Oak Park’s zoning debate has lost its moorings. The fight over it has become the sorcerer’s apprentice scene from Fantasia: the brooms multiplying, the water rising, no one able to make it stop. Can we just pause and admit this discourse has gone bananas?
I’ve lived here a mere seven years, and I’ve learned we’re constitutionally incapable of a low-stakes disagreement. Give us a routine municipal update and we’ll inflate it into an existential Grand Battle for the Soul of the Village.
For all the sound and fury, the Shape Oak Park report itself expects this change to barely register anytime soon — because meaningful physical change, and real affordability, need far more than an updated code can deliver.
Start with how little it actually rewrites about the look and feel of our neighborhoods. Our “single-family” blocks are already dotted with two-flats and small apartment buildings, many built before 1940 — homes that couldn’t be built under today’s code. The proposed zoning code better reflects the existing housing stock and provides flexibility for the future.
But flexibility isn’t the same as activity. Zoning alone doesn’t drive development; it only says what’s allowed. It’s good at preventing things and poor at causing them. The real drivers are economics — demand and the cost of building and policy rules and incentives that can make one type of development easier and another harder. And it’s all connected.
You can see those forces in action 20 minutes to our west. Hinsdale has seen roughly half its historic homes torn down since the late 1990s. Larger lots in a desirable community meant that a teardown and McMansion replacement was faster than renovation, and buyers had the money, the desire, and the space for bigger homes in Hinsdale. Zoning couldn’t protect Hinsdale’s “community character.” What finally slowed the wrecking was a renovation incentive package: grants, tax rebates and streamlined permitting.
Why hasn’t that happened in Oak Park? Our smaller lots don’t pencil out for teardowns the way Hinsdale’s do. And our historic districts, which cover roughly a third of the village, make tearing anything down genuinely hard. As a result, only an occasional small house on a larger lot gets knocked down and replaced.
Now look east, to Chicago’s North Side, where two-flats have been legal all along. There the market ran in reverse: in high-cost, walkable neighborhoods like Lincoln Park, buyers merged two-flats back into single-family homes, shrinking supply and pushing prices up. Between 2013 and 2019 the city lost 11,775 units in two- to four-flats, nearly half of them to single-family conversions.
We’ve seen the limits of an ordinance passed in good faith right here in Oak Park, when we legalized accessory dwelling units (ADUs). Restrictive design rules and high construction costs mean only a handful have actually been built. Achieving gentle density will take far more than simple permission.
So why do it at all? Because the recommendations are necessary, even if only a first step. They retire a policy with an ugly, exclusionary past. They give us room to adapt as our households keep getting older and smaller. They align the code with who we already are. And they’re low-risk, precisely because they’re low-yield. They force nothing on anyone, and they clear the way for the harder work to come.
We’ve spent extraordinary energy — meetings, money, worry, neighbor wary of neighbor — on a step that will change very little, before we’ve even gotten to discuss the levers that could truly shape our village.
Was it worth it?
Sources:
Hinsdale: record 118 teardowns (2005); roughly half of original stock lost since the late 1990s — Crain’s Chicago Business, “Hinsdale says anti-teardown program is saving houses”; Dwell.
About 11,775 units lost from two-to-four-unit buildings (2013–2019), 47.5% converted to single-family — DePaul University Institute for Housing Studies, “Patterns of Lost 2 to 4 Unit Buildings in Chicago.”
Nicole Chavas writes a monthly column for Wednesday Journal. She lives in a single-family home on a block with a two-flat, a six-flat, and a couple of ADUs, and thinks it’s the best block in town.