While headlines focused on the mayoral race, voters in New York City’s municipal elections last week also made their voices heard on an issue that is more than a little familiar to Chicagoans. Three different binding referendums asked New Yorkers whether their City Council members should continue to enjoy veto power over housing — and especially affordable housing — in their districts. On each of the referendums, voters answered decisively: Not anymore.
“There’s too much red tape,” the campaign group Yes on Affordable Housing explained ahead of the vote. “There are too many delays. And there are too many opportunities to say no.”
Sure sounds a lot like Chicago. But while New York is deciding to part ways with a tradition that has held back affordable housing, the recent fight over additional dwelling units, or ADUs, is an example of Chicago doubling down on it.
Some background: ADUs include modest homes such as coach houses and attic and garden apartments — housing types that have been part of Chicago’s urban fabric for over a century and where many Chicagoans live to this day. But a 1957 law banned the construction of new coach houses, and subsequent laws made adding new attic or garden apartments often impossible.
In 2020, the City Council decided to once again allow these homes — which typically offer moderate-cost, unsubsidized housing and make it easy for multiple generations of a family to live nearby without giving up independence — in five pilot areas around the city, with the goal to evaluate and collect data before returning to the council in 2024 to consider citywide implementation. (Full disclosure: We helped craft the initial legislation.)
But that deadline came and went. By last summer, Chicago residents had been due a vote on expanding eligibility for ADUs for over a year. In the end, a protracted fight with competing visions resulted in a compromise that essentially allows each alderman to individually decide the rules that their constituents will have to follow to add an ADU — or whether they will be able to do so at all.
There are several reasons to be disappointed in this outcome. For one, many have complained that Chicago imposes too much red tape on people who want to invest in our communities and our tax base, pointing to duplicative processes, opaque delays and arbitrary rejections that push people and resources elsewhere. But when given the chance to create a citywide, streamlined set of regulations for ADUs, the City Council opted instead to transform five pilot areas into arbitrary hyperlocal permutations. Indeed, just a few months after the ADU ordinance passed, there are already 13 ADU zones — nearly three times more than when we started.
Second, 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?
We wager that they would. After all, housing is a public good, and where it’s located is everyone’s business.
Marisa Novara was commissioner of the Chicago Department of Housing from 2019 to 2023. Daniel Kay Hertz was policy director of the Department of Housing from 2019 to 2024.
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