Update July 15, 2026: Mayor Johnson introduced the Protecting Renters Ordinance as number O2026-0026554 on June 29, 2026. Today, City That Works wrote about the pros and cons and potential positive and negative impacts of the proposed legislation.
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 (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.
