PRO is a comprehensive modernization of the Residential Landlord and Tenant Ordinance — the 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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.

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.

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.

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.

One of the twelve UrbanEco on Grant homes is currently listed for $369,000. Delivery is scheduled for summer 2026.

Show your support for pocket neighborhoods and unbanning other middle housing types by sending emails to your two state legislators.

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. .

Thank you for your time and attention.

I visited with two friends; I think we left there with a clearer picture of the hidden machinery behind our region’s daily life.

A plant almost a century old

The O’Brien plant opened in October 1928. At the time, it was the largest sewage treatment facility in the world. Nearly a century later, it still serves over 1.3 million people across 143 square miles: Chicago north of Fullerton Avenue and 17 north suburban Cook County communities including Evanston, Skokie, Wilmette, Northbrook, and Glenview. Wastewater from all of those homes and businesses travels through a network of intercepting sewers beneath McCormick Boulevard before arriving at the plant’s 97-acre campus at Howard Street.

The plant was renamed for Terrence J. O’Brien, a longtime MWRD president who died in 2021. It’s one of seven plants in the district, each serving a distinct drainage area across the Chicago region.

Simpler than you’d think — and more remarkable for it

The treatment process is more straightforward than most people imagine. Incoming wastewater first passes through screens that remove large debris, then into settling tanks where solids drop out — capturing 60 to 80 percent of suspended material. After that, the water moves into aeration tanks where staff introduce what they affectionately call “bugs”: beneficial bacteria that consume the remaining organic matter. A final round of ultraviolet light disinfection kills any remaining pathogens before the treated water discharges into the North Shore Channel. This effluent is cleaner than the water in the channel.

That channel, built between 1907 and 1910, carries the plant’s effluent south toward the Chicago River — an engineered system designed to move water away from the lake and through the region. Because much of Chicago relies on combined sewers — single pipes carrying both stormwater and sewage — heavy rain events send a surge of combined flow toward the plant. It connects to TARP, the Deep Tunnel system, which captures and holds that overflow until the plant can process it. The plant handles an average of 230 million gallons per day, with surge capacity up to 450 million. At the time of our visit the plant had processed 156 million gallons.

Touring the plant

The MWRD ran an efficient open house, with guided tours departing every 15 minutes. Our guide was a retired staffer who came back to volunteer. Before working there for 10 years he worked at a suburban municipality’s drinking water plant.

A highlight was the 1926 Pump and Blower Building, a vaulted brick-and-steel industrial hall with a skylit roof that. Inside, massive blowers push air into the aeration tanks to keep the bacteria alive and working. Those machines account for roughly half the facility’s entire electricity consumption. It’s a staggering thought: hundreds of millions of gallons treated daily, and the biggest energy draw is simply moving some air.

We weren’t allowed into the grit chamber during the open house, but our guide noted that school groups regularly visit it — and that children almost universally react to the smell by pulling their shirts over their noses.

Infrastructure worth knowing

More people should understand how the infrastructure they pay for and benefit from actually works. The O’Brien open house is a rare chance to do exactly that: to stand next to the blowers, walk past the settling tanks, and talk to the people who run it. Staff talked to us about how they test at the plant and at businesses that generate “industrial wastewater”, including breweries and metal processing facilities.

The staff also test for viruses as well as fecal matter to assess the effluent’s cleanliness. The tour guide said that before the water enters the UV channels Before the UV channels the water has over 1,000 fecal coliform per 100 mL; after treatment it drops to 25, sometimes as low as 3. The MWRD’s NPDES permit sets the effluent limit at 200/100 mL as a 30-day geometric mean, so readings of 3–25 represent the plant performing well above the requirement.

The process is elegant in its logic, the history is genuinely impressive, and the scale is humbling. MWRD’s website does a better job than I at summarizing the process. The MWRD holds open houses at several of its water treatment plants each year. There are two more this month:

• Saturday, May 16. Stickney
• Saturday, May 30. Calumet

The co-living trend seems to be picking up in Chicago. Co-living is a housing arrangement where people who don’t necessarily know each other live in the same apartment and share a kitchen, but each tenant is only responsible for a lease on their own bedroom. It saves tenants money through shared facilities — typically including in-unit laundry — and many of the new co-living developments offer the same amenity package as Chicago’s market-rate apartment buildings: rooftop decks, coworking space, gyms.

Co-living isn’t new. Unrelated adults have been sharing apartments for centuries. What’s new is the on-site amenity layer, on par with the newest apartment buildings in the city. As a renter myself, there’s a real attraction to it: you save a little money by having roommates, you don’t have to find them yourself, and you aren’t responsible for their share of the rent. Many operators bundle weekly professional cleaning into the rent, which handles the chore-wheel question. Some apartments come fully furnished.

Related: Chicago’s zoning code regulates the number of unrelated adults that a household can be designed to accommodate – laws that undo this are sometimes called “The Golden Girls Bill”. Read more.

The regulatory picture

In Chicago, co-living buildings adhere to the same zoning code standards and largely the same building code standards as a multi-family development. They are also subject to the same Affordable Requirements Ordinance (ARO) standards as a multi-unit building. Even though the standards are the same, navigating the Department of Buildings and Department of Planning & Development processes isn’t always straightforward for new co-living developers.

Ten buildings, six operators

By my count there were ten co-living buildings operating or under construction in Chicago at the start of 2019, run by a mix of local, national, and international companies. Most allowed whole-apartment leases in addition to room-by-room leases.

Common is a New York–based operator that has built a platform local developers can plug into for new construction or conversions. Three Chicago buildings:

• 455 W Briar Pl. in Lakeview — a converted two-flat with 14 bedrooms and 8.5 bathrooms, permitted as an SRO. (“SRO” is a zoning code term; the building code calls the same thing congregate living.) This was the only conversion in Common’s Chicago portfolio at the time; everything else was new construction.
• 2048 W Chicago Ave. in Ukrainian Village — new construction.
• 1407 W 15th St., between the Illinois Medical District and Pilsen — under construction at the time. It later opened as Common Addams.

PMG (Property Markets Group) is a local developer that operates two co-living buildings:

• The L in Logan Square, at 2211 N Milwaukee Ave.
• X Chicago in University Village, at 710 W 14th St.

1237 West at 1237 W. Fullerton Ave. — A privately owned DePaul University dormitory that recently began accepting non-students. Owned and operated by The Scion Group.

Quarters at 171 N Aberdeen St. in the West Loop — The first Chicago location of Berlin-based Medici Living Group’s international Quarters brand. The building was developed by MCZ Development.

30 East Apartments in the South Loop — Opened in 2017. It’s surrounded by several colleges and universities, so the marketing leans toward students, but you don’t have to be one to live there. Developed by Gilbane and managed by Asset Campus Housing.

Bungalow is a startup that master-leases existing houses and apartments. At the time: a 5-bedroom house in Bucktown and a unit in Wicker Park.

If I missed a Chicago co-living building from that 2019 moment, let me know.

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.

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!

I started pulling numbers in August 2022 (which I posted in a Twitter thread) and the gap was striking. Illinois agriculture generates more than $19 billion annually in commodities. The Netherlands’ agricultural sector is worth roughly $106 billion — more than five times as much, from a country smaller than West Virginia.

Illinois is no slouch

To be fair to Illinois, the state punches well above its weight in food production and processing:

• Illinois ranks third nationally in the export of agricultural commodities, shipping $8.2 billion worth of goods to other countries.
• With 2,640 food manufacturing companies, Illinois ranks first in the nation in processed food sales — $180 billion worth.

That $180 billion processed food figure matters. Illinois doesn’t just grow crops; it turns them into products. That’s a different and more lucrative part of the supply chain.

The Dutch numbers need an asterisk

When I first posted that the Netherlands exports $106 billion in agriculture, I had to walk it back. The Dutch import and then re-export enormous quantities of goods — Rotterdam is one of the world’s largest ports, and the Netherlands functions partly as a distribution hub for Europe. Accounting for that, their domestic origin agricultural exports are closer to $77 billion. Still more than nine times Illinois’ export figure.

The Washington Post explained how: the Netherlands is the second largest food exporter in the world by value, behind only the United States — a country with 20 times the land area. The Dutch achieve this through intensive greenhouse agriculture, precision farming, and a relentless focus on yield per square meter. (And apparently, feeding discarded stroopwafels to pigs and chickens.)

Agricultural universities: world-class programs on both sides

The agricultural excellence of both regions is reflected in their universities. Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands holds the top global ranking from QS, and has been named the world’s most sustainable campus for nine consecutive years (it’s 12-mile bike ride west of Arnhem). Its research focuses on food systems, climate resilience, and sustainable farming—precisely the disciplines that underpin the Netherlands’ intensive, high-yield agricultural model.

In Illinois, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) ranks among the nation’s top programs in crop sciences and agricultural engineering. UIUC is home to the Morrow Plots, established in 1876 as the oldest continuous agronomic research site in the United States, and its researchers drive advances in plant genetics and biotechnology that benefit Midwest grain production. That both regions produce top-ranked agricultural universities is no coincidence: world-class farming and world-class research reinforce each other.

The cost of intensity: a manure crisis

The Netherlands’ agricultural output is so intensive that waste manure now exceeds the country’s own environmental standards. The national government has been working out how to actively contract the agriculture industry to bring nitrogen emissions under control. The productivity that made Dutch farming famous is now colliding with environmental limits in a country that has almost no room to absorb the runoff.

That tension doesn’t resolve the admiration for what Dutch farmers have built, but it’s an important caveat to any “why can’t we farm like the Dutch” argument.

Dutch expertise travels

Despite the domestic pressures, Dutch agricultural knowledge is in demand globally. In January 2023, Dutch farming firms brought their expertise to Kentucky.

By May 2023, Rotterdam had opened a floating cattle farm — a multi-story farm built on a barge in the harbor, producing milk within the city. You can tour Floating Farm.

From farmland to transit: the same underlying lesson

By early 2024 the thread had drifted from agriculture to land use and transit. The same constraint that pushes Dutch farmers into vertical greenhouses and floating barns shapes how the Dutch build cities and move people.

In May 2022, CTA and Metra together provided 315,481 rail rides per day. The Dutch national railway (“NS”) carried over 1,000,000 per day. The raw gap is about 3.2x, but the Netherlands has 2.1x more people than the seven-county Chicago metro region, so on a per-capita basis NS carries about 1.5x more rides per resident per day than CTA and Metra combined — and that’s before counting Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague’s separate tram and metro systems.

In February 2024, NS announced its 2025 timetable. One change stood out: they were going to increase service to every 10 minutes between The Hague, Rotterdam, and Dordrecht. To put that in Chicago terms, it would be like Metra running through-trains from Hyde Park to Highland Park every 10 minutes because it takes about two hours today, with frequencies every 1-2 hours (We should #BuildTheTunnel.)

The travel time comparison makes it even starker. The Hague to Dordrecht via Rotterdam takes a fraction of the time it takes to travel a comparable corridor in the Chicago region — not because the trains are faster, but because the network is integrated, the frequency is high, and stations are where people actually want to go.

What connects all of this

The Netherlands has spent decades — centuries, really — solving the problem of doing more with less space. In agriculture, that means precision, intensity, and now painful reckoning with environmental limits. In cities and transit, it means integrated networks, high frequency, and land use patterns that make transit work.

“This campaign was shaped by the hands of hundreds of people who made our victory possible,” Warren said in an emailed statement. “I will strive to honor their work and to be a public servant worthy of those I have the privilege to serve.”

As of today I’ve volunteered for Drake Warren’s campaign for Cook County Commissioner of District 10 for twenty hours. That’s six shifts, and six wildly different weather patterns that changed day-to-day and hour-to-hour.

In such a short time I’ve talked to so many Chicagoans. Chicagoans who are voting for Drake, might vote for Drake, and people who can’t or won’t vote. It’s been fun, eye opening, and challenging to try and find ways to connect with so many different people as they walk to or from the grocery store or gym. I did poll greeting at Truman College several times and it’s pretty easy to pick up on people’s habits and figure out which people are headed to cosmetology, to Aldi, or to vote. (I live in a different neighborhood where my neighbors have another set of destinations and patterns.)

I’m supporting Drake because he wants to do the job full time, depends on transit and understands the link between the Board of Commissioners and the CTA, rents his home and, like most renters, has experienced the painful rent increases driven by our housing shortage firsthand. Plus he has clear policy priorities and plans for the future of the office and the Board. I also support his candidacy because his vision for housing affordability is authentic and realistic. He and I are, after all, members of Abundant Housing Illinois alongside whom we’ve spent a lot of time demanding that electeds allow for more housing options to lessen the devastating impacts of a housing shortage — displacement, homelessness, and low quality home environments. 

I haven’t encountered someone who was going to vote for the incumbent, Bridget Gainer, and I wish I could say my sample size is a reliable indicator of what the results will be on Tuesday. But I’m not taking any chances. After I publish this, I’m planning to get back out there for eight more hours on March 17, Election Day. 

People have noticed Drake’s dedication. They’ve seen him at Broadway Armory daily as they commute past him. They’ve appreciated hearing his policy to stop vacant land tax breaks as he stands in the January cold outside their door. And remarked how well he communicates his proposals about the issues Cook County is required to tackle and how it can do better – in person and in various interviews. The juxtaposition between Drake’s and the incumbent’s campaigns has been conspicuous to many folks. This was the case before the news came out showing Gainer had the second worst attendance record for board and committee meetings. Based on some of my conversations during greeting I think that has caused some voters to seek an alternative. 

I’ve asked many of my friends to join me at the early voting locations (a few have heeded the call), or watch and repost one of his videos, or simply read the engaging interview with him in Windy City Times. It was amusing to get a couple of texts from people saying, “I saw your friend when I dropped off my ballot at Broadway Armory.” Drake has been greeting people at that early voting location for two weeks.

A community of advocates for more housing, clean energy, and safe transportation has sprung up to support Drake. I feel invigorated being part of this local movement to elect someone who can meet the moment and better represent my friends and other district residents (including my sister and mother).

I’ll be out there tomorrow, on Election Day.

Please vote or drop off your ballot at a secure drop box!

Improved cost tables

The “Costs of these crashes” tables have two improvements.

• Each injury-severity column now shows a count alongside the dollar figure, so you can see exactly how many people of each type were killed, had incapacitating injuries, or had non-incapacitating injuries for the selected time period. This makes it easier to verify the numbers and understand the scale behind the cost estimates.

• The tables previously listed three person-type rows: Driver/Passenger, Pedestrian, and Bicycle. The CPD dataset actually includes six person types. The two remaining types — non-motor vehicle occupants and non-contact vehicle occupants — were being silently folded into the Driver/Passenger row. They now appear in their own “Other” row.

What’s interesting is the differences in value. Pedestrian is “worth” less than bicyclist. Cost estimates use values from the CDC’s WISQARS Cost of Injury study and vary by injury severity and person type.

• A pedestrian who is killed is said to result in $14,169 in medical costs and $10,500,000 in non-medical costs, totaling $10,514,169
• A bicyclist who is killed is said to result in $19,750 in medical costs and $10,800,000 in non-medical costs, totaling $10,819,750
• A motor vehicle occupant who is killed is said to result in $11,556 in medical costs and $10,600,000 in non-medical costs, totaling $10,611,556

I haven’t figured out why the pedestrian has a lower non-medical cost.

A note on count differences

You may notice that the injury counts in the “Costs of these crashes” table differ slightly from the totals in the “killed or injured” summary above it. This is expected and I will try to reconcile them 1:1 soon. The two figures come from two Chicago Police Department datasets and may be modified at certain times in ways that my import system does not catch. They differ by a small number of records at any given time.

Crash data is sourced from the Traffic Crashes — Crashes and Traffic Crashes — People datasets on the Chicago Data Portal.

The skill, called speech-clip-extractor, takes a video file and a set of topics you care about, then returns a table of timestamps, quotes, and reasons each moment is worth clipping. From there, it extracts the clips using ffmpeg.

Transcription with mlx-whisper

The first step is generating a subtitle file. I used mlx-whisper, Apple’s port of OpenAI Whisper optimized for Apple Silicon. Running on the Neural Engine instead of the CPU, it transcribes a 60-minute video in a few minutes rather than the better part of an hour. One gotcha: mlx-whisper only installs on arm64 Python. If you’re running Anaconda, which ships as x86_64 under Rosetta, the install will silently fail. The fix is to use Homebrew’s Python instead.

I’ve since added speaker diarization to the skill using pyannote.audio. When enabled, each line in the transcript gets a [SPEAKER_00]: label so you can immediately distinguish who is talking. I found this very helpful when reviewing the discussions in multi-person settings like city council committee hearings, where aldermen, commissioners, and witnesses take turns speaking and a plain transcript quickly becomes hard to follow.

Finding the highlights

Once Claude Code has the VTT transcript, it reads the full text and looks for moments that match the topics I specified. For a recent recorded interview with a Cook County Commissioner candidate, I asked it to find moments about property taxes, vacant land, housing, and the Cook County Land Bank. Claude returned a table of eight clips with timestamps, direct quotes, and a one-line note on why each moment was notable — things like “specific stat, strong soundbite” or “names names, calls out a specific corrupt dynamic.”

I also used this skill to locate specific timestamps in Governor Pritzker’s speech from his budget address last week, to locate the parts about housing that I had heard live as he was speaking. It allowed me to quickly pull out clips to show the part when he said “everything is just too damned expensive” and when he talked about parking reform.

I’ve also used it extensively to take notes on very long public hearings — the kind that run three or four hours and cover dozens of agenda items. Rather than rewatching the whole thing, I run the transcript through the skill with a set of topics I care about, and it surfaces the relevant exchanges with timestamps. It’s become my go-to way to extract usable notes from Chicago City Council committee hearings and Illinois legislative testimony.

Cutting the clips

The skill uses ffmpeg to extract each clip and optionally concatenate them into a single video. Even if you don’t use the step of extracting each clip having the timestamps can be immensely helpful to guide you to the right spot in a long video file.

For vertical social media cuts, it applies a 9:16 center crop. When there are two speakers in the frame, it switches the crop to follow whoever is talking — cutting to the left side of the frame when the interviewer speaks and the right when the candidate answers. However, in my experience so far the crop is poorly done so I created my own crop. (I use Final Cut Pro for iPad, which can also do subject tracking within a clip.)

The whole workflow — transcription, analysis, extraction — takes about ten minutes for a one-hour video. What used to require scrubbing through footage manually is now a matter of describing what you’re looking for and letting the model find it.

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:

Third Party Review (SB 4063, Ellman)

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.

Legalizing Middle Housing (SB 4060, Hunter)

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:

• Duplexes (a.k.a. two-flats)
• Triplexes
• Fourplexes
• Cottage clusters
• Townhouses
• Stacked-flat plexes
• Attached courtyard housing
• 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)

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.

Parking Reform (SB 4064, Cervantes)

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.

Single Stair Reform (SB 4061, Feigenholtz)

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.

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
• Examples of “sunlight suites” in Seattle which has allow single stair for almost 50 years
• Additional research about single stair’s strong safety record from Pew
• Watch a webinar about single stair oriented for Chicagoans

ADUs (SB 4071, Martwick)

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.

Impact Fee Modernization (SB 4062, Castro)

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.

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.

Join Abundant Housing Illinois for the next lobby day.

Read another observation in A City That Works.

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. ︎

• 13 total dropoffs
• Timespan: October 18, 2023 to December 26, 2025 (about 26 months)
• Total volume: 13 × 101 oz = 1,313 ounces (about 10.3 gallons)
• Average frequency: roughly once every 2 months

Last month I made the thirteenth trip to a City of Chicago food scrap dropoff site at 1758 S Clark St. After two years I think it’s a good moment to count how long and how often I’ve been dropping off scraps for composting. I started collecting food waste soon after I learned the city was starting the program, and I dropped off the first collection on October 16, 2023. This means I’ve been hauling my trusty 101-ounce IKEA HÅLLBAR plastic bin to this spot for just over two years now.

That food waste decomposing in landfills causes a significant amount of methane release into the air and that methane traps more heat than CO2. Although there is still a lot more CO2 than methane released I thought that I can do a little more, and the site being over a mile away means I’m forced to go for a short bike ride even if I don’t otherwise feel like it.

• Find a dropoff site near you, or open the fullscreen map
• Learn more about methane and climate change

What do the numbers say

• Over 26 months, I’ve diverted about 1,313 ounces of food scraps from the landfill—that’s about 10.3 gallons of mostly banana peels, coffee grounds, and eggshells (I am using the volume of the bin rather than weights I’ve measured)
• On average, I make the trip roughly every two months, though the intervals have varied quite a bit.
• Looking back at my photo timestamps, I notice some interesting patterns. In 2024, there was a long gap between my July dropoff and my December one—over four months.
• But 2025 has been different. I’ve made six trips this year alone, with intervals as short as 34 days between visits.

The Clark Street dropoff isn’t particularly close to my apartment, and I’ll admit that’s been a barrier. On days when I don’t feel like making the trip, that container sits in my fridge a little longer, and gets full to a point where I divert food waste to the trash. Curbside pickup would change everything—but until that happens, I’m still glad the city offers the dropoff sites.

A new steel beam – actually three segments – will be installed in the basement, supported by two new posts on these two new footings. The orange lines in the footing holes represent the top of the future floor slab, indicating a 18″ dig-down.

The holes cannot be filled in until a city building inspector comes by. After they are filled in, and a post is installed, more excavation will occur on the perimeter to do underpinning. This will extend the depth of the house’s foundation to support it for another one hundred years, and probably prevent more sinking and shifting.

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. 

I compiled eight reasons – from the Treasurer’s report, news reports, and my own research – as to why a Chicagoan’s property tax bill may have gone up.

Before moving on, check that your understanding of the levy system used in Cook County is the same as mine. Every year the various taxing bodies pass budgets and the portion of their budgets that will be funded by property taxes becomes their levy. The levy is a product of the assessed values (adjusted by exemptions and appeals) times the tax rates (which are determined by the Cook County Clerk, and change based on local factors including whether a property is in a TIF district or expanded mental health district). As long as the levy does not exceed the cap (set by state law) then the taxing bodies will receive the entire amount of their levy. In other words, the combined property tax bills is equivalent to all of the levies added together.

2024 was a reassessment year

Assessed values, the value on which the tax bill is calculated, tend to increase the most in assessment years. These happen on a “triennial” basis, meaning every three years. The last assessment year in Chicago was in 2021. The assessed value in 2024 is a lot different than the assessed value in 2023 because the last time it was assessed was actually in 2021. Home values can fluctuate a lot in three years.

This is a great moment to point out that a change in the AV does not equal the same change in the tax bill for countywide and individual property reasons (think: property-level exemptions). My mom’s condo’s AV increased by 23 percent between assessment years. While the condo’s AV increased by 23 percent the tax bill increased by only 16 percent.

The median tax bill increase for Chicago homeowners – which includes condos, single-family houses, and owner-occupied two-to-six flats – was 16.7 percent. But the median tax bill didn’t climb everywhere. The Treasurer’s report said that the median residential tax bill fell in nine Chicago community areas!

Your property value went up, which meant your assessed value went up

The Institute of Housing Studies indicates in its latest home values report there was a 72 percent price increase for single-family houses in the Austin-North Lawndale-Garfield Park submarket from 2020 Q1 to 2024 Q4. This roughly matches the previous assessment (January 1, 2021) and current assessment (January 1, 2024). The highest growth in single-family house values was in the Englewood/Greater Grand Crossing submarket (see map below), showing an increase of 97.0 percent. Citywide, IHS reports that “prices rose 47.8 percent” since 2020 Q1.

Another example: the median sale price of single-family houses in the West Englewood community area – which is part of the Englewood/Greater Grand Crossing submarket – increased by 122 percent from 2020 to 2024, per sales data collected by the Illinois Department of Revenue and analyzed by the Cook County Assessor’s Office.

The Cook County Assessor’s Office says about its method, “The goal of the model is to answer this question: ‘What would the sale price of every home be if it had sold recently in an arms-length transaction?'” In September the Cook County Assessor’s Office published a new Home Value Report website that explains how their automated valuation model (AVM) works. This may also be referred to as a computer-assisted mass appraisal.

The AVM is a computer program that uses lots of data, mostly about sale prices and dates, to estimate the market value of properties – it’s necessary to do this as a mass evaluation because a sale is the best way to determine the market value but most properties don’t sell each year and some sales have to be ignored because they’re atypical¹.

Look up your home’s report; the HVR website works for single-family houses and two-to-six flats and does not work for condos and cooperatives.

The HVR – example below – will show the AVM’s five most representative nearby property sales, out of potentially thousands reviewed, that led to establishing your property’s assessed value. The HVR for the example property I selected demonstrates how the CCAO’s automated valuation model creates an estimated market value for any given residential property. Its 2021 assessment was $9,000 (implying an estimated market value of $90,000), and its 2024 assessed value is $23,000 (implying an estimated market value of $230,000). To give you some background: this two-flat was obtained in a tax sale in 2019, sold to someone for $75,000, renovated by that someone in 2022, and then sold in 2023 for $365,000.

Downtown Chicago property values dropped disproportionately, thus decreasing their share of the assessed values

Commercial properties in Chicago’s downtown contribute a lot of property tax revenue to the various taxing bodies. Although values dropped there the various taxing bodies will collect the same amount of property taxes for the year. The levy system means every taxing body collects 100 percent of the levy they set for the year. A property’s assessed value’s proportion of the aggregate assessed value for all properties in the whole county determines that property’s share of the levy (tax bill). A drop in values in one area or class of buildings means that other properties are going to make up a slightly larger proportion of the total assessed value and thus a slightly larger proportion of the levy (tax bill).

From the Treasurer’s report: “Commercial property there lost $379.2 million, or 7.2%, in assessed value, according to the report. The Loop’s commercial properties accounted for 11% of all taxes collected in 2024, compared to 13% the year before.” Putting that into real terms these properties were billed about $108 million less in 2024 than in 2023. Because of the levy system those two percentage points that downtown properties aren’t paying is made up by all other properties.

Property owners of higher value properties appealed

Every successful appeal means every other property pays just a tiny bit more because the appealed property’s share of the total assessed value has gone down a bit². And appeals are not submitted evenly distributed or evenly practiced³.

Property owners in majority Black and Brown communities are the least likely to appeal. The Treasurer’s report says, “Many of Chicago’s South and West side communities, where home values have soared in recent years and homeowners are far less likely to appeal their assessed values, will see significant property tax increases. Residential property values and tax bills increased by the largest percentages on the South and West sides, where median bills shot up by more than 30% in 15 community areas — with a massive 133% increase in West Garfield Park.”

The Chicago Tribune reported earlier this year on a different study by the Treasurer, looking at where appeals most often come from:

While overall 27% of homeowners appealed, the study found “wide variations” in which homeowners filed their own appeals. Just 3.4% of homeowners in West Englewood, a majority-Black and low-income neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, disputed their assessment during 2021 city cycle, while nearly all Loop homeowners — 96% — did so. That could be because assessments dropped in Englewood and went up in the Loop that year as Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi rejiggered the office’s methodology.

Homeowner appeal rates are highest in majority white neighborhoods and lowest in majority black neighborhoods. And there’s a clear trend that the higher the median income in a neighborhood there’s a higher proportion of homeowners who appeal. (This is the case for homeowners across the city and across the county.)

Then there’s the discrepancy between business property owners and homeowners. In a spring 2025 study from the Treasurer about appeals the office found that 74.8 percent of businesses appealed, countywide, from 2021 to 2023, while only 42.2 percent of homeowners did. In this period, the tax bills for businesses went down by $3.26 billion while the tax bills for homeowners went up by $1.91 billion.

Taxing bodies increased their levies

Certain taxing bodies maximized⁴ the amount of property tax levy they were allowed to increase from 2023 to 2024. This means just about every property will pay a little more. From the Treasurer’s report:

• “Chicago Public Schools had the largest levy increase in 2024, asking for $171.9 million more in property taxes than in 2023. That was the maximum allowed under the Property Tax Extension Limitation Law [PTELL], which limits levy increases to the rate of inflation from the previous year or 5%, whichever is lower. The national inflation rate was 3.4%, allowing CPS to boost its levy by that amount for the 2024-2025 budget year.”

• “The total tax amount in Chicago increased in 2024 by $528.6 million, or 6.3%, due to increased TIF revenue, governments seeking more money and refunds made through the state’s recapture law.”

Taxing bodies used recapture

Recapture means to (re)collect money after property owners’ successful appeals caused the owners to get refunds. This process is best explained by the Treasurer’s report.

Recapture allows non-home rule taxing agencies – like school districts, park districts and sanitary districts – to recover money refunded to taxpayers after their property assessments were lowered by the Illinois Property Tax Appeal Board, state courts or county offices [like the Cook County Board of Review].

Those refunds reduced the amount of money taxing agencies anticipated having to pay their bills. When those refunds were large, that crimped the ability of affected taxing agencies to provide services.

The law [adopted by the Illinois legislature in 2021] requires the county Clerk to automatically increase taxing agencies’ levies by the amount refunded during the previous year, although agencies may reject the increase.

The Chicago Public Schools collected the most through recapture, at $49.1 (which is included in the $171.9 million described in the previous section.

TIF districts still exist

TIF districts have an indirect impact. They divert property tax revenue to special funds used for economic development and infrastructure development. Since they don’t go to taxing bodies’ regular funds the taxing bodies have a tendency to maximize the PTELL (see above).

As the Treasurer’s report puts it, “That extra money [the 11.5 percent increase of property tax revenue diverted to TIF accounts from 2023 to 2024] did little to relieve the overall financial burden on homeowners. That’s because nearly all the money is channeled into special funds that do not pay for everyday government services such as police officers’ salaries and running schools.”

The Board of Review may have overdone appeals

The Board of Review significantly adjusts downward the assessed values of property owners who appeal.⁵

The Edgewater Beach Apartments, a cooperative residential building with 400 units, appealed directly to the Board of Review, which reduced their assessed value by 64 percent. The Edgewater Beach Apartments (EBA) also appealed their 2021 assessment and the Board of Review reduced that assessed value by 32 percent. Hat tip to Eric Erins for pointing out the inexplicable pattern of tax bills.

The AV reduction combined with the other factors in this blog post resulted in a 72 decrease in their tax bill from 2023 to 2024. If EBA’s tax bill in 2024 was divided equally amongst the 400 unit owners each would pay $493.32, which seems like a pretty good deal. A condo on the next block that sold for $375,000 in 2019 and has an assessed value of $24,000 (implying an estimated market value of $240,000) has a tax bill of $5,652.17.

This reaction by the Board of Review implies that the Assessor’s Office was off…by a lot; see point one above about home values increasing. But is the Board of Review establishing a more accurate assessed value than the Assessor’s Office and analyzing the property amongst its peers, as the automated valuation model does? There’s something to be said about the transparency difference between the Assessor’s Office and the Board of Review (which comprises three elected officials each overseeing one third of Cook County).

• The BOR gave this reason for the 2024 appeal: “The Decrease is the result of: A value supported by Assessor’s Recommendation or restoration or prior Cook County Board of Review, PTAB, or Specific Tax Objection lawsuit decision.”
• The BOR gave this reason for the 2021 appeal: “The Decrease is the result of: Consideration given to cost, income, or market date, and/or your appraisal.”

Those aren’t very explicit reasons. The Assessor’s Office isn’t given the same cost, income, or appraisal information that appellants provide to the BOR. It appears that the Assessor’s Office is allowed to ask for and receive that information from the BOR, during the appeal process, but as of December 2024 wasn’t requesting that. On the other hand, Assessor Fritz Kaegi has advocated for many years in Springfield that a state law should be passed to compel that information from commercial property owners to better meet the goal of establishing more accurate and fairer assessments. Additionally, Kaegi has joined with assessors in other counties to advocate for allowing assessors to access residential appraisal data the federal government has.

In the surrounding area, the Institute for Housing Studies shows that in the Uptown-Rogers-Edgewater submarket the price of single-family houses increased by 33.8 percent from 2020 Q1 to 2024 Q4, and Zillow shows a 32 percent increase for condos and cooperative apartment units from late 2017 to present in the EBA’s ZIP code.

The EBA share of the levy went down but the full levy will get collected and the share of the levy that the Edgewater Beach Apartments (EBA) is no longer responsible for after the appeal will be collected from every other property taxpayer. I’m singling out EBA because of the drastic AV reduction the BOR granted, essentially back to the building’s pre-2021 AV. (Review EBA’s tax bill and AV history.)

Bonus reading: A report commissioned by Cook County President Preckwinkle’s office explored the differences in methods and adherence to industry standards by reviewing the Assessor’s Office assessments in 2021 and the Board of Review’s reactions via request for appeals. I’ll add that two of the three Board of Review commissioners were different in 2021 than today.

Footnotes

The levy system is in contrast to the millage rate system. In the millage rate system the taxing bodies set a millage rate. That rate is multiplied by the assessed value of each property and that determines the size of each property’s tax bill. Millage rate is probably easier for property taxpayers to understand.

All quotes in the footnotes, except where otherwise noted, are from a Chicago Sun-Times article about the Cook County Treasurer’s November 2025 report which analyzes annual changes in the tax bill data.

1. For example, only properties that are “arms length transactions” should be evaluated. Assessors should incorporate only fair market transactions in their models and exclude transactions between family members and trusts, to give a couple of examples. Read more about arms length transactions. ︎
2. The Edgewater Beach Apartments, for example, which is a cooperative, had their assessed value reduced from $5.89 million to $2.13 million. Note that this reduction in AV was granted by the Board of Review and not by the Cook County Assessor’s Office (CCAO). It’s my belief and understanding that because the CCAO now has a highly accurate automated valuation model (AVM) that many appeals to the CCAO fail. But appeals to the BOR more often than not succeed. The Assessor and the three BOR commissioners are elected.  ︎
3. “Homes on the West and South sides were also hit harder because property owners appealed their assessments less often, according to the report.” ︎
4. “Across the county, taxes rose $871.8 million to nearly $19.2 billion, or 4.8%, well above the 3.5% inflation rate for 2024, according to the report.” ︎
5. Read Assessor Kaegi’s letter to the editor on this topic. And it looks like the Treasurer’s office nominally agrees with the assessor’s characterization of the BOR’s actions. From the Treasurer’s November 2025 report: “The shift onto residential properties occurred after the Cook County Board of Review significantly lowered the estimated value values of commercial, industrial and large multifamily properties set by the Assessor’s Office.” ︎

Blacks In Green, teaming up with Tom Bassett-Dilley Architects, submitted an entry to the “Missing Middle Infill Housing” competition proposed that an entity like the City of Chicago would authorize the drilling of public wells in the alley that each property that abuts the alley could connect to, running pipes from a building owner’s heat pump to the wells to carry thermal energy to or from the house, as needed using ground source heat pumps.

The South Side nonprofit Blacks in Green is pursuing…a plan for a multibuilding geothermal system that will tap steady, year-round underground temperatures of about 55 degrees.

In step one of the project, workers will send plastic pipes 450 feet into the ground beneath Chicago alleys. The pipes, which circulate a fluid that absorbs and releases heat, will loop back to up to 69 buildings in a four-block area of West Woodlawn, powering heating and central air.

–Chicago Tribune

Blacks In Green obtained a grant in 2024 of about $10 million from the United States Department of Energy’s Geothermal Technologies Office, but the latest report about their project indicates that the Trump administration may have tried to freeze the funding (that article is from June and I haven’t seen news since then that explains what has happened since then).

In CRGA, the Illinois Power Agency must create a “Geothermal Homes and Businesses Program” so that the agency can “procure” renewable energy credits from new geothermal networks. The agency’s long-term renewable resources procurement plan should allocate up to $10 million per year to stimulate eligible geothermal systems. The program shall begin on June 1, 2028, and 33 percent of the energy procured each year should be from geothermal networks serving residential uses. Read the SB25 bill text.

Perhaps despite the Trump administration’s grants chicanery, the Blacks In Green communal geothermal network can still move forward using state funding priorities that CRGA puts into place.

At about 4:22 AM this morning the Illinois Senate concurred with the Illinois House on bill SB2111 (PDF), approving a revenues and reform package that will close budget gaps and provide additional funding for the state’s 63 transit agencies. Among the reforms are establishing a new oversight authority that will centralize service planning and fare-setting in Chicagoland and assigning powers to build transit-supportive development, among other major and unique policy changes.

Additionally, the bill includes the People Over Parking Act, which was introduced by Rep. Buckner earlier this year and prohibits municipalities from requiring car parking for residential and commercial uses in areas served by transit. The bill, which will go into effect on June 1, 2026 (per House Amendment 4), will also apply in home rule communities. This includes Chicago, which passed its own transit-adjacent parking reform that took effect on September 25, 2025.

Specifically, the ban on parking mandates applies when the following is true:

• a development project is for new construction or renovation and that is not a hotel, motel, bed and breakfast, or other transient lodging
• the project is located within one-half mile of a public transportation hub (nodes) or one-eighth mile of a public transportation corridor (street segments)

A public transportation hub is a node that includes rail transit stations, a boat or ferry terminal that is served by a bus stop or a rail transit station, and street intersections where two or more bus routes meet and those bus routes have a combined frequency of 15 minutes or less during the morning and afternoon peak commute periods. This means that new housing will soon be able to be developed, at lower cost, within a half mile of the Highland Park Metra station without any parking.

Metra has 168 stations outside of Chicago, and there are also Metrolink rail stations in Illinois communities east of St. Louis, Missouri. That’s in addition to higher-frequency bus service in Champaign and some communities served by Pace bus.

A public transportation corridor is a street segment that has one or more bus routes that have a combined frequency of 15 minutes or less during the morning and afternoon peak commute periods.

The fine print

Municipalities are still allowed to enact minimum parking requirements for bicycles; and they can establish maximum parking allowances. The act does not apply to existing approved Planned (Unit) Developments but will apply to any amendments or extensions if the amendment or extension will increase the car parking requirement.

In situations where developments are voluntarily providing car parking, municipalities can impose requirements that reserve space for car share vehicles, that some parking be made available to the public, and that parking must be made available for a charge. Municipalities cannot require that parking be made available for free.

I believe that this new law will override Chicago’s requirement that projects in the Downtown zoning districts and projects in transit-serve areas that are served only by Metra obtain an administrative adjustment to build less parking that otherwise required.

Finally, Illinois has existing code regarding electric vehicle charging and sets a standard for how much of the provided parking must be “EV ready”, “EV capable”, and “EV installed” (read the Illinois Electric Vehicle Charging Act) – those requirements are not impacted by the People Over Parking Act.

I was shocked when the ADU ordinance (read it here) passed unanimously, 46-0. The ordinance number is SO2024-0008918, and when you open the legislation details page look for the filename called “SO2024-0008918 ADU 9.23.25 (LRB 10a) (2) (1).pdf”

How do I feel? I’m relieved this seven-year-period of ADU advocacy is over, and I’m disappointed in the outcome. More advocacy will be needed to ensure that most alders maximize the eligibility areas in their wards.

Highlights of the new ADU ordinance

• the ADU eligibility area increases from 12 percent of the city to 29 percent of the city, with options to increase further
• the arbitrary cap of 700 s.f. of floor area allowed in each coach house has been removed (there is still a site-specific cap)
• existing off-street parking can be removed in order to build a coach house on the ground level
• B (business) and C (also business) zoning districts are now part of the eligibility area
• ground floor space in mixed-use buildings in B and C zoning districts can be converted to ADUs without having to get a “special use”

I wrote an ADU FAQ for Abundant Housing Illinois.

Media coverage of the passage

• Crain’s by Justin Laurence
• Dwell by me

All of these articles include quotes from me:

• Chicago Tribune by Jake Sheridan and A.D. Quig
• Block Club Chicago by Quinn Myers
• Illinois Answers Project by Alex Nitkin

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.

• Wednesday, 9/3/25
  ADU discussion at the monthly Strong Towns Chicago meeting. 
  
• Monday, 9/8/25
  ADU Advocacy 101 webinar. With special guests (from AARP Illinois and ULI Chicago) we’ll advise members on how to advocate for ADUs in their wards before the vote. Read the recap and watch the recorded video.
  
• Tuesday, 9/23/25
  House+ADU tour in Woodlawn. RSVP is required because capacity is limited. This is a members-only event but there are promo codes for Abundant Housing Illinois members (check the Slack) and for 20th Ward residents (ask me).

• Thursday, 9/25/25
  The City Council meeting where I expect ordinance SO2024-0008918 to be approved! We’ve got 18 people signed up so far to go. 

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