My prepared remarks spoken to the Chicago City Council’s Committee on Zoning, Landmarks, and Building Standards on May 21, 2025.
Hi, my name is Steven Vance, I’m a 34th ward resident and a member of Abundant Housing Illinois, a group whose members show up to advocate for approving new housing. I wanted to speak today to support the expansion of the city’s ADU pilot program into a permanent and citywide option.
This month is the four year anniversary of the beginning of a three-year ADU pilot program.
A year ago, in June, just after the three year anniversary, the department of housing fulfilled their obligation and presented their findings and recommendations. They recommended to expand it citywide.
Two years ago, a year before the department’s recommendations, newly elected Alderprerson Lawson introduced an ordinance that would do just that. To my recollection, the zoning committee has substantially discussed that ordinance only once.
During the last four years, nearly 400 ADU homes have been permitted by the Department of buildings, and hundreds of those homes have been built. Homeowners and other property owners have been able to build homes for their parents, friends, and as rental units to earn more household income. None of the ADUs are allowed to be used for Airbnb or other short term rentals.
Chicago was recently recognized as a national leader…in rent increases. Allowing more homes, including in the form of accessory dwelling units, is a way to suppress the rate at which rents rise. In some cases, including this year in Austin, Texas, Minneapolis, and Denver, so many new homes were built that rents started falling.
I urge the zoning committee to adopt an ordinance to allow ADUs citywide. Thank you.
Brian and his wife built a coach house in 2023, pursuant to the ADU pilot program, so their newborn child’s grandma could live close to home and help babysit.
Earlier in March I moderated a panel called “Bringing Back 2-to-4 Flats” at the Metropolitan Planning Council office, interviewing three panelists who are developers and designers for these venerable Chicago housing typology.
Two, three, and four-flats are super common in Chicago, representing about one fifth of the city’s dwelling units. These properties are the most likely to have lower rents and family-sized units, according to the Institute of Housing Studies. But Chicago’s zoning laws severely restrict where they can be built. Changing the zoning laws to allow 2- to 4-flats by right makes it easier to increase the city’s housing supply and grow the economy.
Neelam Dwivedi is a real estate agent and small local homebuilder. She co-founded Nath Construction in 2018. She has developed numerous 3 and 4 flats, particularly in the Near West Side and East Garfield Park.
Nick Serra is a small local homebuilder who founded Grace Street Renovation Lab in 2023 and has completed 15 rehab projects. He was previously a practicing attorney and disliked it so much he pivoted to real estate.
Katherine Darnstadt founded Latent Design, an architecture and urbanism practice in 2010. I met Katherine in 2015 and I think the main thing I remember about her practice is the breadth of it. She’s said that the firm has worked on projects “at the bench, building, and block scale”.
Now that I’ve audited the Chicago building permits for the last four years I can more accurately visualize where new homes were permitted across Chicago’s fifty wards. I was not surprised to see that the 27th Ward carries the team known as City Council, but I was surprised by how big the gap was between the first and second place wards, and the gap between the fewest number of wards where 50 percent of new homes were permitted and the number of wards where the other half were permitted.
In the period 2022-2024…
24.0 percent of new homes were permitted in the 27th Ward
10.6 percent in the 34th Ward
8.1 percent in the 3rd Ward
6.9 percent in the 4th Ward
Those four wards comprise 49.5 percent of new homes permitted, while 46 wards permitted the remaining 50.5 percent. Some of this imbalance is due to how different alderpersons accept new development proposals, and the current zoning capacity of properties in each ward.
Incredibly, when rounding to the tenths place, 24 wards permitted so few new homes in that time period that they round down to 0 percent.
To further illustrate how some wards are where so few new homes are permitted, which may be due to factors beyond the alderperson’s control (local rents not meeting development and construction costs, and racism, to name a couple), consider that six wards permitted fewer than 10 homes each during that three-year period.
While Chicago does not have quotas or goals on how many new homes should be permitted or built either citywide or by ward, the city will maintain a housing shortage if most wards are not facilitating or allowing new housing to be built. The allowance of new housing is heavily influenced by each alderperson’s choices.
The city’s ability to grow and spread the property tax revenue burden fairly depends on new development occurring across the city. This is especially the case in areas where new housing can moderate rising demand housing costs, and transportation infrastructure and amenities are in good supply.
Map 1. Chicago’s 50 wards and their share of new homes permitted in 2022-2024. Tap or click the map to enlarge it. Open the spreadsheet containing data that powers this map.
Other statistics
Table 1. New construction homes permitted, by year
2022
2023
2024
Total
7,574
4,498
4,360
16,432
Methodology
Using Chicago Department of Building permits that are imported to Chicago Cityscape’s Building Permits Browser, I review each new construction permit’s description to count the number of units authorized by that permit. Foundation phases of multi-phase permits and most revision permits are excluded. I do my best to catch projects that change scope between two permits, such as a permit originally issued for a two-flat but changed to a single-family house, or a larger multifamily building losing or gaining units in a subsequent permit.
New construction coach house units are also excluded because they are allowed only in five pilot areas in a subset of wards; view ADU statistics on Chicago Cityscape.
The statistics are also shown in Chicago Cityscape’s building permits analysis table, which is updated daily; look for columns with a heading that says the year and the word “audited”. Data for permits in other years are not yet reviewed and corrected.
This is an imperfect comparison of wards because there was a redrawing of ward boundaries and an election in 2023. This means that some alderpersons are new, and that all alderpersons oversaw new development approvals and the capacity of their zoning map in different areas before and after the remap.
On the flip side, the new ward map also means that the number of inhabitants in each ward was roughly equal at the time of the remap. This supports some level of data normalization (i.e. new homes permitted per capita), which can be done in future analysis.
It’s been nearly two years since I’ve written a blog post about the gut rehab of the two-flat I bought in 2020 so I figured an update was necessary. The status is that I’m working on finalizing a contract with a general contractor and I have a loan application in progress.Read the other two-flat journal posts.
Two-flats – and their cousins the three- and four-flats – are the second most common building type in Chicago. There are approximately 254,800 homes in 2-to-4 flats in Chicago, according to data collected by the Cook County Assessor’s Office. And according to the U.S. Census they make up 27.2 percent of residential structures in Chicago. That’s compared to 25.5 percent detached homes, 3.8 percent attached homes, and 43.5 percent of houses, apartment, and condo buildings with five or more units (2-to-4 flats can also be condo buildings).
Thus it makes sense that there would be a handful of blogs to discuss their renovation.
(Although in the same vein it would probably make sense that there are blogs to discuss renovating condos, and I haven’t come across those.)
That’s my house on the left, captured in December 2024.
I’m glad each one of these is pretty well-organized because it takes a lot of time to peruse a project-oriented blog for specific information if you haven’t read it from the beginning.
Here are the blogs
Most recently updated is listed first.
Two Flat: Remade This is the story of a deconversion (to a single detached house) but the renovation process is pretty much the same as restoring two units; gas service remains in the house. By Matt and Sarah, who bought the house circa 2011 and are still renovating it (check out “The Plan” page to learn about their phasing).
Reshaping our Footprint (One Watt at a Time) Follow our journey of a deep energy retrofit (or energy efficient rehab) on a 100+ year old masonry two flat in Chicago. The goal is to turn the building into a zero-energy home with a sustainable and resource-efficient landscape. Most posts are by Marcus de la Fleur.
Yellow Brick Home Kim and Scott bought the dilapidated two-flat in 2019 and completed the renovation in 2021 or 2022. Each unit and the outside are detailed in three groups of articles. Yellow Brick Home is the most design-forward of the blogs.
Little Chicago Two Flat Corey and Emily bought their two-flat in 2021 and did a DIY renovation over the next eight months.
If you know of another blog about renovating a 2-to-4 flat in Chicago, leave a comment with the link!
Bonus links
Back To The Studs This a video series by Brad and Sean who have been renovating a Brooklyn brownstone into three units since 2021. I’ve been watching their progress on TikTok, but given the “soft ban” it’s better to look at their YouTube page.
Home electrification case study in North Lawndale “Through Elevate’s electrification program, contractors installed electric, energy efficient appliances at Ms. McGee’s house in Lawndale. The upgrades included an electric stove, washer and dryer, as well as a heat pump that powers a central heating and cooling system.”
