Category: Cities

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.

Chicago’s ten co-living buildings, circa 2019

May 1, 2026 / / 0 Comments

This is adapted from a piece I originally wrote for the MAP Strategies blog in January 2019, when I was consulting for them. The original is gone from their site but lives on in the Wayback Machine. I’m republishing it here because the inventory is a useful snapshot of where Chicago’s co-living market stood at the start of 2019 — a moment when it looked like co-living might become a real fixture of the city’s housing landscape. How that played out is a story for another post.

The co-living trend seems to be picking up in Chicago. Co-living is a housing arrangement where people who don’t necessarily know each other live in the same apartment and share a kitchen, but each tenant is only responsible for a lease on their own bedroom. It saves tenants money through shared facilities — typically including in-unit laundry — and many of the new co-living developments offer the same amenity package as Chicago’s market-rate apartment buildings: rooftop decks, coworking space, gyms.

Amenity floor, exterior, at The Post
The Post is a co-living building near the North/Clybourn station, which opened in 2023.

Co-living isn’t new. Unrelated adults have been sharing apartments for centuries. What’s new is the on-site amenity layer, on par with the newest apartment buildings in the city. As a renter myself, there’s a real attraction to it: you save a little money by having roommates, you don’t have to find them yourself, and you aren’t responsible for their share of the rent. Many operators bundle weekly professional cleaning into the rent, which handles the chore-wheel question. Some apartments come fully furnished.

Related: Chicago’s zoning code regulates the number of unrelated adults that a household can be designed to accommodate – laws that undo this are sometimes called “The Golden Girls Bill”. Read more.

The regulatory picture

In Chicago, co-living buildings adhere to the same zoning code standards and largely the same building code standards as a multi-family development. They are also subject to the same Affordable Requirements Ordinance (ARO) standards as a multi-unit building. Even though the standards are the same, navigating the Department of Buildings and Department of Planning & Development processes isn’t always straightforward for new co-living developers.

Ten buildings, six operators

By my count there were ten co-living buildings operating or under construction in Chicago at the start of 2019, run by a mix of local, national, and international companies. Most allowed whole-apartment leases in addition to room-by-room leases.

Common is a New York–based operator that has built a platform local developers can plug into for new construction or conversions. Three Chicago buildings:

  • 455 W Briar Pl. in Lakeview — a converted two-flat with 14 bedrooms and 8.5 bathrooms, permitted as an SRO. (“SRO” is a zoning code term; the building code calls the same thing congregate living.) This was the only conversion in Common’s Chicago portfolio at the time; everything else was new construction.
  • 2048 W Chicago Ave. in Ukrainian Village — new construction.
  • 1407 W 15th St., between the Illinois Medical District and Pilsen — under construction at the time. It later opened as Common Addams.

PMG (Property Markets Group) is a local developer that operates two co-living buildings:

  • The L in Logan Square, at 2211 N Milwaukee Ave.
  • X Chicago in University Village, at 710 W 14th St.

1237 West at 1237 W. Fullerton Ave. — A privately owned DePaul University dormitory that recently began accepting non-students. Owned and operated by The Scion Group.

Quarters at 171 N Aberdeen St. in the West Loop — The first Chicago location of Berlin-based Medici Living Group’s international Quarters brand. The building was developed by MCZ Development.

30 East Apartments in the South Loop — Opened in 2017. It’s surrounded by several colleges and universities, so the marketing leans toward students, but you don’t have to be one to live there. Developed by Gilbane and managed by Asset Campus Housing.

Bungalow is a startup that master-leases existing houses and apartments. At the time: a 5-bedroom house in Bucktown and a unit in Wicker Park.

If I missed a Chicago co-living building from that 2019 moment, let me know.

Choosing NITA board members: it needs the best people

February 2, 2026 / / 0 Comments

It’s super important to the success of the forthcoming Northern Illinois Transit Authority1 (NITA, pronounced “neat-uh”) that is has new board members who are forward-thinking, collaborative, and invested in high-quality transit service. Collaboration is almost an inherently necessary trait, as 17 of the 20 new board members will also serve on either the Pace, Metra, or Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) boards! A mind for the future is also obligatory because NITA will take over planning responsibilities from the three service boards and decide on service patterns and expansions with the region in mind, using new-to-the-region operations and capital funding.

The Blue Line to Forest Park desperately needs an overhaul to eliminate slow zones and create stations that are comfortable for riders. Connect 290 Blue is an interagency effort to consolidate planning for the Blue Line overhaul and the reconstruction of the Eisenhower Expressway.

There is going to be an estimated $1.2 billion in new funding for transit service and another $180 million annually for capital projects; I want the new funds to be invested well2 and I think that starts with a well-formed NITA board3.

The authority will materialize on September 1. Good board members should be nominated by their respective choosers and confirmed by the Illinois Senate well in advance.

Mayor Johnson will get to appoint five members to the NITA board, similar to how the mayor of Chicago appoints five members to the Regional Transportation Authority board. The RTA will dissolve on September 1. The same goes for Cook County President Preckwinkle, who will appoint five members to NITA, with “advice and consent” of the 17 commissioners.

New to the process will be Governor Pritzker, who will get to appoint five members to the NITA board. The Illinois governor did not get to appoint any of the RTA board members.

The last key attribute of a NITA board member is their personal investment in transit.

Drake Warren is running for a seat on the Cook County board and at the Abundant Housing Illinois happy hour last week he said that as a commissioner, to ensure that NITA provides the best connectivity for Cook County residents, he will support only the nominations of people who actually ride transit in the region.

This is what Drake said (which is in the video above):

Cook County is responsible for putting some of the upcoming NITA board members on the board, and I have some non-negotiables [in order] to have my support for appointment.

Somebody has to be a transit user and have relevant expertise, whether that’s legal, whether that’s technical, operational, or otherwise.

I’m not going to have a discussion around support unless they can meet those criteria because transit is one of the most important ways for how our city fulfills its function of connecting people.

I think whether one rides transit is a reasonable and preferred heuristic to gauge board member eligibility. So that’s another reason why I think AHIL’s endorsement of Drake Warren was the right call.

Environmental Law & Policy Center (ELPC), based in Chicago, adds six of their own criteria – vision, regional perspective, financial experience, consistent and recent transit use, commitment to values, and being a transit champion – for good board member choices. They offered this in an open letter to all of the people required by law to appoint NITA board members.

Ensure your voter registration is up to date and request a Vote By Mail ballot.

Footnotes

  1. I think that Austin Busch wrote the best summary of NITA (SB2111), for Streetsblog Chicago. ↩︎
  2. Speaking of good choices in spending: the transit TIF that is funding the local match for the CTA’s Red Purple Modernization Phase 1, which was completed in summer 2025, will likely have generated the necessary amount of monies in 2028. CTA does not yet have a plan for Phase 2 and should not automatically have access to transit TIF funding. City That Works argues that the transit TIF should be terminated at that time rather than continue to divert money from the different city and county governments. ↩︎
  3. Diverging Approach writes about some of what the new board’s mandate comprises. ↩︎
a collage of 7 photos on 7 occasions where food scrap waste dropped off at a collection site in the City of Chicago

I’ve been composting using the city’s food scrap dropoff program for two years now

January 18, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Data summary:

  • 13 total dropoffs
  • Timespan: October 18, 2023 to December 26, 2025 (about 26 months)
  • Total volume: 13 × 101 oz = 1,313 ounces (about 10.3 gallons)
  • Average frequency: roughly once every 2 months

Last month I made the thirteenth trip to a City of Chicago food scrap dropoff site at 1758 S Clark St. After two years I think it’s a good moment to count how long and how often I’ve been dropping off scraps for composting. I started collecting food waste soon after I learned the city was starting the program, and I dropped off the first collection on October 16, 2023. This means I’ve been hauling my trusty 101-ounce IKEA HÅLLBAR plastic bin to this spot for just over two years now.

That food waste decomposing in landfills causes a significant amount of methane release into the air and that methane traps more heat than CO2. Although there is still a lot more CO2 than methane released I thought that I can do a little more, and the site being over a mile away means I’m forced to go for a short bike ride even if I don’t otherwise feel like it.

What do the numbers say

  • Over 26 months, I’ve diverted about 1,313 ounces of food scraps from the landfill—that’s about 10.3 gallons of mostly banana peels, coffee grounds, and eggshells (I am using the volume of the bin rather than weights I’ve measured)
  • On average, I make the trip roughly every two months, though the intervals have varied quite a bit.
  • Looking back at my photo timestamps, I notice some interesting patterns. In 2024, there was a long gap between my July dropoff and my December one—over four months.
  • But 2025 has been different. I’ve made six trips this year alone, with intervals as short as 34 days between visits.

The Clark Street dropoff isn’t particularly close to my apartment, and I’ll admit that’s been a barrier. On days when I don’t feel like making the trip, that container sits in my fridge a little longer, and gets full to a point where I divert food waste to the trash. Curbside pickup would change everything—but until that happens, I’m still glad the city offers the dropoff sites.

Modular townhouses built by Kinnex for Structured Development.

How Chicago could maintain its housing affordability status

December 3, 2025 / / 0 Comments

An op-ed by Steffany Bahamon, Jasmine Omeke and Steven Vance (Abundant Housing Illinois co-leads) published in Crain’s Chicago Business.

Of all the major cities in the United States, Chicago provides the greatest value, with robust amenities and culture without correlated housing costs. But if Chicago wants to retain that status, some things need to change. Rents in Chicago are growing faster than the country’s average, and the inventory of housing for sale in the Chicago area is at an 11-year low. In September, Redfin published data showing asking rents had increased 11% year over year. New construction is lagging, too. When we look at new homes permitted per year in Chicago, we see a sharp drop in the number of permits for detached houses and multifamily buildings in the last three years.

There isn’t enough housing available for the new households moving into Illinois or relocating between cities and neighborhoods. Plus, households today have fewer people, requiring more homes to support the population. The Illinois Economic Policy Institute estimates the state is short 142,000 homes. Recent Census Bureau data shows that Chicago hit a demographic milestone: The city now has more households than ever before, even compared to 1960, when the city had about 1 million more inhabitants.

Compounding the problem is that people’s incomes are not keeping up with rents. In Cook County, wages went up 4% from 2024-2025, and across Illinois they went up only 3.2%.

Household growth and rising rents are clear indicators of demand and evidence of the need for more homes. By increasing the housing supply, Chicago can maintain an affordability that both entices people to live here and makes it practicable to do so. No amenity or cultural offering can compensate for an inability to make ends meet, and a failure to anticipate growth prohibits growth.

The climbing cost of housing is a main reason why 450 people have joined Abundant Housing Illinois, and bringing down costs is why they help in the political fight to show there is support for more housing. In 2025 about 50 Abundant Housing Illinois volunteers from Chicago and Champaign traveled to Springfield on multiple occasions to meet their legislators and talk about this statewide housing shortage. We specifically advocated for HB 1813 and HB 1814, two bills introduced in the state Legislature that would have permitted accessory dwelling units (ADUs), like granny flats and coach houses, across Illinois and two-, three-, and four-unit houses in many municipalities, respectively.

Our volunteers, most of whom live in Chicago and want to stay in Chicago, will again support these, and other bills, in 2026. These two bills, which are necessary to reduce — and yet still insufficient to ameliorate — the housing shortage, did not get approved.

And it’s clear that action needs to happen at the state level because the problem is broader than any one city. The Chicago market for home prices extends across the suburban border, where home prices are also increasing at a similar rate to the city average. Chicago can take unilateral action on housing within its borders. Starting last year, some alderpersons have collaborated with the city’s planning department to proactively upzone neighborhood corridors — on all sides — to allow more housing and allow it to be built sooner. And in September, the City Council adopted a permanent ADU program.

Organizing a sufficient response from the multitude of governments across the Chicago metropolitan area to allow enough housing at the rate that it’s needed is much more difficult. Still, even more permission for new housing isn’t enough. Additional reforms are also necessary everywhere in Illinois: standardizing which fees are assessed and in what amounts; curbing delays and additional costs from project-by-project exactions for perceived impacts that aren’t based on empirical standards; and amending building code requirements, like not always requiring a second stairway, as Seattle and New York City have been doing for decades.

We’ll see legislators in Springfield in the spring to fight for these reforms again. Growth in and around Chicago is counting on them.