The Oak Park trustees rejected a referendum on abolishing single-family zoning. It had generated over 250 emails to trustees, 95% in favor. A FOIA request for all emails to trustees in that month produced 329 pages, many coming even after the vote.
Fortunately the Illinois Township Code also provides for referendums, but taking very much longer to set in motion. A group of citizens has now submitted the matter for a vote at the Township Annual Meeting on whether to put a referendum on the ballot: “Should the village of Oak Park have a zoning ordinance with no single-family zones, and permitting multifamily buildings to be constructed to replace single-family homes?”
But the village board is scheduled to vote on abolition before that comes up. So the referendum would be a retrospective advisory vote on the board having already gotten rid of single family zoning. The Township Annual Meeting is set by law for April 13. Mark your calendar and show up to vote.
Why?
The next election for three VOP trustee positions will be one week prior to the Township meeting. That virtually guarantees that abolition of single-family zoning will be the major issue, for both the election and the meeting.
Weeks before rejecting a referendum that would show what villagers want, the village president talked about the upcoming “outreach” in mid-September, to get public feedback on the proposal. But the board voted to immediately take the next step legally necessary for abolition — forwarding the proposal to the Plan Commission — without waiting to find out what villagers’ feedback was. One Trustee declared: “I don’t think a lot of that feedback will be particularly interesting or valuable.” And the VOP staffer in charge of the project answered a villager’s written question about whether polls will be taken to determine where the attendees stand on the proposed rezoning. The answer? “No.”
It seems that trustees are hell-bent on pushing this project through, no matter what the villagers think. They don’t want to know.
Now four brief public “outreach” sessions are set. Past efforts produced virtually no feedback. They were nothing but promotion of “affordable housing,” unsupported wishful thinking divorced from reality. Completely ignored was the macroeconomic factor “option value effect”: the moment the option exists of replacing single-family homes with more valuable multi-unit dwellings, the value and price of each house will immediately go up, defeating the stated purpose — i.e., backfiring. Also ignored is that these zoning changes are essentially a bulldozing program for existing houses, further shrinking the supply — also a factor driving up values and prices and making matters worse. And pretending that six flats 35 feet tall or higher on typical 5,000-square-foot, single-family lots will blend right in with currently existing two-story houses typically about half the height. And that’s not the half of it.
It’s time to stand up and insist on being heard. Go to an “outreach” session and raise your voice. Above all, add your email to the flood at board@oak-park.us, and go speak up at board meetings, to let the trustees know what the public really thinks.
This is what democracy looks like.
Frank Stachyra
Oak Park