Chicago has a housing affordability crisis that has left the city 120,000 units short of the residential units it needs.
On Tuesday, the City Council helped ease that shortage with safeguards aimed at preserving the residential character of Northwest and Southwest Side neighborhoods dominated by single-family homes.
By a 13-7 vote, the Zoning Committee approved a compromise ordinance that will give single-family homeowners carte blanche to turn their attics, basements, garages and coach houses into revenue-generating “granny flats.”
Ald. Bennett Lawson, (44th), spent more than a year trying to find common ground on the volatile issue of accessory dwelling units that pitted bungalow belt Council members against colleagues whose wards have more density.
The compromise he crafted includes a string of safeguards aimed at preventing neighborhoods dominated by single-family homes from being overrun by granny flats.
The guarantees include:
- Limiting “construction by right” to one unit per block, per year in neighborhoods zoned R-1; two units per block, per year in areas zoned R-2; and three units a year in neighborhoods zoned R-3. Individual alderpersons can choose to remove those limits by ordinance provided the exempted area includes “no less than one block face and opposite block face combined.”
- Requiring homeowner occupancy “at the time of precertification in all detached houses seeking to build accessory dwelling units. Once again, local alderpersons can opt out.
- Extending the current prohibition on using accessory dwelling units as short-term rentals.
- Retaining the existing mandate that building be “in existence for at least 20 years to construct a conversion unit.
- Mandating an annual report to the City Council on the number of additional units created.
Lawson said he worked “in concert” with Mayor Brandon Johnson’s office and the Department of Housing “to put together an ordinance that had the greatest number of votes we could get without weakening the program too deeply.”
“If we could add a couple hundred units throughout the city every year through this type of program, that makes a difference. It helps with rent prices, which are skyrocketing,” Lawson said. “We need to build housing of all types: affordable, market, naturally occurring affordable at today’s market rate. It helps all of those things, but in a slow, sort of methodical way.”
With those safeguards in place, Lawson said he’s confident he’ll have the 26 votes he needs to win final approval from the full City Council, if not this week, then at the final meeting before the August recess.
“It’s my ordinance, so I’m hoping there’s some deference, but at the same time,” parliamentary maneuvers that delay consideration for one meeting are “sort of becoming par for the course on this Council from all sides, so I’m ready for that, too,” Lawson said.
Retiring Zoning Committee Chair Walter Burnett said allowing single-family homeowners to turn their attics, basements, garages and coach houses into revenue-generating “granny flats” will allow Chicagoans struggling to “stay in gentrifying neighborhoods where taxes have gotten so high.
“It gives them another alternative to be able to supplement their income and pay the taxes so they can stay in the neighborhood,” Burnett told the Chicago Sun-Times before chairing his final meeting. “It also gives them an opportunity for their child or their parent to be able to stay with them.”
The safeguards were not enough to satisfy Southwest Side Ald. Marty Quinn (13th). He’s holding out for an “opt-in” provision for areas zoned R-1, R-2 and R-3.
“My residents are having this ordinance jammed down their throats — and that’s not fair,” Quinn told his colleagues before the final vote.
“I believe residents in the Bungalow Belt will move if they don’t work for the city of Chicago. That makes this an attack on the working class, the people that show up every day: our teachers, our firefighters, our police officers, our laborers, our heavy equipment operators. So, go ahead. Ruin the integrity of single-family dwelling blocks. You’re only hurting the integrity of the city of Chicago.”.
Burnett respectfully disagreed.
“Basically what we’re doing is helping folks become legal because, honestly, a lot of folks have been doing it illegal,” Burnett said.
Finance Chair Pat Dowell (3rd) has urged the Johnson administration to devise a grant program to “help folks who can’t afford to build a coach house on their garage or rehab their basements into residential units.”
There’s no money specifically identified for conversion assistance. But Burnett said the mayor’s office has agreed to try to “come up with some kind of funding mechanism” at a time when federal housing assistance is being dramatically reduced by the administration of President Donald Trump.
“We’re trying to come up other ways for them to be able to afford to do these things and have these apartments,” he said.