Tag: Abundant Housing Illinois

Abundant Housing Illinois statement on BUILD, PRO, and FAIR

September 26, 2026 / / 1 Comment

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.)

Abundant Housing Illinois endorsement graphic: If you want cheaper housing, push BUILD. If you want cheaper housing and tenant rights, push BUILD and vote for an amended PRO.

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.

Warmly,

Abundant Housing Illinois

Update, October 2026: We’ve since published detailed follow-ups on two parts of PRO: what Chicago’s rental registry should collect, and how to pay for it, and how Chicago should regulate rental junk fees.

AHIL group in front of an Amtrak train

A day in Springfield with Abundant Housing Illinois

April 20, 2026 / / 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.

Chloe, Rep. Bob Morgan, Ben
Everyone wore their AHIL t-shirt
Gov. Pritzker happened to come down the stairs near our group
Photos by Stephen Stassen

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!

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 / / 1 Comment

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.