This spring, as the Oak Park Village Board begins to consider zoning reform in earnest, the WJ opinion pages are sprouting anti-reform opinion pieces like daisies:
“Zoning reform won’t produce affordable housing”
It’s a common misconception that only the government can produce affordable housing. Since 2012 Oak Park has built 1,751 new housing units, 50 of them deed-restricted affordable, but in the same amount of time the number of affordable units in Oak Park, according to the Illinois Housing Development Authority, increased by 1,300. This is because building new market-rate housing decreased the demand for existing affordable housing, protecting it for lower-income residents. There is no progressive plan that will generate 1,300 affordable units in a decade, not even close.
Oak Park is not alone, data from across the nation shows that building new market-rate housing increases affordability at all market levels.
“It will displace vulnerable residents”
According to U.S. Census data, the percentage of Black population in Oak Park fell from 21.2% to 17.8% between 2010 and 2023. Our exclusionary housing policy is already resulting in displacement. Displacement occurs when housing demand exceeds supply. Prices are bid up, existing stock is renovated and sold to a more affluent market segment to meet demand.
Gentrification is what you get when the only legal building form is a house that costs more than the one it replaced.
“It threatens homeownership and wealth-building”
The status quo has resulted in cheap starter homes being flipped and turned into larger more expensive homes. In Oak Park there’s no returning to the cheap, small, single-family home as the lowest rung in the housing ladder. But we can provide more affordable entry points for ownership and wealth accumulation by building more townhomes and condos.
“Private equity and developers will exploit it”
Private equity invests in housing because artificially constrained supply is causing housing to appreciate much faster than inflation. It’s a good investment. The best thing we could do to stick it to private equity is build more housing.
“It harms neighborhood character and historic fabric”
Almost half of Oak Park’s housing is in multifamily buildings. Duplexes, townhomes, and courtyard apartments can be found everywhere in our neighborhoods, and predate single-family zoning. For the last 100 years we’ve made building new examples of that housing illegal. Zoning reforms would allow us to return to the housing forms that make Oak Park so unique and special.
“Traffic, parking, and infrastructure will suffer”
Higher-density housing correlates with lower car ownership rates and lower car usage. Our local infrastructure is sized for a much higher population than our current population, and the main constraint of our sewer system is storm runoff, which does not scale with population. If anything, as climate change increases the demands on our infrastructure, we’ll want more taxpayers to share the burden.
“The real problem is wealth inequality, not zoning”
This ignores the fact that exclusionary zoning is the primary mechanism employed by land owners to capture wealth. One of the enumerated purposes of our zoning code is ‘To conserve the values of property throughout the Village.’ It has done that very well; housing prices have far outpaced the rate of inflation. No amount of redistribution will allow a lower-income family to buy a $500K bungalow.
“The process is biased and undemocratic. Opposition is being ignored. We need more study and community feedback”
The research is clear that community feedback is dominated by older, whiter home owners. These are also the people who are most likely to vote. The opinions of reform opponents are very well represented. Calls for more process and community involvement are a standard delay tactic. We’ve been studying this for years, across multiple boards and consulting engagements. The voters have had their say. It’s time to act.
“New construction is a large source of carbon and wastes the sunk carbon costs of the building it replaces. New apartments will lack green features so that developers can make a profit.”
The single-family home is the least sustainable form of housing. Low-density, single-family neighborhoods promote car use, and multifamily housing is much more efficient to heat and cool per unit. Long term, adding higher-density housing decreases emissions and allows more people to live in an area where infrastructure and transit already supports much lower per resident carbon footprints.
Sustainability concerns should, of course, factor into new building designs, but they should not be a barrier to new forms that are innately more efficient.
“We don’t have room in the schools for all of the new kids”
District 97 enrollment is down over 10% since 2018 (https://www.illinoisreportcard.com/District.aspx?source=studentcharacteristics&source2=enrollment&Districtid=06016097002). Regardless, one of the primary purposes of zoning reform is to provide a diversity of housing types so that people who don’t have children in the schools can afford to live here. This will make Oak Park a place both 20-somethings and retirees can call home, broadening the tax base and making our educational system more sustainable, not less.
Josh is a passionate urbanist and entrepreneur who’s lived in Chicagoland for thirty years and has called Oak Park home for over a decade.