It is easy to get discouraged by the pace of local housing reform. Municipalities have all the power, and they are incredibly conservative when it comes to zoning changes. Progressive Oak Park is no different. Our biggest change in the past decade was legalizing Accessory Dwelling Units, or “granny flats.” That produced fewer than two dozen coach houses. This ordinance is permissive on paper, utterly ineffective in practice.
The Oak Park Village Board has been studying broader reform for nearly two years. It recently hired a consultant and just launched a community survey: https://engageoakpark.com/shape?tool=survey_tool#tool_tab. We are nowhere near the finish line. We are two years in and only now at the real starting line.
Despite the slow pace, advocacy is still worth it. Looser housing rules will increase housing supply, strengthen local businesses, broaden economic and racial diversity, and improve affordability. We just need to be realistic and realize that local change will be slow and contested at every step.
This is why I’m so excited about some recent state-level legislation. Last week, the Illinois legislature passed an omnibus transit funding bill that includes the “People Over Parking Act”. The idea is simple. Within a half-mile of transit hubs, municipalities cannot impose parking minimums.
For Oak Park, the effect will be large. Most of the village is within a half-mile of a transit hub (see map https://www.yesoakpark.org/people-over-parking-act-coverage-in-oak-park). In much of Oak Park, new developments would no longer face mandatory on-site parking minimum.
This will make developing new housing much easier. High parking minimums often kill projects because parking is expensive to build and returns little revenue. As a result, parking minimums are a frequently deployed tactic in the NIMBY toolkit.
Because this is state law, it overrides our slow and cautious local process and provides an immediate boost to new development. It should also spur our local village board to remove parking minimums from the village code entirely. One clear standard would be cleaner than a Swiss-cheese map that hinges on bus schedules. A uniform rule will also result in less legal wrangling.
I expect a hearty citizen outcry, as there always is around parking. But remember that developers still want to build parking even when the minimum is zero. The difference is flexibility. Projects can right-size on-site parking, use shared or off-site options and, downtown, make better use of our underfilled and money-losing public garages.
Increasingly, progressive state legislatures are stepping in when cities stall and preemptively loosening municipal choke points on housing.
I support this trend, and hope that progressive Oak Park gets ahead of it.
Josh is a passionate urbanist and entrepreneur who has lived in Chicagoland for 30 years and has called Oak Park home for over a decade.