Category: Urban Planning

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 / Steven Vance / 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

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.

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 / Steven Vance / 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.

A day in Springfield with Abundant Housing Illinois

April 20, 2026 / Steven Vance / 0 Comments

Earlier this month I made the trip down to Springfield to volunteer with Abundant Housing Illinois, an advocacy organization pushing for more housing options across the state. It was our biggest group ever, with 39 people going from five Illinois municipalities, and most of us took Amtrak there and back.

The day was a mix of orientation, refining our housing stories and why we volunteer, and then walking the halls of the Capitol to speak with legislators and their staff. Our housing advocates talked to twenty Illinois General Assembly members about reforming local codes that prevent people from being able to afford housing all over the state. We spoke in support of the BUILD plan I wrote about earlier.

It’s important – although inefficient – to show up in person and make the case directly. The legislators we met with were highly or quite receptive, though you never quite know what interactions or talking points will actually move the needle. All of the six bills in the BUILD plan have not yet passed committee; but that doesn’t stop them from moving forward through other means.

If you care about housing in Illinois — whether that’s affordability, supply, or just the ability to build an ADU in your backyard — Abundant Housing Illinois is worth knowing about. Join us!

Okay, 2026 should be the year Illinois lawmakers do something about the housing shortage

February 19, 2026 / Steven Vance / 0 Comments

Governor JB Pritzker announced his plan to address the state’s housing shortage in 2026. This is the third year in a row I’ve written about proposed legislation to unlock new housing in Illinois, and this should be the year – the governor and General Assembly leadership are fully aligned since they, together, introduced bills cover six major land use, zoning, and housing development reforms.

Pritzker’s budget address on Wednesday covered a wide range of housing issues in four minutes:

the size of the shortage (227,000 new homes are needed by 2030 to keep up with demand)
everything is too damned expensive! rent is too high!
not enough homes are being built
redlining played a role in housing being built less often in certain areas
regulations inhibit new homes and small homes from getting built
bureaucratic red tape
parking mandates require too much parking that are unused and expensive

Watch the full 4-minute housing speech, part of his hourlong budget address.

I propose some non-exhaustive reasons why the average Illinoisan might want to support these reforms:

There are 6% year-over-year rent increases which is making it hard for Illinois to be a competitive place to maintain its population and its services. Population loss results in higher costs for everyone because services and pensions are paid for by fewer people.
I want Illinois to lose as few Congressional seats as possible in 2030.
It encourages new development which spreads the tax burden onto more taxpayers and lowers it for any given taxpayer.

Ask your legislator to support the BUILD plan by sending them a letter. All you have to do is enter your address and the modify the subject line.

It’s a whole set of reforms to lower housing costs

To resolve these issues, Gov. Pritzker is working with legislative leaders in the Illinois House and Illinois Senate to adopt a package of bills:

Third Party Review (SB 4063, Ellman)

In cases where a municipality cannot review a building permit quickly enough an applicant could hire a third-party reviewer. The municipality would have to complete its initial plan review within 15 business days for a one or two-family house, and within 30 business days for “any multifamily, mixed-use, or commercial project”. Each subsequent review cycle would need to be completed within 10 business days.

Additionally, the bill would set inspection standards, specifically requiring a municipality to perform inspections within two business days of the request. Applicants could also use third-party inspector if the municipality does not meet the standard. Municipalities cannot charge additional fees if an applicant exercises this right, and qualified third-party reviewers and inspectors would not be permitted to charge more than the municipality’s fee.

Finally, the bill sets qualification, conflict of interest, and auditing standards, and the bill would also apply to home rule municipalities.

Legalizing Middle Housing (SB 4060, Hunter)

This is a big deal and is the key to unlock the solution to the housing shortage in Illinois. It would allow multifamily housing as of right on all lots that have a minimum area of 2,500 s.f. (To give some context the most common residential lot size in Chicago is 3,125 s.f. and in Oak Park the average residential lot ranges between 4,000 s.f. and 13,000 s.f. depending on the zoning district.)

The bill would permit between two and eight units of housing per lot in a residential zoning district, depending on the size of the lot. It would also permit new housing types that most municipalities ban:

Duplexes (a.k.a. two-flats)
Triplexes
Fourplexes
Cottage clusters
Townhouses
Stacked-flat plexes
Attached courtyard housing
Detached courtyard housing. This would allow a front house and an equal size rear house, which Chicago has vintage examples of and some architecture firms have proposed as part of the Missing Middle Infill Housing initiative, but the Chicago zoning code does not permit)

Future Firm, a design studio based in Chicago, created this concept that places two detached houses on a single property in Chicago. The current zoning code there does not permit more than one principal building per zoning lot, so if this were to get built the two houses would have to share some part of their structures.

What are some potential impacts?

In Chicago, there are 14,148 vacant lots that are zoned in a way that bans multi-family housing. If 5 percent of those were developed each year with a two-flat that would reduce the city’s housing shortage by 1,415 homes annually. (Chicago has seen an average of 4,357 new homes permitted from 2023-2025.) These zoning districts are pretty broadly distributed in Chicago, and overlap with all kinds of school attendance boundaries and near all kinds of amenities.

In Naperville, there are 35,449 (57 percent of the parcels in the city and 86 percent of parcels that allow residential uses) lots that ban multi-family housing. A minority of those would be improved to have two-family houses which would go a long way to increasing opportunity for Illinoisans (while also increase Naperville’s property tax revenues).

That’s almost too simplistic (and perhaps a bit optimistic) because the bill would permit more housing types than Chicago currently allows, like the detached courtyard housing – these new options would respond to the desire for lower-cost detached housing, increasing or maintaining the density on blocks where deconversions and teardowns are common.

The need for housing extends beyond Chicago and Oak Park. I ran this exercise here because it’s where I have the easiest access to high quality property and zoning data. Every town needs additional housing and additional housing types – for its existing residents and for future residents. Every town with transit service especially needs more housing, because more people should be allowed to take advantage of that service and that public investment.

Parking Reform (SB 4064, Cervantes)

A municipality would not be allowed to require more than 0.5 automobile parking spaces per multifamily dwelling unit or more than one automobile parking space per single-family home.

And parking mandates would be eliminated for several uses:

individual dwelling units that have an area smaller than 1,500 s.f.
affordable housing developments
assisted living developments
ground floor non-residential uses in mixed-use buildings
when converting a building from non-residential to residential use

The standards would also apply in home rule communities.

Single Stair Reform (SB 4061, Feigenholtz)

Residential buildings up to six stories, with a maximum of four dwelling units per floor, an automatic sprinkler system, and automatic door closers, would be permitted to have a single interior exit stairway (“single stair”). Small multifamily buildings with a single means of egress are as safe or safer than those with more than one.

A typical new apartment building in Illinois has a “double loaded corridor” layout, which has a high apartment per stair ratio. The smart stair option in the center, not currently permitted, has a much lower apartment per stair ratio. The graphic on the right shows that a single stair building can have more variation in unit layouts and sizes (number of bedrooms).

The benefits improve quality of life by making it easier to design multi-bedroom and family-size homes with additional windows for more natural light, and inset porches (allowing for cross-breezes!) because space isn’t needed for a corridor to connect every unit to a second stair way. Homes are closer to the exit in these buildings. Plus, it makes it easier for small, multifamily buildings to “pencil” (make financial sense to undertake) on infill lots which tend to have higher land values.

Note about exiting: at the time of writing I live in a 450-unit apartment building that has five stairs that lead to two exterior stairs (and then there are more stairs after that). I counted that it takes about 220 steps (I have a long stride) to reach the ground; it took me 1 minute and 21 seconds to go from my apartment door, down the stairs, and over to the exterior exit. It takes a little bit more time to descend the last stair to the ground. In a single stair building, that would be limited to 20 feet – far less than the 600-or-so feet in my current abode.

ADUs (SB 4071, Martwick)

Do I even have to say what this is about? The bill would permit accessory dwelling units in all zoning districts that permit residential uses. The state ADU bill, as written in HB5626, could possibly invalidate the labor requirements for coach houses in Chicago (emphasis added):

(1) Each municipality shall permit accessory dwelling units in all zoning districts that permit single-family dwellings without additional requirements for lot size, setbacks, aesthetic requirements, design review requirements, frontage, space limitations, or other controls beyond those required for single-family dwelling units without an accessory dwelling unit.

A new construction coach house in Logan Square

Impact Fee Modernization (SB 4062, Castro)

The state would create formulas that set maximum impact fees, relative to the impact (i.e. number of students, domestic water and sewer, etc.) and incorporate certain unique contexts, to establish certainty for home builders. Municipalities, include those with home rule authority, would have to adopt the formulas within 30 months after the bill’s effective date.

The House has this package in a single omnibus bill: HB 5626.

Abundant Housing Illinois volunteers were in Springfield yesterday to listen to Governor Pritzker’s budget speech and to push for bold housing solutions to reduce the housing shortage – evident by continually rising prices – that persists across the state.

The new bills that Governor Pritzker’s office announced today – collectively called BUILD – will have a big impact on permitting new starter homes and allowing multi-family housing all over the state, among other changes to speed up housing construction. These bills will have the biggest effect on reducing housing costs when passed collectively.

Join Abundant Housing Illinois for the next lobby day.

Read another observation in A City That Works.

Two-flat journal 10: the project has a permit and basement digging has begun

December 10, 2025 / Steven Vance / 0 Comments

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.

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