Tag: Abundant Housing Illinois

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. ↩︎
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. 

a collage of photos of a coach house ADU in Lakeview with the text "yes to ADUs citywide"

This is the month we get ADUs legalized citywide

September 2, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Update: City Council adopted a 135% expansion of the ADUs eligibility area with options to go citywide, on September 25, 2025.

Abundant Housing Illinois has put together a bunch of pro-ADU events this month – two of our own, one with a partner, and one is a City Council meeting – in anticipation of the vote on September 25, 2025.

The house tour is a 3-block away from the Cottage Grove ‘L’ station in Woodlawn, and the address will be provided after you RSVP.

Finally, our ADU petition. We’re trying to collect 500 more signatures to deliver to City Council.

Illinois might join the country’s league of states adopting land use reforms

February 23, 2024 / / 2 Comments

Update on April 5, 2025: none of these bills were passed, but there is greater momentum in the current General Assembly for new bills. Read about them on my newer blog post.

Illinois House Representative Kam Buckner (26th district) has introduced three bills that would adopt land use reforms across all or a lot of the state. This is a trend happening across the United States to address twin crises of low housing construction and limited affordable housing caused in large part by individual municipalities restricting new housing.

I’ve summarized the three proposed bills below. If you would like to help get these adopted, join Abundant Housing Illinois.

Allowing accessory dwelling units

Accessory dwelling units (ADUs) are apartments and small backyard houses that are built to provide on-site housing for family members, or generate additional income. They are usually allowed by amending zoning codes to add design parameters that treat them differently than apartments, detached, or attached houses and exempt them from typical density limitations inherent in nearly all zoning codes.

Buckner filed HB4213 in November 2023, which would disallow any unit of local government in Illinois from prohibiting ADUs, which most governments in Illinois do through various zoning rules (the main one being that a residentially-zoned parcel is only allowed to have a single building).

A bill like this has already been adopted in California, Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire (at a minimum).

Letters to the editor

I submitted a letter to the editor in March and am waiting for the media outlet to select it for publication.

Coach houses are one type of small backyard house, common in Chicago. This one in Lakeview was built in 2023.

Lifting parking mandates

Buckner submitted HB4638 in January 2024 to get local governments out of the business of forcing a minimum number of car parking spaces at developments near transit, which are currently established without any rationale. You might say the amount of space cities require businesses and apartment buildings to provide is based on vibes.

Letters to the editor

  • My letter to the editor describing the benefits of not requiring so much parking everywhere, and specifically mentioned this bill, was published in The Daily Line in February.
  • Pete Snyder’s letter to the editor was published in the Chicago Sun-Times in March and asks Chicago to “finish the job” that the Connected Communities ordinance started and remove parking mandates citywide.
There are so many better things we can do for a community than dedicating land for car parking.

Allowing more than one home per lot

Most municipal zoning codes in Illinois have a zoning district called something like “R1” that allows one detached house on a lot, often setting a very large minimum lot size that must be assembled before construction can begin. Municipal leaders then apply R1 broadly within their municipalities’ boundaries, effectively banning condos, townhouses, row houses, and apartments – the most affordable kinds of homes to buy and rent.

Buckner introduced HB4795 in February 2024; it would apply to the state’s eight largest cities and require them to allow at least a “duplex” (two-unit house) on every parcel that allows a detached single-family house.

Naperville would be one of the covered municipalities; the city allows two-family dwellings in R2 zoning districts and slightly more homes per lot in the higher-number R zoning districts. Their B1 neighborhood shopping district also allows multi-family housing.

But the Naperville zoning map shows how prevalent R1 and its friends the “E” estate districts are: the vast majority of the city is zoned to allow only single detached houses.

Letters to the editor

My letter to the editor in support of this bill was published in the Chicago Sun-Times on February 26, 2024.