The house finally looks like a house again on the inside. When I walked through earlier this month the walls had insulation in them, new windows were in, and the new back porch was up. It’s been almost a year since the last journal entry, when the permit was issued and the crew had just dug the first footings in the basement.
Insulation
The exterior walls are now filled with closed cell spray foam insulation, which also seals the air gaps and creates a tight building envelope needed to make an all-electric house work. Heat pumps don’t work as hard when the heated or cooled air stays inside.
Some interior walls got fiberglass batts as an inexpensive way to modestly improve noise isolation.
The basement unit
The basement is now framed out for the third unit. Before the framing went up, the crew covered the foundation walls with a dimpled drainage membrane (the black sheets). The dimples create a small air gap so any moisture that comes through the brick runs down to the drain tile under the floor instead of soaking into the drywall.
Back porch
The new wood back porch is built and the stairs are in. The crew was still working around its base, and the yard is a mess of gravel, lumber, and wheelbarrows.
Drywall is coming next, but before that I hired an inspector to perform a “whole house” blower door test to find areas where the spray foam was insufficiently applied. Once the drywall, windows, and final doors are installed then the same inspector will return and do a blower door test in each dwelling unit. The ComEd Electric Homes program requires that the house passes all three tests.
If you want to open a hair salon in a Chicago storefront that’s zoned for business, you can, as long as there isn’t another salon within 1,000 feet1. If there is, you need a special use permit from the Zoning Board of Appeals (ZBA). That means paperwork, mailed notices, often hiring an attorney, attending an official hearing, possibly being part of a ward-level community presentation, and potentially paying rent for months on a space you can’t open. And for all that, the ZBA approves 95 percent of salon applications.
That number comes from the Metropolitan Planning Council’s (MPC) new report, At What Cost? How Chicago’s Outdated Zoning and Land Use Systems Thwart Inclusive Growth, published in October 2026. It arrives while a proposal to fix part of this problem has sat untouched in City Council for nearly two years. In December 2024, Ald. Desmon Yancy introduced an ordinance to let the zoning administrator approve many special uses directly, without a ZBA hearing. It still hasn’t been heard in committee.
I first wrote about Yancy’s proposal in a Bluesky thread the week before it was introduced. MPC’s research makes the case for it stronger than I could at the time.
What is a “special use”?
Chicago’s zoning code sorts every building type, business, or land use into one of three buckets in each zoning district: permitted “by right,” not allowed, or allowed as a “special use.” A special use is allowed only after a review that decides whether that particular location suits it. Today that review means a public hearing before the ZBA, a board of mayoral appointees.
MPC calls the ZBA process “complex” and “lengthy,” says it often requires the help of an attorney, and concludes that its “opacity… and lack of consistent guidelines” favor applicants with time and money, “creating a pay-to-play system.” (Based on my observations at ZBA meetings most hair salon applicants represent themselves and the ZBA board members accommodate them and how they are not as familiar with the processes as other applicants who’ve hired attorneys.)
The ZBA approves nearly everything
MPC built its own dataset from 12 years of ZBA meeting minutes (through October 2023). The city doesn’t publish this data in a searchable format, so MPC’s staff had to pull it from hundreds of PDFs. Here’s what they found:
Finding
Figure
Share of all ZBA applications approved
92% (only 3–4% are explicitly denied; the rest are withdrawn)
Votes in which the board was unanimous
96%
Special use applications reviewed per year
About 230
Special use applications coming from business (B) and commercial (C) districts
78%
Special use applications for hair, nail, or beauty salons and barbershops
27%
Salon and barbershop applications approved
95%
Salon and barbershop applications decided at their first hearing
90%
Translation: more than a quarter of the board’s special use docket is salons and barbershops, and they’re approved almost every time. That sounds like a toll that every applicant pays. MPC also points out who pays it: 91 percent of hairdressers and cosmetologists are women, and nail salon workers are mostly immigrants, so the 1,000-foot rule likely falls hardest on women-owned and immigrant-owned small businesses.
I’d like to know why City Council cares about how close two salons are to each other and wanted to regulate that.
What Yancy’s ordinance would change
The ordinance (O2024-0014002) was introduced on December 2, 2024, and co-sponsored by Alderpersons Rodriguez (22nd Ward), Villegas (36th), and Hadden (49th). It amends Section 17-13-0900 of the zoning code so that the zoning administrator, a DPD staff position, decides special use applications instead of only sending a recommendation to the ZBA.
The ZBA would keep the final say on:
anything in a manufacturing (M) or planned manufacturing district (PMD)
special uses requiring compliance with the Air Quality Ordinance
drive-throughs
waste-related uses
cannabis establishments
gas stations
liquor stores
adult uses
Everything else that’s a special use today would go to the zoning administrator:
Category
Special uses that would move to the zoning administrator
Housing
Ground-floor homes in B1, B3, C1, and C2 districts (detached houses, two-flats, townhouses, multi-unit buildings, elderly housing, and single-room occupancy); artist and business live/work units; residential conversion units; most housing types in the DX district, and multi-unit, elderly, and SRO housing in DC
Shelters and group living
Transitional residences, transitional shelters, temporary overnight shelters, domestic violence shelters and residences, group community homes, nursing homes, assisted living, and group living not otherwise classified
Neighborhood businesses
Hair salons, nail salons, and barbershops within 1,000 feet of another one; banks, currency exchanges, and ATMs subject to the pedestrian street rules; body art (tattoo) services; massage establishments; fortune telling; taverns and rooftop patios in B3; indoor event venues; entertainment cabarets; hookah bars; rooftop urban farms; hotels and motels
Civic and institutional
Community centers and recreation buildings (including in parks), religious assembly, schools, colleges in C3, lodges and private clubs, police stations, government-operated health centers in residential districts, major utilities, and detention and correctional facilities
Other uses
Pawn shops, payday and title loan stores, valuable objects dealers, firearms dealers, shooting ranges, wagering facilities, day labor employment agencies, and flea markets
Auto-oriented and other
Non-accessory parking lots, vehicle storage and towing, animal shelters and boarding kennels, stables, poultry slaughtering, cremation, freestanding wireless towers, satellite dishes beyond what’s allowed by right, and certain signs
Two more details stand out:
Public input stays. Applicants would still mail, publish, and post the same notices, and the public would get 30 days to send comments to the zoning administrator. What goes away is the daytime City Hall hearing.
There’s a deadline, and it has teeth. If the zoning administrator doesn’t decide within 120 days of a complete application, it’s automatically approved (unless the applicant caused the delay).
MPC’s suggestions would go further
Yancy’s ordinance and MPC’s recommendations point in the same direction, but MPC goes a step further. MPC recommends permitting “most current special use categories by-right, with accompanying use standards,” and saving ZBA review for “uses with likely impacts on health and safety,” like heavy manufacturing, waste processing, and adult uses. Salons, live-work spaces, and community centers would be “regulated like all other business types.”
(Use standards mean specific requirements the applicant would have to show when they get their business license or building permit. The same people who review those now would ensure that the applicant is planning to meet those specific requirements, and city inspectors would verify these things before the business gets approval to open for customers.)
The two also agree on housing. Exempting shelters and transitional residences from the ZBA was one of the recommendations in the city’s Cut the Tape report, and MPC recommends removing the special use requirement for single-room occupancy (SRO) buildings, shelters, and other group living, a requirement that MPC says “delays or blocks a necessary housing option… for our lowest-resourced neighbors.” This is also the position of Abundant Housing Illinois, which advocates for removing barriers to approving housing and for increasing affordable housing.
I wonder why some uses need a special zoning review at all: hookah bars are on the special use list yet regulating indoor smoking is a job for health and licensing rules, not zoning. That’s an argument for MPC’s approach: review each item in the special use list, permit the low-impact uses by right, and keep a real hearing for the few that need it.
What about the alderpersons?
The obvious objection is that the zoning administrator becomes the person angry alderpersons blame. Alderpersons wouldn’t get a formal sign-off under the ordinance, though they’d receive the same notice that nearby property owners get.
But MPC notes that alderpersons already aren’t officially part of the ZBA process, and yet “in practice, alders hold major sway in the outcome,” so special use applications “often require political support to move forward.” Moving the decision to staff, with a deadline, gives that informal pressure less room to work.
That’s part of why it’s notable that this proposal came from Ald. Yancy. His predecessor in the 5th Ward tried to rezone a stretch of the 71st Street commercial corridor to single-family residential, which would have given her a veto over any business that wanted to open there. Yancy is proposing to give some of that kind of power away.
Where it stands
The ordinance has not been heard in committee. One of its co-sponsors, Ald. Gilbert Villegas, now chairs the Committee on Zoning, Landmarks and Building Standards. Villegas should give Yancy’s ordinance a hearing and the committee should pass it. Then the city planning department and committee should later take up MPC’s larger recommendation: write use standards into the code and let low-impact uses like salons open by right.
There are 1,730 licensed hair, nail, and skin care locations in Chicago. The 1,112 in “B” districts are subject to the 1,000-foot proximity rule, and 84 percent of those are within 1,000 feet of another salon. Their median distance to the nearest salon is 336 feet. ↩︎
Abundant Housing Illinois is a pro-housing organization that advocates for abundant housing and sustainable, inclusive cities throughout Illinois. Our website is currently being migrated to a new platform so we shared this statement about the Protecting Renters Ordinance on our Bluesky and now on my blog. (I am one of the leads of Abundant Housing Illinois.)
We’re happy to hear that there’s been extensive commentary in City Council and elsewhere in Chicago on housing affordability. Given all this new discussion, we recommend this plan of action for all the aldermen who have correctly bemoaned the city’s top ranking of places where rents have increased the most:
If you’re serious about Chicago’s housing shortage and skyrocketing housing prices, work with us to pass Governor Pritzker’s BUILD plan.
As research from Chicago Community Trust shows, the Chicagoland housing market is regional. As many other states have shown, one of the best mechanisms to address high housing costs locally is to pass laws at the state level. The laws of Illinois and Chicago’s neighboring municipalities that suppress new housing from being built also affect every ward’s housing market. Governor Pritzker understands this.
The BUILD plan is a common sense reform that will allow us to rebuild the neighborhood character of Chicago. The missing middle advocated for in his plan is present already as the beloved 2-to-4 flats in nearly every community area of Chicago. The missing middle bill already has many municipal elected officials against it – nothing is stopping our municipal elected officials for pushing in favor. In other states local elected champions made the difference.
With budget season upon us, there’s one more thing worth stating: housing growth is a revenue strategy. The Chicago Financial Future Task Force’s final report explicitly called out policies echoed in BUILD as revenue generators. The recently passed 21st century ROAD to Housing Act means these reforms could impact federal money for Chicago and other municipalities in Illinois. More housing means more residents, a broader tax base, and more options for Chicagoans already here.
A witness slip takes 3 minutes to fill out, a letter to the editor takes 30, a social media video explainer takes an afternoon. If you’re serious about addressing the housing shortage and helping pass BUILD, we’re happy to help with all the above and more. Your voice as an alder impacts statewide officials – your relationships with representatives outside Chicago are crucial now more than ever.
However, there have been extensive conversations about updating the RLTO that outlines how tenants and housing providers relate to each other across Chicago. As the Chicago and Illinois chapter of YIMBY Action, increasing housing stability is one of our five core policy pillars. It’s not our primary focus but we have a vested interest in the update. Since both ordinances concern mostly housing stability policies, not housing supply policies, we believe that they should be evaluated primarily on those benefits.
After extensive deliberation with members and partners across Chicagoland, including leadership in both the PRO and FAIR coalitions, Abundant Housing Illinois is endorsing the Protecting Renters Ordinance plus certain changes from the FAIR proposal.
We’re grateful for the viewpoints and leadership the FAIR coalition have brought to this debate. Reasoned dissent makes policy better, and we see this here with what the FAIR folks have brought to the table. Many of the changes we’re recommending are lifted directly from FAIR. We’re grateful for the supply provisions added in FAIR, and look forward to working with Chair Villegas, the Zoning Committee, and City Council on all of these policies and more. We’re especially grateful for the input from the Neighborhood Building Owner’s Alliance; Chicago’s small and midsized housing providers deserve a seat at the table, and we hope further negotiation keeps centering their input along with other interested parties.
PRO maintains existing tenant law protections – something our members say is key to any update of the RLTO. PRO’s placement of most tenant law enforcement in the Department of Housing allows the Department of Building to continue its important focus on permitting new homes and home habitability. PRO’s approach to junk fees was praised by the National Consumer Law Center and is roughly consistent with Evanston and Cook County’s existing approaches, easing compliance for housing providers who work inside and outside of Chicago. PRO also codifies the right to counsel and creates a fully detailed and funded rental registry. Leads of ours have been advocating for a rental registry since 2023! These policies have been successful across many places in increasing housing stability while minimally impacting housing production.
For those concerned that PRO will increase rent – market prices are set by supply. PRO will not increase rent as much as our housing shortage currently does. Where demand is high and prices are high, like in much of Chicago right now, an operations cost increase of no more than $5/unit per month will have minimal bearing on what the rent is.
There are some changes we’d like to see in PRO.
The definition of ‘owner occupied’ should include ‘good faith’ owner occupants who have placed their properties in LLCs.
PRO should use FAIR’s security deposit cap limits and a more realistic effective date.
Allowable fees for prospective tenants should adhere to a ‘reasonable-cost’ standard like in Illinois’ Rental Fee Transparency and Fairness Act.
Caps on other fees and fines should be indexed to inflation, to ensure additional costs by housing providers and tenants are born fairly.
Rental registry fees should transition to resourcing from the city’s budget, so all of Chicago can share the responsibility of maintaining the registry and not just renters and housing providers; we understand that might be difficult with Chicago’s current budget constraints.
We firmly believe that the best tenant protection a city can provide is having plenty of housing options. Chicago needs to make housing easier and less expensive to build so we can stop being the city with the fastest growing rent in the country. Beyond BUILD, AHIL has model ordinances ready right now for four-flats by right, elimination of minimum lot area requirements, allowing multiple detached houses on a lot, and elimination of parking mandates citywide; any elected official for the City who wants to introduce one should contact us.
Supply work shouldn’t wait. It also isn’t a reason to delay smart policy helping Chicagoans stay where they are. If you want cheaper housing, push BUILD. If you want cheaper housing and tenant rights, push BUILD and vote for an amended PRO.
Update July 15, 2026: Mayor Johnson introduced the Protecting Renters Ordinance as number O2026-0026554 on June 29, 2026. Today, City That Works wrote about the pros and cons and potential positive and negative impacts of the proposed legislation.
PRO is a comprehensive modernization of the Residential Landlord and Tenant Ordinance (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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
