining them. The Sun-Times reported that the city specifically cited this use case — the registry as a way to “start tracking patterns and understanding trends.”

Chicago would not be the first Illinois city to do this. Rockford, Urbana, Champaign, and Evanston all have rental registries. New York City, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Washington DC, and Detroit are the national comparables the city cited. New York has three registries — for rent-stabilized units, short-term rentals, and a general one. Chicago’s would be modeled on that general type, focused on data collection and transparency rather than rent regulation.

The ordinance as proposed is focused on registration and enforcement, but I see opportunities to expand what the registry tracks. Could it record evictions as they happen, building a running citywide record rather than relying on court data retrieved years after the event? Courts will provide eviction data, but only historically — a live registry linked to eviction filings would be far more useful for spotting patterns in real time.

Could it also serve as a public-facing database of available apartments, including units created through the city’s Affordable Requirements Ordinance? ARO units are notoriously difficult for renters to find. The city publishes an ARO buildings database but people who qualify for an ARO apartment must contact each building manager individually to ascertain availability. A registry designed with these uses in mind from the start could solve so many longstanding issues with finding housing.

Where things stand

PRO is still a work in progress and the ordinance text hasn’t been finalized. The city has been briefing advocacy organizations and apartment industry groups to gather feedback, and is hoping to introduce the ordinance in late June.

I’ll write more as the ordinance advances. The rental registry is the piece I care most about in this series — it’s the data foundation without which the rest of PRO is difficult to enforce.

BUILD would legalize pocket neighborhoods across Illinois

May 21, 2026 / / 0 Comments

BUILD fact of the day: The plan includes a middle housing component that would allow cottage clusters, courtyard buildings, and pocket neighborhoods across the state.

A pocket neighborhood with 12 homes broke ground in Evanston this year. The rest of Illinois has most likely never seen one built in decades. The BUILD plan would change that.

Photos of the construction site by Steven Vance and renderings of UrbanEco

What is a pocket neighborhood?

A pocket neighborhood (also called a cottage court or cottage cluster) is a small cluster of detached homes arranged around shared outdoor space. Each home has its own front door and a measure of privacy, but the units face inward toward a common courtyard or green space rather than outward to the street.

Chicago has pre-1950s examples, mostly on the South Side, but current zoning in Chicago and most Illinois municipalities makes new ones nearly impossible to build.

What’s being built in Evanston

Developer David Wallach of BluePaint Development broke ground this month on UrbanEco on Grant, a 12-home pocket neighborhood at 1915 Grant Street in Evanston, steps from the Metra Central/Union Pacific North line. Each home is approximately 600 square feet with two bedrooms and one bathroom over one story. Prices start at $369,000, and five of the twelve homes were already under contract at the time of the groundbreaking ceremony.

The project occupies roughly 30,000 square feet across two parcels (inspect this property on Chicago Cityscape); there was previously a vacant lot and a single-family house. Evanston updated its zoning code to allow the project, but it wasn’t easy: the development faced substantial neighborhood opposition before City Council approved it in March 2024.

At the groundbreaking, Evanston Community Development Director Sarah Flax acknowledged the challenge: “I don’t think there’s any one thing that’s going to solve the problem — we got to be open to lots of different things.” Developer Wallach credited the city directly: “This city takes on really, really big issues, and they’re certainly to be commended for it.”

One of the twelve homes is currently listed for sale at $369,000 — a 600-square-foot, two-bedroom detached home with shared outdoor amenities including a landscaped courtyard with fire pit and grill, near parks, schools, and transit.

Why this housing type is almost impossible to build in Illinois today

Outside of Evanston, pocket neighborhoods collide with standard zoning rules at every turn. In Chicago, I identified at least six separate zoning barriers that prevent them:

  • Most codes allow only one principal building per lot — pocket neighborhoods need multiple detached buildings on one site
  • Minimum lot-area-per-unit rules make small clusters economically unworkable
  • Lot subdivision rules block individual fee-simple ownership of units
  • Rear setback requirements conflict with inward-facing courtyard designs
  • Side setback standards prevent the close clustering the typology requires
  • Parking rules restrict placement in ways that break courtyard-oriented designs

Getting around these barriers, as Evanston did, requires a years-long rezoning process with no guaranteed outcome — and, as the UrbanEco project shows, significant community opposition along the way.

Next door to UrbanEco is another kind of pocket neighborhood, a set of five ranch townhouses built in 1962.

Five ranch townhouses next to the new UrbanEco development.

What the Illinois BUILD plan would change

Governor Pritzker’s BUILD plan includes a middle housing reform (SB 4060) that would require all Illinois residential zoning districts to permit cottage clusters — along with duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, townhouses, stacked flats, and attached and detached courtyard housing.

The bill allows between two and eight units per lot depending on lot size, with middle housing types permitted on lots as small as 2,500 square feet. Crucially, municipalities couldn’t simply decline to update their codes. Whatever barriers each municipality maintains would have to come down.

Evanston spent years navigating a contentious public process to allow a single pocket neighborhood. Under the BUILD plan, that fight would be nearly moot everywhere in Illinois — the housing type would be legal by default.

Two views of the same one-story floor plan showing two bedrooms, a bathroom, a terrace, and combined kitchen, dining, and living rooms.

One of the twelve UrbanEco on Grant homes is currently listed for $369,000. Delivery is scheduled for summer 2026.

Show your support for pocket neighborhoods and unbanning other middle housing types by sending emails to your two state legislators.

hand holding four postcards that all have pictures or drawings of homes

My testimony to the Illinois House’s executive community in favor of the BUILD plan

May 6, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Today the Illinois House executive committee is having a subject matter hearing about Gov. Pritzker’s BUILD plan, which was introduced to the House by Rep. Kam Buckner as HB5626. Because the oral testimony list for today’s meeting was getting too long I was asked to submit my testimony in writing instead.

Thank you for inviting me to speak. My name is Steven Vance, and I am a volunteer lead Abundant Housing Illinois, a pro-housing advocacy group.

I would like to describe what a housing shortage looks like in Northeastern Illinois using two examples from current listings.

  • A 3-bedroom apartment in Evanston was listed earlier this year at $2,900 a month and advertised a move-in fee of 40% of the rent — $1,160 on top of the first month. The move-in fee is a percentage of rent so as rents rise, so would that fee.
  • A western suburban apartment building charges $75 in application fees, $300 in administrative fees, and a move-in fee that ranges between $250 and $500, depending on the applicant’s credit.

At the onset, this may not seem like a housing shortage issue, but this is what landlords can charge when renters have few options. One of the solutions for this is increasing their competition.

The Illinois legislature is the right venue to make changes to allow more housing. The case for state action rests on a structural mismatch: housing markets are regional, but zoning is local. When a single municipality blocks new homes, it pushes demand elsewhere, raising prices across a region and displacing people, or forcing them into longer commutes or out of Illinois altogether. Additionally, in the rare event that a community allows more homebuilding, pent up demand can be overwhelming. State-level reform spreads pressure evenly and equitably over neighborhoods across the state.

The study by Illinois Economic Policy Institute found that Illinois is roughly 142,000 homes short of where it needs to be, and we’re building at barely half the pace required to catch up. Every Illinoisan pays for that, but individual municipalities aren’t incentivized to fix it. Even the willing municipalities can’t solve it alone: a few good actors out of hundreds doesn’t aggregate into a sufficient response.

Some of the legislature’s responsibilities include growing our economy, spurring good jobs, and keeping the tax base healthy to fund schools, transit, and healthcare. Housing scarcity undermines all of that.

The people most harmed by scarcity — the family priced out, the senior who can’t downsize, the next generation that hasn’t moved here yet — don’t get to voice their support for housing at each village’s plan commission hearings. They are not always local constituents, but they are yours.

That Illinois has a housing shortage isn’t in serious dispute. The question this body faces is how to act on it. BUILD isn’t coming out of nowhere; in 2020, for example, there was an accessory dwelling unit bill introduced, and other housing legalization bills were introduced in the last two years. The BUILD plan creates a coherent statewide framework, pairs it with $250 million in capital funding for infrastructure, middle housing construction, and down payment assistance. BUILD is a comprehensive proposal created at a time when the politics to reduce the housing shortage should finally be aligned. 

A century ago Illinois delegated zoning authority to municipalities. The legislature has the right and responsibility to set a floor for allowing more housing when that delegation produces statewide harm. BUILD sets that floor, and adopting it is a job only this body can do and what our over 530 members are asking you to do. .

Thank you for your time and attention.

Inside the machine: visiting the O’Brien Water Reclamation Plant

May 2, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Half of all the electricity consumed at one of the largest wastewater treatment facilities in the Midwest goes to running air blowers and pumps. That was the detail that stuck with me most from Saturday’s open house at the Terrence J. O’Brien Water Reclamation Plant at the corner of Howard Street and McCormick Boulevard in Skokie, one of seven facilities operated by the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago (MWRD).

I visited with two friends; I think we left there with a clearer picture of the hidden machinery behind our region’s daily life.

Upon arriving one hears a loud and consistent noise. This turns out to be air moving through these large pipes from the blower and pump room to the aeration tanks.

A plant almost a century old

The O’Brien plant opened in October 1928. At the time, it was the largest sewage treatment facility in the world. Nearly a century later, it still serves over 1.3 million people across 143 square miles: Chicago north of Fullerton Avenue and 17 north suburban Cook County communities including Evanston, Skokie, Wilmette, Northbrook, and Glenview. Wastewater from all of those homes and businesses travels through a network of intercepting sewers beneath McCormick Boulevard before arriving at the plant’s 97-acre campus at Howard Street.

The MWRD service area map shows the locations of the seven water treatment plants (Hanover Park, Egan, Kirie, O’Brien, Stickney, Lemont, and Calumet) using a green icon. Download as PDF.

The plant was renamed for Terrence J. O’Brien, a longtime MWRD president who died in 2021. It’s one of seven plants in the district, each serving a distinct drainage area across the Chicago region.

Simpler than you’d think — and more remarkable for it

The treatment process is more straightforward than most people imagine. Incoming wastewater first passes through screens that remove large debris, then into settling tanks where solids drop out — capturing 60 to 80 percent of suspended material. After that, the water moves into aeration tanks where staff introduce what they affectionately call “bugs”: beneficial bacteria that consume the remaining organic matter. A final round of ultraviolet light disinfection kills any remaining pathogens before the treated water discharges into the North Shore Channel. This effluent is cleaner than the water in the channel.

That channel, built between 1907 and 1910, carries the plant’s effluent south toward the Chicago River — an engineered system designed to move water away from the lake and through the region. Because much of Chicago relies on combined sewers — single pipes carrying both stormwater and sewage — heavy rain events send a surge of combined flow toward the plant. It connects to TARP, the Deep Tunnel system, which captures and holds that overflow until the plant can process it. The plant handles an average of 230 million gallons per day, with surge capacity up to 450 million. At the time of our visit the plant had processed 156 million gallons.

The pump and blower room has pumps that push the water up to the first tanks, after which gravity moves the water from stage to stage. The blowers push air into the tanks so that dissolve oxygen facilitates the growth of beneficial bacteria. Left: pumps, and a small sign that counts the number of gallons pumped today. Right: a blower machine.

Touring the plant

The MWRD ran an efficient open house, with guided tours departing every 15 minutes. Our guide was a retired staffer who came back to volunteer. Before working there for 10 years he worked at a suburban municipality’s drinking water plant.

A highlight was the 1926 Pump and Blower Building, a vaulted brick-and-steel industrial hall with a skylit roof that. Inside, massive blowers push air into the aeration tanks to keep the bacteria alive and working. Those machines account for roughly half the facility’s entire electricity consumption. It’s a staggering thought: hundreds of millions of gallons treated daily, and the biggest energy draw is simply moving some air.

We weren’t allowed into the grit chamber during the open house, but our guide noted that school groups regularly visit it — and that children almost universally react to the smell by pulling their shirts over their noses.

Infrastructure worth knowing

More people should understand how the infrastructure they pay for and benefit from actually works. The O’Brien open house is a rare chance to do exactly that: to stand next to the blowers, walk past the settling tanks, and talk to the people who run it. Staff talked to us about how they test at the plant and at businesses that generate “industrial wastewater”, including breweries and metal processing facilities.

Left: primary treatment tank, where sand and gravel fall to the bottom and fats and plastic float to the top; both are skimmed and removed. Center and right: the tour guide describes the secondary treatment process in which “bugs” (beneficial bacteria) have a feast on the remaining organic matter.

The staff also test for viruses as well as fecal matter to assess the effluent’s cleanliness. The tour guide said that before the water enters the UV channels Before the UV channels the water has over 1,000 fecal coliform per 100 mL; after treatment it drops to 25, sometimes as low as 3. The MWRD’s NPDES permit sets the effluent limit at 200/100 mL as a 30-day geometric mean, so readings of 3–25 represent the plant performing well above the requirement.

The process is elegant in its logic, the history is genuinely impressive, and the scale is humbling. MWRD’s website does a better job than I at summarizing the process. The MWRD holds open houses at several of its water treatment plants each year. There are two more this month: