If you want to open a hair salon in a Chicago storefront that’s zoned for business, you can, as long as there isn’t another salon within 1,000 feet1. If there is, you need a special use permit from the Zoning Board of Appeals (ZBA). That means paperwork, mailed notices, often hiring an attorney, attending an official hearing, possibly being part of a ward-level community presentation, and potentially paying rent for months on a space you can’t open. And for all that, the ZBA approves 95 percent of salon applications.
That number comes from the Metropolitan Planning Council’s (MPC) new report, At What Cost? How Chicago’s Outdated Zoning and Land Use Systems Thwart Inclusive Growth, published in October 2026. It arrives while a proposal to fix part of this problem has sat untouched in City Council for nearly two years. In December 2024, Ald. Desmon Yancy introduced an ordinance to let the zoning administrator approve many special uses directly, without a ZBA hearing. It still hasn’t been heard in committee.
I first wrote about Yancy’s proposal in a Bluesky thread the week before it was introduced. MPC’s research makes the case for it stronger than I could at the time.
What is a “special use”?
Chicago’s zoning code sorts every building type, business, or land use into one of three buckets in each zoning district: permitted “by right,” not allowed, or allowed as a “special use.” A special use is allowed only after a review that decides whether that particular location suits it. Today that review means a public hearing before the ZBA, a board of mayoral appointees.
MPC calls the ZBA process “complex” and “lengthy,” says it often requires the help of an attorney, and concludes that its “opacity… and lack of consistent guidelines” favor applicants with time and money, “creating a pay-to-play system.” (Based on my observations at ZBA meetings most hair salon applicants represent themselves and the ZBA board members accommodate them and how they are not as familiar with the processes as other applicants who’ve hired attorneys.)
The ZBA approves nearly everything
MPC built its own dataset from more than a decade of ZBA meeting minutes (through October 2023). The city doesn’t publish this data in a searchable format, so MPC’s staff had to pull it from hundreds of PDFs. Here’s what they found:
| Finding | Figure |
|---|---|
| Share of all ZBA applications approved | 92% (only 3–4% are explicitly denied; the rest are withdrawn) |
| Votes in which the board was unanimous | 96% |
| Special use applications reviewed per year | About 230 |
| Special use applications coming from business (B) and commercial (C) districts | 78% |
| Special use applications for hair, nail, or beauty salons and barbershops | 27% |
| Salon and barbershop applications approved | 95% |
| Salon and barbershop applications decided at their first hearing | 90% |
Translation: more than a quarter of the board’s special use docket is salons and barbershops, and they’re approved almost every time. That sounds like a toll that every applicant pays. MPC also points out who pays it: 91 percent of hairdressers and cosmetologists are women, and nail salon workers are mostly immigrants, so the 1,000-foot rule likely falls hardest on women-owned and immigrant-owned small businesses.
I’d like to know why City Council cares about how close two salons are to each other and wanted to regulate that.
What Yancy’s ordinance would change
The ordinance (O2024-0014002) was introduced on December 2, 2024, and co-sponsored by Alderpersons Rodriguez (22nd Ward), Villegas (36th), and Hadden (49th). It amends Section 17-13-0900 of the zoning code so that the zoning administrator, a DPD staff position, decides special use applications instead of only sending a recommendation to the ZBA.
The ZBA would keep the final say on:
- anything in a manufacturing (M) or planned manufacturing district (PMD)
- special uses requiring compliance with the Air Quality Ordinance
- drive-throughs
- waste-related uses
- cannabis establishments
- gas stations
- liquor stores
- adult uses
Everything else that’s a special use today would go to the zoning administrator:
| Category | Special uses that would move to the zoning administrator |
|---|---|
| Housing | Ground-floor homes in B1, B3, C1, and C2 districts (detached houses, two-flats, townhouses, multi-unit buildings, elderly housing, and single-room occupancy); artist and business live/work units; residential conversion units; most housing types in the DX district, and multi-unit, elderly, and SRO housing in DC |
| Shelters and group living | Transitional residences, transitional shelters, temporary overnight shelters, domestic violence shelters and residences, group community homes, nursing homes, assisted living, and group living not otherwise classified |
| Neighborhood businesses | Hair salons, nail salons, and barbershops within 1,000 feet of another one; banks, currency exchanges, and ATMs subject to the pedestrian street rules; body art (tattoo) services; massage establishments; fortune telling; taverns and rooftop patios in B3; indoor event venues; entertainment cabarets; hookah bars; rooftop urban farms; hotels and motels |
| Civic and institutional | Community centers and recreation buildings (including in parks), religious assembly, schools, colleges in C3, lodges and private clubs, police stations, government-operated health centers in residential districts, major utilities, and detention and correctional facilities |
| Other uses | Pawn shops, payday and title loan stores, valuable objects dealers, firearms dealers, shooting ranges, wagering facilities, day labor employment agencies, and flea markets |
| Auto-oriented and other | Non-accessory parking lots, vehicle storage and towing, animal shelters and boarding kennels, stables, poultry slaughtering, cremation, freestanding wireless towers, satellite dishes beyond what’s allowed by right, and certain signs |
Two more details stand out:
- Public input stays. Applicants would still mail, publish, and post the same notices, and the public would get 30 days to send comments to the zoning administrator. What goes away is the daytime City Hall hearing.
- There’s a deadline, and it has teeth. If the zoning administrator doesn’t decide within 120 days of a complete application, it’s automatically approved (unless the applicant caused the delay).
MPC’s suggestions would go further
Yancy’s ordinance and MPC’s recommendations point in the same direction, but MPC goes a step further. MPC recommends permitting “most current special use categories by-right, with accompanying use standards,” and saving ZBA review for “uses with likely impacts on health and safety,” like heavy manufacturing, waste processing, and adult uses. Salons, live-work spaces, and community centers would be “regulated like all other business types.”
(Use standards mean specific requirements the applicant would have to show when they get their business license or building permit. The same people who review those now would ensure that the applicant is planning to meet those specific requirements, and city inspectors would verify these things before the business gets approval to open for customers.)
The two also agree on housing. Exempting shelters and transitional residences from the ZBA was one of the recommendations in the city’s Cut the Tape report, and MPC recommends removing the special use requirement for single-room occupancy (SRO) buildings, shelters, and other group living, a requirement that MPC says “delays or blocks a necessary housing option… for our lowest-resourced neighbors.” This is also the position of Abundant Housing Illinois, which advocates for removing barriers to approving housing and for increasing affordable housing.
I wonder why some uses need a special zoning review at all: hookah bars are on the special use list yet regulating indoor smoking is a job for health and licensing rules, not zoning. That’s an argument for MPC’s approach: review each item in the special use list, permit the low-impact uses by right, and keep a real hearing for the few that need it.
What about the alderpersons?
The obvious objection is that the zoning administrator becomes the person angry alderpersons blame. Alderpersons wouldn’t get a formal sign-off under the ordinance, though they’d receive the same notice that nearby property owners get.
But MPC notes that alderpersons already aren’t officially part of the ZBA process, and yet “in practice, alders hold major sway in the outcome,” so special use applications “often require political support to move forward.” Moving the decision to staff, with a deadline, gives that informal pressure less room to work.
That’s part of why it’s notable that this proposal came from Ald. Yancy. His predecessor in the 5th Ward tried to rezone a stretch of the 71st Street commercial corridor to single-family residential, which would have given her a veto over any business that wanted to open there. Yancy is proposing to give some of that kind of power away.
Where it stands
The ordinance has not been heard in committee. One of its co-sponsors, Ald. Gilbert Villegas, now chairs the Committee on Zoning, Landmarks and Building Standards. Villegas should give Yancy’s ordinance a hearing and the committee should pass it. Then the city planning department and committee should later take up MPC’s larger recommendation: write use standards into the code and let low-impact uses like salons open by right.
- The average distance between licensed hair salons in Chicago is 563 feet and the median distance is 351. There are currently 1,730 licensed hair, nail, and skin care services businesses that are subject to the proximity rules. ↩︎
