RHubert Katz did everything he could to create an apartment building in Jefferson Park. Katz, an architect and developer who owns Northbrook-based Rktects, had planned to build on a former bank site at Elston and Central avenues — a site that has been vacant since 2014. But neighbors complained that the development would impede traffic and disrupt their businesses. view. Katz tried to appease them: he met with community organizations. It has gone through review after review. He reduced the building's height to three and a half floors and reduced the number of units – first from 52 to 45, then to 40.
But that wasn't enough to calm those who attended the community meeting in March. “That's where the project collapsed,” Katz says. “They made their decision before we came there. The only people who showed up were negative, so it wasn't a fair representation.” When neighbors turned against the project, so did their council president, Jim Gardiner, of the 45th Ward, who refused to rezone the parcel. – Therefore, the development was cancelled.
Katz isn't alone: Many developers have seen their attempts to build apartment buildings in Chicago stymied by red tape or neighborhood opposition. This is despite the clear need for housing here. A study released by the Urban Institute in August found that the number of households in Chicago increased 14 percent from 2010 to 2022, while housing stock rose just 6 percent. Although the housing shortage is national in scope, it is even more pronounced here. “In almost all places, construction lags slightly behind new families, but in Chicago there is a big difference,” says Jorge Gonzalez Hermoso, one of the study's authors.
This shortage hits low-income families hard, because it means fewer apartments available for rent. According to Yardi Matrix, a real estate data firm, Chicago built just 45,400 housing units from 2019 to 2023, compared with 128,400 for major Dallas producers. While Chicago is expected to build fewer than 27,000 multifamily housing units through 2029, Austin — a city with less than half of Chicago's population — is expected to add 100,000 units by then.
So why is it so difficult to build multifamily housing here? There is no single culprit, but the biggest culprit is the city's zoning laws. As of 2023, 41% of Chicago's land is zoned for single-family housing, according to the Metropolitan Planning Council, a nonprofit policy group. The change to allow more units would require rezoning approval, a multi-step process that includes a review by the Department of Planning and Development, a public meeting, and Zoning Commission approval before a full City Council vote. Then there's alderman privilege, the unwritten but prevalent practice of giving aldermen the final say in decisions regarding their wards, including zoning changes.
“To get alderman, you have to get the neighborhood group, and that's where the problem lies.”
Obtaining this approval is rarely easy. Opposition to denser housing in Chicago is loudest at community meetings where aldermen gather feedback from their constituents and decide whether they want to greenlight development. “To get alderman, you have to get the neighborhood group, and that's where the problem lies,” says one local architect. “It's risky, even having this conversation.” Christina Harris, a senior director at the Metropolitan Planning Council, points to research by Boston University and the Urban Institute showing that the residents who attend those meetings tend to be older, higher-income people who oppose dense developments.
Affordable housing advocates have gone so far as to call managerial privilege “a tool of the new Jim Crow.” An investigation by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development gave more weight to this criticism: a nearly five-year civil rights investigation found that Chicago turned aldermen into mini-mayors of each neighborhood. “As a result, new affordable housing is rarely, if ever, built in majority-white neighborhoods that have the least affordable housing,” Lon Miltesen, regional director of HUD's Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, wrote in a letter to the . Mayor's office obtained by The Sun-Times.
The use of aldermanic powers is not limited to those wards. In October, 49th Board Member Maria Hadden rejected construction of a 52-unit apartment building, including 11 affordable units, in Rogers Park. It would have replaced an empty lot at 7728 North Sheridan Road. The decision drew criticism from the YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) crowd — a movement advocating for more housing — which criticized Hadden's denial as a prime example of the board's powers going wrong.
Hadden counters that the development appeared to be a copy-and-paste proposal, unlike a 20-unit apartment building at 7015 North Sheridan that included more voter feedback. She adds that the developer of the rejected property returns with a new proposal. “A lot of us have community operations. They're not geared toward exercising board powers,” says Hadden. “They're geared toward making sure our communities have a voice. This is our job.” But the bottom line is that 52 homes were not built.
On the City Council and in Springfield, there is a growing movement to relax zoning laws. Last April, Mayor Brandon Johnson released his “Cut the Ribbon” report, which made more than 100 recommendations to boost development — including “transformative zoning changes.” Among them: eliminating costly minimum parking requirements for multifamily projects and streamlining approval processes. In Springfield, State Representative Cam Buckner, whose district extends from the downtown lakefront to South Chicago, proposed a bill last February that would ban single-family residential zoning in Chicago and seven other Illinois cities. Early iterations of the bill required that properties zoned for residential use be permitted “moderate housing.” The bill does not define “moderate housing,” but the measure could stimulate more units by increasing the number of two- and three-family apartments, as well as other multifamily housing.
Buckner plans to reintroduce the legislation in early 2025. He is careful to note that the measure would not get rid of municipal planning and zoning units or strip them of their authority. “What this means is that we're really starting with a baseline where you can't tell someone they can only build one family,” Buckner says. This would be a small, meaningful step toward Chicago getting out of its own way.
