A key concession helped Mayor Brandon Johnson narrowly win an early skirmish Wednesday in the battle for the hearts, minds and votes of Chicago’s 600,000 renters, but the political victory may not last.
The City Council’s Housing Committee — chaired by one of the mayor’s closest City Council allies — voted 12-9 to approve Johnson’s newly revised Protecting Renters Ordinance after the mayor dropped the “just cause” provision that would have required landlords to make relocation payments to tenants evicted through no fault of their own.
Eliminating that provision was only the latest change made by Johnson. He previously had exempted from the proposed ordinance owner-occupied buildings of six-flats or less.
An early draft of the mayor’s ordinance also would have required $10,000 in compensation to tenants forced to move out to avoid “unconscionable rent increases.” That provision was removed amid complaints that it could be a dangerous first step toward rent control, which would require a change in state law.
None of those changes were enough to satisfy the opposition faction led by Zoning Committee Chair Gilbert Villegas (36th), which has proposed an alternative set of renter protections favored by some of the same real estate interests that spent millions to defeat Johnson’s “Bring Chicago Home” referendum.
“This is going to raise rents. That’s something that our colleagues cannot support at a time when affordability is an issue,” Villegas told the Chicago Sun-Times. “We see this as no different than Trump’s tariffs. We see this as a rent tariff, which will be passed on to the renters.”
On Thursday, Villegas plans to push his alternative ordinance through the Zoning Committee . That will set the stage for the full City Council to either choose between the dueling ordinances or defer action on both and keep talking in hopes of finding common ground.
“The mayor is using this as an opportunity to try to sway people. Half the city are renters. He wants to get them activated for the election. We’re looking at it from a more pragmatic approach, whereas the mayor is looking at it from a political approach,” Villegas said.
Housing Committee Chair Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez (25th) replied that if anyone is “playing politics and showing it,” it’s Villegas, by “introducing a housing ordinance in a committee that has little jurisdiction over tenant rights” in an attempt to “create confusion and chaos.”
“I’m not sure what Ald. Villegas is doing in Zoning, but it clearly is overstepping, and I’m suspecting it’s because of the money that he’s getting from the real estate industry,” Sigcho-Lopez said.
Johnson has heralded the ordinance as the first rewrite in 40 years of the Landlord Tenants Ordinance championed by former Mayor Harold Washington.
His measure would establish a registry to log who owns the city’s more than 500,000 rental units and whether those landlords are complying with the law. That measure was included in Johnson’s proposal in reaction to a WBEZ/Chicago Sun-Times story about how landlords often set up limited liability companies to mask who they are — creating an anonymity that makes it hard to hold problem landlords accountable.
The mayor’s ordinance also would create a new Bureau of Rental Housing Services to establish and enforce new standards landlords must follow to guarantee safe and sanitary living conditions. A so-called “Renters Bill of Rights” would require landlords to clearly explain all fees, ban move-in fees and require landlords to choose between monthly and annual pet fees.
To bankroll the new level of bureaucracy, the ordinance includes an annual registration fee of $20 per unit that’s expected to raise $22 million a year to cover inspections, attorneys and other enforcement costs.
The mayor’s office maintains the Department of Buildings “doesn’t have the manpower to enforce rental violations on top of all of the other things they’re doing.”
Villegas strongly disagreed.
“At a time when we’re seeing an $882 million deficit for 2027, now’s the time to create a whole new bureau of more employees, more pension liability and add more red tape where you have duplicative services by this whole new department?” Villegas said.
Villegas’ ordinance has some similarities, but also many differences. There is no registration fee, no rental housing bureau, no Tenant Bill of Rights and no new hirings, among other things. Nor would “junk” fees be banned.
Finance Chair Pat Dowell (3rd) called the mayor’s version a “feel-good ordinance” that confronts “just a piece of the problem and leaves out HUD buildings that are “some of the worst” buildings.
“You need to spend more time trying to deal with Building Court and judges to really move the needle and what to do with these slum landlord,” Dowell said. “They don’t care about this ordinance,” Dowell said.
At the committee meeting, building owners condemned the mayor’s revised plan as a “rent increase ordinance.”
“By adding 100 or so rules and regulations, it’s gonna be too much for many of our owners and the temptation is going to be to sell” to buyers who are “not local,” including hedge funds, said Michael Glasser, president of the Neighborhood Building Owners Alliance.
Julie Dworkin, co-executive director of the Institute for the Public Good, countered that Chicago rents have increased by 9.5% since 2023, which she called the “highest increase in the country.”
There are “no limits to what a landlord can charge a tenant to move in or move out of a unit” and ownership of large apartment buildings by limited liability corporations has “nearly quadrupled,” leaving tenants with “scarce information” about whom to contact when things go wrong, she said.