It’s easy to check: is there a ground-level door on the side gangway, or at the rear?

  • Walk up and down the streets of Vittum Park and Archer Heights and you’ll see dozens of houses with gangway doors.
  • Over in Portage Park a bungalow in the 45th Ward has a door at the front corner, a couple of steps down.
Portage Park bungalow with a basement ADU entrance at the front corner

Back in 2018 I wrote about whether “lock off apartments” like these would be allowed by the Chicago zoning code. This was before I realized that so many bungalows have these; they’re so inconspicuous that they’re easy to miss.

Did you know that the city has 14 bungalow districts on the National Register of Historic Places? All but one would be severely affected by the proposed ADU expansion ordinance that would require homeowners to obtain a special use from the Zoning Board of Appeals in order to permit an existing ADU so someone can legally continue living in a separate household, or to permit the build out of a new ADU. That’s because most – if not all, but I didn’t check each one – of the land is zoned RS-1 and RS-2.

Google Street View images show six selected bungalows in Archer Heights that have side doors to basements. The status of each (whether they are separate households or shared with the household on the first floor) is unknown. Legally, however, most homeowners would not be able to rent out a basement unit because of zoning code restrictions here that the ADU ordinance could change. Thank you to Danny Villalobos for finding these; Danny is a fellow member of Urban Environmentalists Illinois, which has this petition gathering support for expanding the ADU ordinance citywide.

Only the homeowners in the Falconer Bungalow Historic District in Belmont Cragin would be exempt from that requirement in the proposed ADU expansion ordinance because none of the bungalows are zoned RS-1 or RS-2.

In a recent blog post I quantified how many small-scale residential properties would be affected by the RS-1/2 “carve out”. In this post I’m discussing those same kinds of properties but in the 13 bungalow historic districts that would be affected.

A list of 13 of the 14 historic bungalow districts in Chicago and the number of small-scale residential properties that are in RS-1 and RS-2 zoning districts that would have to obtain a special use from the Zoning Board of Appeals in order to have an ADU if the current version of the proposed ADU expansion ordinance would be adopted.