This post was co-written with Steffany Bahamon.

Chicago is going to get a rental registry no matter which renter protection ordinance City Council passes. Both the mayor’s ordinance (PRO) and the alternative introduced by Ald. Gilbert Villegas (FAIR) create one. The question now isn’t whether Chicago should have a registry; it’s what data the registry collects and how we pay for it.

I’ve been making the case for a rental registry since 2023, when I proposed a kludge using Cook County databases because Chicago Cityscape only has unit-count data for about 37 percent of apartment buildings. 17 of the 75 largest U.S. cities already run one, and the National League of Cities – where Alderman Villegas sits on the board – recommends them as a local policy.

Rental data is notoriously hard to get right, and as YIMBYs we want the best data possible.

FAIR’s registry collects only four things

Under FAIR, a registration “shall include only”:

  1. the street address of the building
  2. owner or agent contact
  3. property manager contact
  4. who receives repair requests

That’s not enough to do much with.

PRO collects much more: the address and PIN (the property index number Cook County uses to identify each parcel), unit count, floor count, unit numbers, bedrooms, whether each unit is occupied or vacant, and the monthly rent charged for each unit. It also collects the full ownership structure: every member or officer holding 20 percent or more (or the top five if nobody hits 20 percent), parent companies, subsidiaries, the trust name and whoever can direct the trustee, and a local contact in Chicago if the owner isn’t here. No P.O. boxes allowed.

PRO leaves it to the Commissioner of Housing to decide, by rule, which registry information is publicly accessible and which is restricted (§5-12-175(b)(1)). In our view it’s not essential to publish owners’ addresses to the public but City Hall should have it.

A major reason to have a registry is that LLCs shield problem landlords and the city and tenants can’t figure out who owns what. FAIR’s registry cannot pierce a single LLC. You’d get a street address and a registered agent, which is what you can already get from the Illinois Secretary of State.

Here’s what that looks like in practice. In September a Cook County judge halted the receivership sale of the Crestwood Apartments, a 57-unit building for low-income seniors at 525 N Austin Boulevard, after tenants linked the buyer to the building’s former operator, The Real Deal reported. That operator, Boruch “Barry” Drillman, pleaded guilty last year to a $165 million federal mortgage fraud conspiracy, and his company is the target of Fannie Mae’s foreclosure lawsuit over the building after it allegedly defaulted on a $5.1 million mortgage. The Chicago Housing Authority had suspended rent subsidies on 31 units over failed inspections and declared the property “uninhabitable.”

Crestwood isn’t a one-off. Brian Mykulyn and Elora Raymond wrote in Shelterforce that the share of rental units owned by non-individual investors rose from 17.3 percent in 2001 to 24.5 percent in 2015. In Memphis, the majority of the most blighted properties belong to LLCs, and in Milwaukee, LLC ownership correlates with housing disrepair. Their recommendation is the one I’m making here: local rental ordinances that require LLCs to disclose who’s behind them, like Minneapolis, which requires rental licensees to name “an associated natural person.”

PRO pays for itself; FAIR’s funding doesn’t exist on paper

PRO charges an annual registration fee of $20 per unit for buildings with 1–4 units, $40 per unit for 5–49 units, and $60 per unit for 50+ units. Chicago Housing Authority units, affordable units under a regulatory agreement, and owner-occupied one- to six-flats are exempt from the fees (but not from registering). That adds up to about $22 million a year, which funds the bureau that administers the registry (§2-44-200(b)(3)). About half of rental registries are funded this way, so it’s not ideal, but it’s normal.

FAIR has no fee provision at all. Its Office of Rental Housing would sit inside the Department of Buildings and is “subject to appropriation” in a department that housing advocates and the Johnson administration both say is already stretched thin.

Alderman Villegas has verbally described funding it through a foreclosure registry. That is not in the FAIR ordinance text. Steffany looked for a city that funds a rental registry with foreclosure registry fees and couldn’t find one anywhere in the United States. Foreclosure and rental registries coexist in plenty of Florida cities, but they’re funded separately, and foreclosure fees are usually dedicated narrowly by statute.

The closest thing is Columbus, Ohio, and even it doesn’t do exactly that. Columbus has a $250 biannual foreclosed property registration and still funded its April 2026 rental registry with a $15 per-unit fee. Columbus also tried to spend registry fees on affordable housing and was told by its own deputy city attorney that state law only lets registry fees pay for the registry.

Foreclosure revenue moves the wrong way

There’s a very good fiscal reason most rental registries aren’t funded this way. Foreclosure revenue is countercyclical and inconsistent: it’s a trickle in good years and spikes during recessions.

A registry for 500,000+ units, on the other hand, is a fixed, permanent cost: vendors, staff, and a public website. In a city where the budget fight is an annual bloodbath, funding data infrastructure with a revenue line that moves the wrong way is how you end up with an unmaintained or half-built database.

Chicago may not be able to fund the FAIR registry that way regardless. In FHFA v. City of Chicago (N.D. Ill. 2013), Judge Durkin held that the city’s vacant buildings ordinance was preempted as to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and called the $500 registration fee an impermissible tax on the federal government. Fannie and Freddie held about 258,000 Chicago loans at the time. The city settled in 2014 and agreed not to collect. We already litigated the foreclosure fee base and lost most of it.

Data the registry should capture

  • Owner identity, including the real people (natural persons) behind LLCs. The current records don’t show who actually owns the building. It allows early intervention (knowing who is behind a portfolio lets the city act before problems spread across many buildings).
  • Property manager and a local 24/7 emergency contact (this is the “responsible party” who will address tenant issues; ownership information is needed to know who’s responsible for the manager and emergency contact)
  • Building and dwelling characteristics
    • Unit count per building
    • Bedroom and bathroom count per unit
  • Existing data about the building from extant sources
    • Eviction records as they happen (this information would be supplied by a data sharing agreement between the city and the Cook County Circuit Court)
    • Inspection and violation history
  • Rental information
    • Rent for each occupied unit (the price on the lease)
    • Terms for each occupied unit
      • move-in month
      • whether the lease is month-to-month, annual, or some other period
      • which utilities are included
      • price of fixed-rate utilities
      • whether RUBS (ratio utility billing, which splits a master-metered building’s utility bill across units by formula) is used
      • whether a security deposit or move-in fee was used, and the price of such
  • Status of each unoccupied unit, as a count with a per-unit breakdown:
    • Leasable, meaning the owner is looking for a tenant
    • Held for a future tenant who won’t be charged rent
    • Held vacant for a planned renovation
    • Whether it’s listed online, and at what price
    • Whether a broker represents it
    • If it isn’t listed, the price the owner is trying to get

Who else supports rental registries

I’m not alone here. Rental registries have been endorsed by other YIMBY groups and research organizations:

City Council should pass a registry that can actually tell us who owns Chicago’s rental housing, what it rents for, and which units are sitting empty – and fund it with a revenue source that will still be there in year three. PRO’s registry comes much closer to that than FAIR’s.