On Sept. 15, the Oak Park Village Board unanimously voted to approve an ad-hoc Housing Advisory task force assembled to focus on zoning and affordable housing goals.
A quote from a Sept. 23 issue of the Wednesday Journal [Oak Park appointing task force on zoning and affordable housing goals] states:
“As we have continued to evaluate the needs of that committee and the things we’d be working on, we thought that it made the most sense to beef up the amount of real estate and development expertise on it, particularly given the work that will be happening around subsidies and support activities related to housing development,” said Jonathan Burch, Oak Park neighborhood services director.
The question Oak Park residents/taxpayers must ask is: What subsidies and support activities related to housing development is Mr. Burch speaking of? Who will pay for those costs and who will this actually lower housing costs for?
The village has stated Oak Park’s housing costs are rising. A very large component of these costs are property taxes. Let’s be honest, items such as a referendum to issue a $40 million bond for an indoor pool, seeking additional funding to extravagantly rebuild a pedestrian bridge over the Eisenhower Expressway billed as a “forever statement” at the cost of $15 million, creating a two-tiered water-billing system that will increase multi-unit building water bills by an extra 5-7%, and increasing the local plastic bag fee is not exactly going to bring down the housing costs in Oak Park.
Why not concentrate on bringing costs down, and instituting true property tax reform which would benefit everyone, not just those individuals looking to move to Oak Park.
Why don’t you take care of the people who currently live and vote in Oak Park? Simply put, we need a competent government accountable to the current residents of this village, not trustees who paint their constituents as racists because they may not agree with their agenda, which is extremely offensive and greatly resented by this community. Is this what democracy looks like in Oak Park in 2026?
Thomas Collis
Oak Park resident for 62 years