Today, November 4, 2026, Chicago City Council’s Budget Committee is holding its hearing on the Department of Planning and Development’s 2027 budget.
Dear Budget Committee Chair Ervin and members of council. My name is Steven Vance, and I’m a volunteer lead with Abundant Housing Illinois. We’re 500 advocates in Chicago who have a laser focus on stopping the rapid increase in rents and getting more people housed.
There’s a way to raise revenue without imposing new costs: let more housing get built, sooner and faster.
New homes mean new property tax base, permit fees, and construction activity. That’s why I’m concerned about the proposed 33% increase in the lease tax in the 2027 budget. Construction equipment, much of it rented, will cost more. And every homebuilder and architect who uses QuickBooks, AutoCAD, or a payroll service will pay more. Raising the cost of doing business raises the cost of housing.
The other big barrier is process. Most new housing in Chicago is approved through the Planned Development process, the most expensive way to approve housing. Changes to the zoning code can get housing permitted faster and with lower-cost reviews. I’ll briefly describe three ideas to raise revenue by speeding up housing approvals, inspired by the landmark report from Metropolitan Planning Council about Chicago zoning practices, flaws, and opportunities.
More alderpersons should opt in to allow accessory dwelling units, without block by block restrictions. Homeowners who decide to build an ADU pay a little more in property taxes and the neighborhood gets an additional home.
City Council’s zoning and housing committees should approve the introduced ordinances that would let modest multifamily housing be permitted quicker and less expensively. Every month not building means high borrowing costs and a delay in the city receiving new property tax revenue. Not every home should need costly approvals from the City Council.
Build on what’s working. Under Commissioner Boatright’s leadership, city-owned land sales have accelerated and improved. The Missing Middle Infill Housing program has restarted construction on blocks that haven’t seen a new home in decades. Part of that success was changing the zoning map ahead of time. Program participants, and others inspired by the new construction, can now build a three-flat without paying for special approval.
I’d ask Commissioners Ciere Boatright (Planning and Development) and Lissette Castañeda (Housing): what staffing resources do your departments need to develop housing more rapidly? Can city-owned land sales go even faster? What additional changes to the zoning map would jumpstart building more homes less expensively?
This budget should make housing cheaper to build, not more expensive. Funding faster approvals is an investment that pays for itself.
Thank you.
The ordinances
Enable more homes and cheaper construction by allowing a single stair in smaller apartment buildings – SO2025-0017571
Eliminate minimum lot area per unit in multi-unit districts; excludes family-sized units from floor area – O2026-0028842
Three ordinances introduced at City Council in the last four weeks would change the zoning rules for single room occupancy (SRO) buildings, shelters, and community homes. One of them makes it easier to build these kinds of housing. The other two ordinances would add new requirements that would make it more expensive to build them, extend approval timelines, and reduce the number of eligible locations for building them.
The ordinances arrive during a housing shortage that is most severe at the bottom of the market but only one would make a positive impact. Let’s review the latest information on housing supply in Chicago:
The Chicago metro area is short about 224,000 rental homes that are affordable and available to extremely low-income renters (households earning 30 percent or less of the area median income, or $25,200 for one person), according to a March 2026 report from Housing Action Illinois and the National Low Income Housing Coalition.There are only 31 such homes for every 100 of those households.
Chicago permitted 3,916 new homes in 2025, last among U.S. jurisdictions with at least a million residents, according to Census Bureau building permit data.
The number of people sleeping outside rose almost 25 percent, to about 1,641, even though the count happened on one of the coldest nights in recent memory.
People are sleeping in parks and under viaducts. For several years, news media have reported on tent encampments along the North Branch of the Chicago River and in Ronan Park in Albany Park, and the city cleared one at Legion Park in March after two fires there. At Gompers Park in North Mayfair, the city matched about 30 encampment residents with housing at a March 2025 “Accelerated Moving Event.” The Park District removed the remaining tents in May 2025 to build a nature play space, and many of the people still living there moved across the street to Eugene Field Park. Park District Superintendent Carlos Ramirez-Rosa has said there are about 60 encampments in the city, mostly in parks, that residents of a cleared encampment generally move to another park, and that Chicago lacks enough housing for people experiencing street homelessness.
In the 34th Ward, people set up tents under the Metra viaducts on Lake Street near Clinton Street, next to Ogilvie Transportation Center. When the city cleared that encampment in December 2023, seven people accepted rehousing help from the Department of Family and Support Services and 15 declined. Ald. Bill Conway said at the time that many might return.
The three ordinances take different approaches in light of the situation.
Ald. Anthony Quezada’s ordinance would allow SROs and shelters by right on most commercial streets and downtown.
Ald. Pat Dowell’s would require a special use hearing for any new SRO in a residential district, when currently that is not required.
Ald. Ronnie Mosley’s would add new notification requirements for community homes, transitional residences, and transitional shelters, as well as minimum spacing rules between existing and new uses in those categories. This ordinance would drastically reduce the number of eligible locations for these housing types.
Adds 1,000-foot spacing rules, notifying the local alderperson and police district commander, as well as a bigger notice radius to property owners for proposed community homes, transitional residences, and transitional shelters
A quick glossary
The zoning code has its own vocabulary for these housing types, so here’s what each one means in plain language:
Single room occupancy (SRO): a building of small, private rooms, often with shared kitchens or bathrooms. Historically these were residential hotels and for young men moving to the city for the first time looking for work.
Temporary overnight shelter and transitional shelter: places for people experiencing homelessness to sleep, either night-to-night or for a longer stay while they find permanent housing.
Transitional residence: a temporary, supervised living arrangement, such as housing for people undergoing substance use treatment or reentering society after being incarcerated.
Community home: a group home where people with disabilities live together as one household, sometimes with staff. A “family” community home is smaller; a “group” community home is larger.
Special use: a use the zoning code doesn’t allow by right. The applicant has to notify owners of nearby property owners, hire (usually) an attorney, and win approval at a public hearing of the Zoning Board of Appeals.
It’s the experience of every person or organization who has to obtain a special use that their project costs more, is approved later than expected, requires hiring consultants, and pays additional city application fees. These applicants are constantly working under the possibility of being denied after the applicant has already bought or leased the property.
For these types of housing, specifically, applicants and the people who they would house are often subjected to vile NIMBYism and bigotry during this process. Housing delayed is housing denied.
Quezada’s ordinance: SROs and shelters by right in business and downtown districts
Ald. Quezada’s ordinance, co-sponsored by 11 colleagues, would expand where SROs and shelters are allowed without having to get a special use, to the business, commercial, and downtown zoning districts. B and C districts line most of Chicago’s commercial streets, often near transit. D districts are only in downtown, including River North, South Loop, and part of West Loop.
Use
Districts going from special use to permitted
Single room occupancy
B1, B3, C1, C2, DC, DX (already permitted in B2 and DR)
Temporary overnight shelter
B1, B2, B3, C1, C2, C3, DX, DR
Transitional shelter
B1, B2, B3, C1, C2, C3, DX, DR
Transitional residence
No change; still a special use
Dowell’s ordinance: special use for SROs in residential districts
Ald. Dowell’s ordinance would amend one line in the zoning code’s residential use table (Section 17-2-0207). Today, SROs are permitted by right in RT-4, RM-4.5, RM-5, RM-5.5, RM-6, and RM-6.5 districts. The ordinance strikes the “P” and replaces it with “S” in all six, which would thus require new SROs and some renovations of existing SROs to obtain costly special use approval from the Zoning Board of Appeals.
Those districts are where Chicago allows apartments and condo buildings. (SROs already aren’t allowed in districts that mandate detached single family housing and don’t allow multifamily housing.) There would be no residential district in Chicago where someone can build an SRO with only a building permit.
This doesn’t change the city’s 2014 SRO Preservation Ordinance, which protects existing SRO tenants when a building is sold or converted.
Mosley’s ordinance: spacing, notification, and a bigger notice radius
Ald. Mosley’s ordinance has 30 co-sponsors, including Ald. Dowell. It adds four new requirements:
1,000-foot spacing for community homes. A community home would be prohibited within 1,000 feet of another community home (new 17-9-0104.2).
1,000-foot spacing for transitional residences and shelters. Either one would be prohibited within 1,000 feet of another transitional residence or transitional shelter (new 17-9-0115-E).
Notification before opening. Community homes that are permitted by right, and therefore don’t need a special use, would still have to notify the alderman’s office at least 30 days before they start operating (new 17-9-0104.1). Transitional residences and shelters would have to notify the Chicago Police Department district commander when they file for a special use (new 17-9-0115-D).
Four times the notice radius. Special use applications for community homes, transitional residences, or transitional shelters would have to mail notice to every property owner within 1,000 feet, instead of the standard 250 feet. That’s twice the 500-foot radius the code requires for landfills, incinerators, and waste transfer stations.
A 1,000-foot radius is about a block and a half in every direction (a standard Chicago block is 660 feet). Mailing to every owner in that circle costs more and reaches more people. The spacing rules mean that once one group home or shelter opens, the surrounding area is off-limits to the next one. And the proposed ordinance offers no variation or other relief from the 1,000-foot spacing rules. This increases the number of letters that have to be sent by about seven times.
It’s my understanding that community homes house people with disabilities, and the federal Fair Housing Act prohibits zoning rules that discriminate against them. Spacing rules for group homes have been challenged before. In 1996, a federal appeals court ruled that the Fair Housing Act preempts Michigan’s spacing and notice requirements for adult foster care homes, which included a review of similar facilities within 1,500 feet (Larkin v. Michigan Department of Social Services). Other court rulings have found that refusing an exception, or reasonable accommodation, from spacing requirements violates the law. In 2022, a federal jury ordered Springfield, Illinois, to pay $293,000 after the city tried to close a group home under its 600-foot spacing ordinance.
What the Metropolitan Planning Council recommends
The Metropolitan Planning Council (MPC) published At What Cost?, an honest assessment of Chicago’s zoning and land use regulations, earlier this month, after a three-year study that gathered input from more than 700 people (including yours truly). Timing between their report and the three proposed ordinances is coincidental!
MPC recommends removing the requirement that “single-room occupancy buildings, shelters, and other group living quarters” get special use approval in many zoning districts, because it “delays or blocks a necessary housing option.” More broadly, MPC recommends permitting most current special uses by right, with use standards, and reserving Zoning Board of Appeals review for uses with likely health and safety impacts, such as heavy manufacturing, waste processing, and adult uses. MPC’s analysis of ZBA decisions from 2011 to 2023 found that the board approves 92 percent of applications and explicitly denies only 3 to 4 percent, but that the process is complex and lengthy, often requires an attorney, and depends heavily on the local alderperson’s support.
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 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.
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.
I don’t feel like explaining the ups and downs of the last six months, which is when my building permit application was resubmitted. I’ll commemorate the occasion by sharing these photos of the new footings that have been excavated.
A new steel beam – actually three segments – will be installed in the basement, supported by two new posts on these two new footings. The orange lines in the footing holes represent the top of the future floor slab, indicating a 18″ dig-down.
The holes cannot be filled in until a city building inspector comes by. After they are filled in, and a post is installed, more excavation will occur on the perimeter to do underpinning. This will extend the depth of the house’s foundation to support it for another one hundred years, and probably prevent more sinking and shifting.
The ADU pilot program the City Council passed in December 2020 and took effect on May 1, 2021, will finally convert to a permanent law on April 1, 2026 – just shy of five years old. The new policy will increase the permanent eligibility area by a little more than double what the pilot areas allowed (a 135 percent expansion to be more precise). Further expansions are optional and up to each alderperson to decide when and where to “opt in” additional parts of their wards. Additionally, the construction of coach houses will have to comply with unusual labor requirements tacked on by an alderperson who called ADUs “an attack on the working class”.
I was shocked when the ADU ordinance (read it here) passed unanimously, 46-0. The ordinance number is SO2024-0008918, and when you open the legislation details page look for the filename called “SO2024-0008918 ADU 9.23.25 (LRB 10a) (2) (1).pdf”
How do I feel? I’m relieved this seven-year-period of ADU advocacy is over, and I’m disappointed in the outcome. More advocacy will be needed to ensure that most alders maximize the eligibility areas in their wards.
Highlights of the new ADU ordinance
the ADU eligibility area increases from 12 percent of the city to 29 percent of the city, with options to increase further
the arbitrary cap of 700 s.f. of floor area allowed in each coach house has been removed (there is still a site-specific cap)
existing off-street parking can be removed in order to build a coach house on the ground level
B (business) and C (also business) zoning districts are now part of the eligibility area
ground floor space in mixed-use buildings in B and C zoning districts can be converted to ADUs without having to get a “special use”
