The recent Sun-Times story on reducing and eliminating parking for new housing near transit presents the change as an affordability win. But like the Chicago City Council’s recent vote, it overlooks a basic reality: Most people, including those renting affordable units, still rely on cars to make a living.
Nowhere is this more concerning than in Uptown and Edgewater, where City Hall is pushing a major Broadway upzoning that could replace much of the existing corridor with mid-rise buildings adding thousands of new units. To imagine these being built with no off-street parking borders on delusional.
These neighborhoods are already among the city’s densest. Car ownership rates remain high: 1.3 cars per owner-occupied household in Edgewater and 0.9 per rental household, with similar figures in Uptown. Transit is valuable, but it cannot fully replace cars for workers, families and seniors.
Even the experts quoted admitted parking cuts make the most sense in lower-density neighborhoods. Yet the law applies citywide, including communities already overwhelmed by parking shortages.
In Edgewater, parking became nearly impossible after a 100-unit building on Broadway opened with limited parking. Logan Square saw similar problems when a “model” affordable project of 100 units but only 20 spaces left the alderperson’s office besieged with complaints.
The Sun-Times story also leaned heavily on a 2016 “Stalled Out” report that claimed Chicago parking was overbuilt. That study is not only outdated but flawed, if not intentionally misleading. It examined just 41 buildings and concluded too much parking was being built without considering how many tenants simply shifted their cars onto crowded neighborhood streets rather than paying for garage spaces.
Supporters of eliminating parking argue it saves money and “could translate into more units and affordable rents.” But “could” is not “will.” Without binding requirements, those savings almost always become higher developer profits. This is trickle-down economics applied to housing: Cut costs for developers and hope benefits reach renters. History shows those benefits rarely arrive.
Meanwhile, the harm is immediate. Residents spend more time circling for spots, adding congestion, emissions and safety risks. Small businesses lose customers who cannot find nearby parking. Middle-class renters with cars will avoid buildings with no parking, undermining community stability.
Chicago needs more affordable housing, but reducing or eliminating parking requirements without requiring true affordability shifts the burden from developers to neighborhoods.
Brett Barnes, Edgewater
Northwestern’s ‘anti-bias training’ is biased toward Israel
Northwestern University is preventing students from registering unless we comply with an immoral, discriminatory and unscholarly mandatory “training”video that spreads misinformation about Israel’s history and vilifies the country’s critics.
We have made a compelling argument to the administration that this moral blackmail is unjustifiable, yet the policy of mandatory compliance with the training remains in place as the deadline for fall registration approaches.
In late 2024, I traveled to the West Bank to monitor settler violence against Palestinians. What I witnessed — a vertiginous project of occupation, apartheid and ethnic cleansing — was more brutal than anything I had read. Since Israel conducts this campaign with U.S. tax dollars and the collaboration of our universities, I viewed this trip as my responsibility as a student and educator, and I planned to bring this personal experience to my teaching and research on reparations.
Instead, I came back to a university that forced upon its entire student body this so-called “anti-bias training,” which erases the suffering I witnessed in Palestine, promises to discipline me if I name those harms as being rooted in an ethno-colonialist system and adopts the very rhetoric the Israeli government uses to advance its invasion of the West Bank and Gaza.
The video erases Palestine from the map, replacing it with the colonial terms “Judea” and “Samaria,” claiming that “Israel was founded on British land” and alludes to a “Greater Israel,” which includes parts of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt.
Crucially, the training prohibits any critique of Zionism and vilifies anti-Zionists, equating them with antisemites and Nazi sympathizers like David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. It goes without saying that there is no training that features an anti-Zionist Jewish perspective or one that states Palestinians have their own legitimate right to self-determination.
If universities have a role in shaping culture, this is a genocidal one we are cultivating.
As I write this, Israel ramps up its de facto annexation in the West Bank and Gaza. I know, because I read newspapers and receive updates from the many families I saw being violated, harassed and deprived of water and land until they were forced to leave. I know because in the few weeks I was there, I saw new outposts and illegal settlements pop up next to military bases as Palestinian families’ land shrunk to nothing.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described the annexation as part of the vision of “Greater Israel.” I wonder if that genocidal rationale sounds familiar to Northwestern’s administration — after all, its training incorporates that same narrative.
At various points in history, universities have produced and normalized harmful ideologies — providing justifications for slavery and colonialism and the ideological bedrocks of various fascist regimes. That is why we must protect academic freedom and demand Northwestern stop this harm.
Micol Bez, Ph.D. student, philosophy and comparative literature, Northwestern University
Drawing attention away from Trump
Oh, those crazy kids! You’d think Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce would know better than to bump Donald Trump from the front pages with their big announcement. They might consider themselves lucky to not be indicted for treason.
Bob Ory, Elgin