BUILD fact of the day: The plan includes a middle housing component that would allow cottage clusters, courtyard buildings, and pocket neighborhoods across the state.
A pocket neighborhood with 12 homes broke ground in Evanston this year. The rest of Illinois has most likely never seen one built in decades. The BUILD plan would change that.
Photos of the construction site by Steven Vance and renderings of UrbanEco
What is a pocket neighborhood?
A pocket neighborhood (also called a cottage court or cottage cluster) is a small cluster of detached homes arranged around shared outdoor space. Each home has its own front door and a measure of privacy, but the units face inward toward a common courtyard or green space rather than outward to the street.
Chicago has pre-1950s examples, mostly on the South Side, but current zoning in Chicago and most Illinois municipalities makes new ones nearly impossible to build.
What’s being built in Evanston
Developer David Wallach of BluePaint Development broke ground this month on UrbanEco on Grant, a 12-home pocket neighborhood at 1915 Grant Street in Evanston, steps from the Metra Central/Union Pacific North line. Each home is approximately 600 square feet with two bedrooms and one bathroom over one story. Prices start at $369,000, and five of the twelve homes were already under contract at the time of the groundbreaking ceremony.
The project occupies roughly 30,000 square feet across two parcels (inspect this property on Chicago Cityscape); there was previously a vacant lot and a single-family house. Evanston updated its zoning code to allow the project, but it wasn’t easy: the development faced substantial neighborhood opposition before City Council approved it in March 2024.
At the groundbreaking, Evanston Community Development Director Sarah Flax acknowledged the challenge: “I don’t think there’s any one thing that’s going to solve the problem — we got to be open to lots of different things.” Developer Wallach credited the city directly: “This city takes on really, really big issues, and they’re certainly to be commended for it.”
One of the twelve homes is currently listed for sale at $369,000 — a 600-square-foot, two-bedroom detached home with shared outdoor amenities including a landscaped courtyard with fire pit and grill, near parks, schools, and transit.
Why this housing type is almost impossible to build in Illinois today
Outside of Evanston, pocket neighborhoods collide with standard zoning rules at every turn. In Chicago, I identified at least six separate zoning barriers that prevent them:
Most codes allow only one principal building per lot — pocket neighborhoods need multiple detached buildings on one site
Minimum lot-area-per-unit rules make small clusters economically unworkable
Lot subdivision rules block individual fee-simple ownership of units
Rear setback requirements conflict with inward-facing courtyard designs
Side setback standards prevent the close clustering the typology requires
Parking rules restrict placement in ways that break courtyard-oriented designs
Getting around these barriers, as Evanston did, requires a years-long rezoning process with no guaranteed outcome — and, as the UrbanEco project shows, significant community opposition along the way.
Next door to UrbanEco is another kind of pocket neighborhood, a set of five ranch townhouses built in 1962.
Five ranch townhouses next to the new UrbanEco development.
What the Illinois BUILD plan would change
Governor Pritzker’s BUILD plan includes a middle housing reform (SB 4060) that would require all Illinois residential zoning districts to permit cottage clusters — along with duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, townhouses, stacked flats, and attached and detached courtyard housing.
The bill allows between two and eight units per lot depending on lot size, with middle housing types permitted on lots as small as 2,500 square feet. Crucially, municipalities couldn’t simply decline to update their codes. Whatever barriers each municipality maintains would have to come down.
Evanston spent years navigating a contentious public process to allow a single pocket neighborhood. Under the BUILD plan, that fight would be nearly moot everywhere in Illinois — the housing type would be legal by default.
Two views of the same one-story floor plan showing two bedrooms, a bathroom, a terrace, and combined kitchen, dining, and living rooms.
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. .
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, BenEveryone wore their AHIL t-shirtGov. Pritzker happened to come down the stairs near our groupPhotos 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!
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:
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.
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:
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.
Four two-flats in Logan SquareA courtyard-style building (but without the courtyard)
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.
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.
Further reading:
Minnesota study on fire risk of buildings with a single stair compared to buildings with more than one store
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.
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.
Volunteers and Rep. BucknerAHIL volunteers at the Springfield Amtrak station
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.
Cottage and bungalow courts (also called clusters and pocket neighborhoods) are a common multi-family design typology in cities outside of Illinois. You’ll find them in California (where they’re more often called bungalow courts) and Tennessee, for example. They are characterized by having multiple detached one or two-story houses on a single and compact development site. The houses commonly face a shared green space and have shared parking behind them.
A primary benefit of cottage courts – and smaller footprint housing, generally – is that it creates more for-sale detached houses (which are in very high demand in Chicago) while sharing land [1]. In other words, cottage courts create more detached houses using less land.
It is not possible to build a cottage court in Chicago because of how the zoning code is written. The purpose of this article is to discuss specific text amendments that would have to be collectively adopted in order to allow this housing type.
The Chicago zoning code allows only one principal building per lot. A detached house constitutes a principal building and only one of them is allowed. The code would have to be changed to allow more than one principal buildings per lot. If the city council wants to limit this allowance to cottage courts then other code would have to be modified to define a cottage court (similarly to how it has a definition of a townhouse). (Section 17-1-1300 – this anti-housing provision is in the first chapter of the Chicago zoning code!)
Cottage courts should be fee simple [2], to make them easier to mortgage and sell, which means subdividing a lot into one lot per house. The Chicago zoning code does not allow subdividing a lot below the minimum lot area for the particular zoning district governing a lot. For example, currently in RS-3, if more than one principal building per lot was allowed, each cottage court house would have to occupy 2,500 s.f., which is an untenable size for cottage court development.
Minimum lot area per unit standards also severely restrict development of cottage courts. To build four houses in an RS-3 zoning district one would need a 10,000 s.f. lot!
Rear setbacks would need to be reducible, preferably without the need for a variation from the Zoning Board of Appeals. Because the houses are oriented to face a common green space at the interior of the lot (not at the front or rear of the lot), the rear of the house may be close to the side property line, violating the rear setback standard of ~30 feet.
Side setbacks would need to be combinable or eliminated as a requirement for cottage court development, so that the houses could be closer together or the designer could have more flexibility in their orientation.
Parking requirements would need to be more flexible, both in quantity and in design. Parking is currently allowed only in the rear setback, but these houses may not have a rear setback because of their inward orientation. To maximize shared green space parking requirements should be reducible for this housing type. The Chicago TOD ordinance may be relevant here, as it now applies in RM-5, and higher, residential zoning districts, but the cottage court needs to be allowable in the RS-3 and RT-4 zoning districts (as these are for more common).
Attorneys, designers, and developers: Are there any other Chicago zoning code standards missing?
Examples of cottage courts
I know of a few cottage courts in Chicago (et. al. means there is an address range):
7436 S Phillips Ave (et. al.). These were built prior to 1952, according to historic aerial images, and are individually parceled (see barrier #2 above).
7433 S Euclid Pkwy (et. al.). The houses were built between 1938 and 1952, according to historic aerial images, and are individually parceled. Two of the parcels are vacant.
1802 S Kildare Ave (et. al.). The houses were built after 1950.
3020 N Waterloo Ct (et. al.). This townhouse court was built between 1970 and 1975. These houses are arranged like townhouses but they are not compliant with the present townhouse code (adopted in 2004) because they are too dense and have too little parking. The density is equivalent to 2.5 homes per standard lot (which, in Chicago, is 3,125 s.f.).
511 W Deming Pl (et. al.) at Geneva Terrace. This looks like a hybrid cottage and townhouse cluster. It has a large front yard and a shared interior courtyard. Each of the five units is an individually owned and taxed parcel.
3020 N Waterloo Ct has 25 homes and one car parking space per home.551 W Deming Pl has five homes.
All of the images below are from the Missing Middle Housing website, created by Opticos Design, an architecture firm that has popularized the term “missing middle”.
Three photos of existing cottage courts, and a site plan showing how a cottage court could be arranged.
Cottage court codes
Burlington, VT, approved a zoning plan in March 2024 that permits “cottage courts” in places “where lots make it feasible”. Read their new Neighborhood Code, which created the graphics below showing before and after the code change.
Graphics showing the new housing types that are allowed in the updated Burlington, VT, zoning code. (I made the collage.)
Notes
A tiny house village may also be considered a cottage court. The influential architecture firm, Landon Bone Baker, once designed a proposed tiny house village (knowing full well it was not legal) for Thresholds and Easter Seals in Chicago.
[1] It’s also assumed that sharing land means sharing land costs, and land costs are a significant part of purchasing a house. In the areas where demand for detached houses is the highest, land costs are also the highest. Cottage courts create more detached houses with less land.
[2] fee simple has a legal meaning, but here I mean “the house owner also owns the land beneath the house”, and the pair are collateral for the lender that, on paper, looks like any other detached house the lender has mortgaged.
