Oak Park’s zoning debate has quickly divided us into camps despite our shared interest in a better Oak Park. The goal isn’t maximum density, nor fossilizing everything exactly as is. It’s an Oak Park that stays welcoming, diverse, viable, and beautiful. We might lower the temperature of this debate if we treated zoning as one tool toward that future rather than the cause we’re fighting over.
I’ll offer a personal parallel from across the globe. I grew up in Kozhikode, India, and my family’s housing story mirrors that of many families here: from our grandparents’ home to a rental to a house my parents built and owned, and now almost 50 years later, a condo in a high-rise. These transitions reflect the natural progression of life and a city changing around us.
Kozhikode itself evolved dramatically over those decades: population growth, denser cores, expanding development, and planning regulations matured accordingly. Once a much smaller town, today its framework identifies distinct zones: residential, commercial, mixed-use, transit corridors, lower-density, and heritage areas, adding capacity to the core and expanding outward.
Kozhikode is not an ideal example, but an experience that informs my perspective. It is a large market that can absorb enormous development like many of the cities globally that have/are experimenting with zoning changes like Auckland, NZ; Austin, TX; Minneapolis, etc. These merit study and hold lessons, but none translate directly to Oak Park. We’re 4.7 square miles, mature and built out, embedded in a much larger metropolitan housing market.
While more supply eases price pressure, Oak Park alone cannot control the regional market, and we cannot expand our boundaries. We can and should add housing choices, but I question whether zoning changes alone within our small footprint can meaningfully solve affordability challenges and housing shortages confronting us.
That means first asking what Oak Park can realistically accomplish and then creating policy priorities. I don’t think we are asking enough questions for the scale of the change that is being proposed. The question isn’t just “does more supply help affordability?” It’s “how much supply will these specific changes actually produce, at what price points, over what timeframe, and at what cost and risk?”
Oak Park already has housing diversity: apartments, condos, courtyard buildings, two-flats, single-family homes, historic multifamily buildings. In my 20 years here, I’ve rented, owned a single-family home, and now live in a 130-year-old condo that peacefully coexists on an “Oak Parky” block with single-family homes and two-flats. We should build on that diversity with more housing along transit corridors, easier accessory dwelling units (ADUs), redevelopment of underutilized properties, options for seniors to age in place, incentives for genuinely affordable units, and missing-middle housing where it fits.
It doesn’t necessitate declaring one housing type good and another bad. This shouldn’t become a fight between people who care about affordability and people who care about their neighborhoods. Most of us care about both.
There’s middle ground between freezing Oak Park in time and transforming every neighborhood all at once. Why not identify pilot areas for duplexes and triplexes with clear guidelines and design standards for building envelope, setbacks etc., then measure what actually happens before adjusting? Let’s truly understand the effects on property values, property taxes, schools, infrastructure, parking, and neighborhood character and use that understanding to bring the whole community along. That’s not resistance to change; it’s how responsible change works.
The real question is how we can shape change thoughtfully, protecting what makes this community unique while making room for the people, homes, and businesses of the future.
Ravi Parakkat
Former Oak Park trustee