Cory Wesley and Jim Taglia are both right when it comes to the proposal to reshape a core element of Oak Park’s longstanding residential zoning. It is a big decision.
A plan coming out of a consultant’s report, steered there by Oak Park’s very progressive village board, would eliminate single-family zoning as the cornerstone of how the village looks at housing in its neighborhoods.
Seems radical. And it is. When you listen to Wesley eloquently and passionately explain that single-family zoning is, across America, rooted in efforts to keep communities white, to block out affordable pathways to either buying or renting housing on traditionally single-family blocks, when he calls it out as systemic racism, it gets your attention. And it ought to.
He is right on all those points.
Wesley is not calling you a racist if you are a white Oak Parker. He is saying, and he makes it clear in his many and thoughtful social media posts and when he sat down a few months ago with me and a Journal colleague, that real estate as a method of racial segregation is baked into our village and our nation.
Of course it is. Now don’t get all defensive. Don’t go into denial. Or all piney nostalgia.
Trustee Wesley wants this Oak Park Village Board, which has been intentionally working on this issue for years, to bring this to a vote in the weeks ahead. Trustee Taglia last week at a board meeting said this issue was simply too big to be decided by elected officials and it ought to be put to a binding citizen referendum.
Now I admire Taglia and I’m grateful for his voice – more financially conservative, perhaps more skeptical of village hall operations. But my antennae go up each and every time anyone suggests a political issue is so complex, so important that it has to be brought to voters in a binding referendum. Yes to referendums on tax hikes. Essential.
But we elect people to public office to make hard decisions. And we need to let them make those decisions. Voters, every two years, get to elect the electeds. And over decades now, Oak Park voters have, with a couple of breaks, elected a very progressive village board and equally progressive school boards.
Close out with a long-term perspective. Oak Park is already way better than most suburban communities when it comes to having diverse housing stock. About half of the housing units in the village are multifamily, mostly rentals. The town was built that way starting in the 1920s. This is the century-old apartment corridors on Austin and Washington, the 1960s mid-rises on north Kenilworth and North Boulevard and the high rises built downtown over the past decade-plus. But it is also the two- and three-flats sprinkled all over the village on blocks that are mainly single-family. It has worked well for decades.
And second, no developer is coming in to buy up a block of single-family homes on Harvey so they can build 200 units. It won’t work that way.
But opening the door to somewhat more density, some more height at certain locations, more “accessory dwelling units” in backyards and other variants on affordable housing would make real Oak Park’s chatter and back-slapping about equity and inclusion.
Time to act.
