Chicago does not have enough affordable housing. In fact, the area needs 142,000 units, and one report released in June said the region must build 227,000 in the next five years to keep pace with demand. 

Mayor Brandon Johnson kicked off a stormy battle in the City Council this summer and presided over the passage of two ordinances that act as first steps in chipping away at Chicago’s problem. First, he revived an ordinance to make “granny flats,” or accessory dwelling units, legal again throughout Chicago — albeit with some compromises. Second, the mayor championed a ban on parking space minimums in buildings near public transit. 

Contributors to our op-ed section wrote thoughtfully on how Chicago can quickly develop the amount of housing needed while respecting the realities and demands of life in a city. We also published innovative development ideas and what Chicago can learn from cities such as Austin, Texas, and New York. 

Here is a look back in excerpts. 

May 1: Micky Horstman, “Austin, Texas, figures out affordable housing while Chicago postures”

Houses that are under construction are seen in a neighborhood on April 17, 2025, in Austin, Texas. (Brandon Bell/Getty)

Chicago’s leaders must abandon their self-strangling, restrictive approach to affordable housing. Regulation coupled with market manipulation is not working. Just this year, average one-bedroom rents have grown to more than $1,900 per month in Chicago.

They should look toward another blue city, Austin, Texas. Austin has shown you can only build your way to affordable housing. You can’t regulate it. 

This year, rents in Austin dropped again to $1,436 per month. How?

In 2019, the city eased zoning restrictions and provided incentives for higher density in affordable and mixed-income developments.
In May of last year, the city boosted its commitment to housing affordability by passing local ordinances to allow single-family homes to be built on smaller lots.
Last month, the City Council voted to expand single-stair housing developments to provide more affordable options for families. Buildings no longer are required to have two staircases per floor when taller than three stories, which eliminates the need for a central hallway and allows compact designs.

Austin leaders spent time dismantling red tape instead of pursuing headlines. The result? Austin has been building well above the national average for new units, while Chicagoland ranks last of the top 10 urban areas for issuing new housing permits per 100,000 residents, according to an Illinois Policy Institute analysis.

Chicagoans can see this trend in thinner wallets. Median rents in Austin declined 22%, or $400 a unit, since their peak in August 2023, Bloomberg reported in February. In Chicago, rents increased 11% from 2023 to 2024, the Tribune reported.

If nothing changes, rents in Chicago will continue to increase. But there are commonsense, pro-growth reforms city leaders can implement quickly to repair the problems. 

May 13: Danny Villalobos, “The Southwest Side isn’t a suburb. Stop zoning it like one.”

Lily Aceves, Ari Romero and Sergio Romero trick-or-treat on Kilbourn Avenue in the West Lawn neighborhood on Oct. 31, 2023. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune)

Zoning and land use on the Southwest Side haven’t kept up with the people who live here. They restrict growth, block new housing options and prioritize cars over community. Despite clear signs of demand and density, most of these neighborhoods remain locked into low-density, single-family zoning.

In the West Lawn neighborhood, 41% of households have four or more people, yet 72% of all housing is single-family detached. Meanwhile, in the Lakeview neighborhood on the North Side, half of all households are one person, but half of the housing consists of buildings with 20 or more units. The “missing middle” couldn’t be more absent. It’s a mismatch that stifles quality of life — and it’s time for the Southwest Side to be part of Chicago’s broader planning conversation.

I’m not asking for radical transformation. I’m asking the city to let us grow in ways that reflect who we already are. Families on the Southwest Side are living in more crowded conditions — not because they want to, but because the zoning code doesn’t allow them to expand. Accessory dwelling units (ADUs), two-flats and four-flats are basic forms of housing in many parts of the city. But here, they’re often illegal or heavily restricted. The result is a lack of options for extended families, working-class renters or seniors aging in place.

People want to stay — but policy is pushing them out. These neighborhoods have become a lifeline for people priced out of the North Side and the increasingly unaffordable outer Loop neighborhoods. Yet city policies — from mandatory parking minimums to outdated lot coverage rules — make it harder to build the housing we need or support the businesses that make neighborhoods thrive. There’s opportunity here, but we’re blocking it.

May 19: Alicia Pederson, “Chicago’s affordable housing plan demands a courtyard block blueprint”

Let’s face it: Chicago is losing children and thus jeopardizing its demographic sustainability and home-grown connection to the future. Cook County’s under-5 population plunged 15% from 2020 to 2024. Chicago Public Schools has lost more than 100,000 students in the past 20 years, with more than 40,000 leaving in just the last five. Yes, housing affordability influences where parents choose to live and raise their children. However, other elements — such as school quality, outdoor access and neighborhood amenities — play crucial roles in these decisions. Every parcel is an opportunity to build amenity-rich blocks and neighborhoods, creating the high-value housing that will help Chicago retain the families it needs to flourish in the 21st century.

Courtyard blocks are the epitome of pro-social housing, and the city’s developers can use courtyard block designs to create mixed-use, mixed-income neighborhoods that appeal to households of all ages, stages and income levels.

In the time-tested courtyard typology found throughout Europe, city blocks are framed with wall-to-wall, mixed-use buildings, going up three to six stories. The building floor plates are wide and shallow (rather than narrow and deep like the standard North American urban floor plate), leaving room in the block interior for a large, semi-private courtyard. Each building in the block has commercial space and garage stalls on the ground floor, very large units on the lower levels, and smaller, more affordable units on upper levels. While the gracious, dual-aspect layouts appeal to households of all ages and stages, the family-oriented units on the lower levels create the “big house with a yard” that targets families with young children.

Balancing density with green space, courtyard blocks are a simple and effective way of rapidly increasing the supply of affordable, family-inclusive housing in the cities. 

July 20: Steve Weinshel, “Cutting parking requirements while upzoning Broadway will create a crisis”

The 6000 block of Broadway looking north in the 48th Ward of Chicago on July 9, 2025. This area is being considered for a change in zoning that would affect density and local businesses. (Stacey Wescott/Chicago Tribune)

The Chicago Department of Planning and Development’s proposed framework for Broadway is predicated on the wishful thinking that people living near mass transit are substantially less likely to own cars. But that is simply not borne out by the facts.  

Car ownership rate for homeowners in Edgewater is 1.3 cars per owner-occupied household, according to City-Data.com. Ownership rates for renters in the community are somewhat lower but are still 0.9 vehicles per household. Those figures are similar for the Uptown and Rogers Park communities adjacent to Edgewater. 

Even data provided by the city as part of its case for the Broadway upzoning framework demonstrates the point that it’s creating a parking nightmare. That means more cars will be coming to Edgewater if its “visions” are realized. Where these vehicles will go is anyone’s guess, but city bureaucrats and their housing density mouthpieces try to deny this reality.

Many new residents will likely aggravate current practices of illegally parking in front of fire hydrants, in handicapped zones, blocking alley entrances and corner tow zones that are essential for the passage of school buses and emergency vehicles. 

As a major artery for traffic coming off of DuSable Lake Shore Drive, Broadway is already a busy, relatively narrow corridor. It currently has metered parking and numerous business loading zones, but these may soon be disappearing with increasingly dense residential development. Intensified residential development will inevitably bring even more double parking for ride-share and delivery vehicles, which have already exploded in recent years.

Aug. 25: Miguel Chacon, “Chicago aldermen are making the housing shortage worse” 

The city’s own policies, such as the Affordable Requirements Ordinance, which mandates that developers include affordable units, are grossly limited by aldermanic control over zoning. Developers are mandated to meet affordability requirements, but their projects are then stymied by the very same officials who set the rules. This contradictory approach forces builders to abandon larger, more inclusive projects in favor of smaller, luxury developments that require no zoning changes, bypass community review and often provide zero affordable homes.  

Mayor Brandon Johnson has publicly acknowledged the need to build more housing. He claims that he’s creating “the safest, most affordable big city in America,” but his administration and his closest allies seem to be working against those stated goals. Last summer, the mayor announced his “Cut the Tape” initiative to boost housing construction. Among the recommendations listed: streamlining the design and construction requirements. A few days later, then-Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa passed a “special character zoning overlay” for a corridor on Milwaukee Avenue for developers to follow specific design guidelines.

While our housing shortage didn’t start overnight, today’s elected officials are making it only worse. Instead of bringing solutions, they continue to pass ordinances that cause delays, increase costs and deliver little to no real benefit. Instead of streamlining the development process, they create additional hurdles. Instead of working alongside developers, they publicly vilify them for political gain. The results are clear: Chicago’s housing supply crisis is a direct product of the City Council’s failure to acknowledge that building more housing creates jobs and increases our tax base to pay for our schools, parks and ever-increasing city debt. 

Nov. 13: Marisa Novara and Daniel Kay Hertz, “New York nixes veto power over housing while Chicago unwisely doubles down”

Chicago is one of the most geographically unequal cities in the country. As decades of research have found — including the Shriver Center and Chicago Area Fair Housing Alliance’s 2019 report on zoning and the Metropolitan Planning Council’s “Cost of Segregation” — a significant contributor to this imbalance is our long tradition of allowing any neighborhood with loud dissenters to opt out of providing affordable housing, whether that means subsidized homes or simply more modest apartments or condos. While each individual rejection might seem insignificant, over time, these opt-outs have created disparities as big as the Grand Canyon across Chicago neighborhoods.

In the past, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, agreed that this pattern is problematic. Responding to a complaint filed by a coalition of advocates from Chicago, in 2023 HUD found that the City Council’s practice of deference to hyperlocal rejections of new housing violated federal fair housing law and created illegal impacts on Chicagoans of color and other protected classes.

One of their reported demands to resolve the finding? A citywide ADU expansion. 

So how did the City Council get away with something that falls so far short of that? HUD dropped the suit in August, and the very next month, the council passed the ADU ordinance that falls back on the exact practice that was found to be a violation of federal fair housing law.

It may be time to take this question into the hands of Chicago voters. Would Chicago voters support measures, as New York City’s just did, to fast-track publicly financed affordable housing everywhere and any affordable housing in areas that produce the least of it; to create an expedited review process for smaller projects, going from seven months to 90 days; and to create an appeals board when affordable housing is rejected by the council?

Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/12/29/opinion-chicago-affordable-housing-debate-2025/