The March 4 Wednesday Journal article on eliminating single-family zoning refers to “reforms” 11 times, along with public “education,” “making the case,” “updating,” taking “leadership,” a “legislative priority” of village trustees for “transformative change,” and it ends with the village president hoping the board will be “ready to act” on the proposal, and hear the “sense of urgency.” How’s that for dictating a favored outcome by framing the terms of the debate?
The target area for fostering more affordable housing is said to be South Oak Park, and the rationale that the code is a legacy that needs correcting: the use of zoning for racial segregation. I live south of the Eisenhower, largely dominated by single-family homes. Are we all racists then, needing to be “re-educated” and our attitudes and practices “reformed” into accepting different ethnicities?
I don’t recall even thinking about race when moving to Oak Park in 1974 and buying a single-family home 50 years ago. What I chiefly remember in fleeing the density of Chicago was driving around for an hour late on weekend nights looking for a place to park, and the dog poop on the parkways so thick that it was impossible to walk from your car without stepping in it. And when the arrival of my second child required larger quarters (thinking ahead to quality of schools), choosing Oak Park because I could not afford Evanston.
My community evolved over half a century from one affordably housing mainly “working class” people like railroad bridge workers, mailmen and the like, into a socio-economically more upscale population of greater means (and greater ethnic diversity too). When I moved in, everybody cut their own grass; now almost all save time for leisure, trading money for lawn service. Their high demand raised prices.
The current move on zoning seems a simplistic and merely symbolic solution to a complex problem, the affordability crisis our country faces, and one that will actually accomplish nothing but virtue signaling on the part of its proponents. Do my attitudes really need “education” and my preferences “reform”? That reminds me of the Cultural Revolution in China.
If race plays a role in the current situation in Oak Park, it is solely as a factor in the much broader category of socio-economic well-being, which raises a host of other moral questions of its own. But they won’t be answered by eliminating single-family zoning.
The effect I see of a zoning change is solely on money. Single-family homes won’t be demolished for multifamily dwellings anytime soon. But they will over time — by investors who realize that values will be raised by putting more residences on a plot (part of a decades long effort by village powers toward increasing the tax base by increasing housing density). But the new multifamily residences won’t be any more “affordable” than the single-family homes they replace. They will be at the same high demand and cost that have pushed up single-family home prices.
The new residents in denser neighborhoods will be the same upscale people who flock to Oak Park now. And yes, race will be the same socio-economic factor among them that it is now — if you don’t have the means, you won’t be able to afford Oak Park, just as I could not afford Evanston then, nor Lake Forest now.
The true crisis is that of affordability generally, and the wealth divide between the various “classes.” We have erected an economic system that, by design, sucks up small amounts of the wealth produced by the majority who are just getting by, and accumulating it for the few plutocrats to whom it flows. In my 80 years, I have seen the economic model of the U.S. slowly evolve to do just that. The ideal was once to build a better mousetrap that will make the world beat a path to your door, and to be satisfied with that. But once the mouse was caught, the trap-buying ceased. And so came a great transition to a different economic model: one that requires perpetual payments, like renting cars instead of selling them, or bargain deals with resulting payments that never cease, with all the subscriptions you are paying for that you don’t even use.
What we truly need are governmental “social engineering” solutions that will transfer some of that massive wealth back to where it came from, to those of our fellows who suffer most from the affordability crisis, and from housing costs.
In the meantime please spare us from the meaningless and ineffective “solution” that is the elimination of single family zoning, and the insult to our intelligence and morality from the insistent invocation of what are just hollow changes, as “reform.”
Frank Stachyra is a longtime resident of Oak Park.