Category: Information

ADUs in Chicago: it’s the 4-year anniversary of a 3-year pilot program

May 22, 2025 / / 0 Comments

My prepared remarks spoken to the Chicago City Council’s Committee on Zoning, Landmarks, and Building Standards on May 21, 2025.

Hi, my name is Steven Vance, I’m a 34th ward resident and a member of Abundant Housing Illinois, a group whose members show up to advocate for approving new housing. I wanted to speak today to support the expansion of the city’s ADU pilot program into a permanent and citywide option. 

This month is the four year anniversary of the beginning of a three-year ADU pilot program. 

A year ago, in June, just after the three year anniversary, the department of housing fulfilled their obligation and presented their findings and recommendations. They recommended to expand it citywide. 

Two years ago, a year before the department’s recommendations, newly elected Alderprerson Lawson introduced an ordinance that would do just that. To my recollection, the zoning committee has substantially discussed that ordinance only once. 

During the last four years, nearly 400 ADU homes have been permitted by the Department of buildings, and hundreds of those homes have been built. Homeowners and other property owners have been able to build homes for their parents, friends, and as rental units to earn more household income. None of the ADUs are allowed to be used for Airbnb or other short term rentals. 

Chicago was recently recognized as a national leader…in rent increases. Allowing more homes, including in the form of accessory dwelling units, is a way to suppress the rate at which rents rise. In some cases, including this year in Austin, Texas, Minneapolis, and Denver, so many new homes were built that rents started falling. 

I urge the zoning committee to adopt an ordinance to allow ADUs citywide. Thank you. 

Brian and his wife built a coach house in 2023, pursuant to the ADU pilot program, so their newborn child’s grandma could live close to home and help babysit.
photo of the interior of an ADU coach house in Lakeview built in 2023
Interior of Brian’s coach house

AARP Illinois talks to Brian and Steven about legalizing ADUs citywide and statewide

March 25, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Adam Ballard, the Associate State Director for AARP Illinois, the local chapter for AARP, interviewed Brian P. and I about accessory dwelling units. We discussed:

The conversation is 28 minutes long; if you haven’t dived into ADUs yet, this is a great video to help get you up to speed!

Bonus content: AARP is the largest organizational supporter of allowing accessory dwelling units in all communities because of how they expand the options for people to “age in place” (continue living in the same neighborhood when their housing needs change), earn additional income, or rent their big house to their adult children’s families. Explore AARP’s ADU resources.

wide angle photo of the Illinois capitol in Springfield

Submit witness slips for housing abundant bills: Illinois spring 2025 edition

March 17, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Update 3/20/25, 6:04 PM: at a last-minute scheduled meeting of the Illinois House housing committee this afternoon, HB 1813 and HB 1814 were passed. The next steps are that they will likely be amended and in a few weeks will be voted on by the House.

Illinoisans who want housing abundance…it’s time to submit “witness slips” (they’re kind of like petitions and they’re seen by Illinois State Representatives and Senators. This whole process will take less than 5 minutes, including the time it takes to watch this video tutorial I made.

I summarized the bills on the Chicago Cityscape blog.

Tutorial

Here are the steps to create witness slips for pro-housing bills in the Illinois General Assembly

  1. Register for “My ILGA”, which expedites filling out witness slips.
  2. Open the list of bills on the Illinois House’s housing committee agenda.
  3. Select the “Create Witness Slips” buttons next to both of Rep. Buckner’s bills or select the links below:
    • HB 3288, affordable communities act
    • HB 3552, local accessory dwelling units act
  4. Fill out the witness slips! Because you pre-registered your contact information will already be filled in. If you’re representing yourself, enter “self” in the three fields (firm, title, and groups represented in this appearance). Then select the “create slip” button. (See annotated screenshot below.)
  5. Repeat the process for all of the witness slips you want to support (or oppose).

You’re done!

Screenshot showing the witness slip form (which is prefilled because I have a My ILGA account); the checkboxes are annotated to show which ones to select.

Transit in St. Petersburg

February 4, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Steven’s note: I originally drafted this post in December 2016, for Transitland (my contract employer at the time). Here’s the original (archived) post on Transitland’s website.

St. Petersburg Tramway Russia 2013

Photo of a Russian-built tram in Saint Petersburg by Hans-Rudolf Stoll.

We [TransitLand] recently added the feed for surface transit in Saint Petersburg, Russia. ORGP is the transport organizer’s name in the Latin alphabet. ORGP website is a central source of information for the various municipally- and privately-operated ferry, bus, and tram routes.

St. Petersburg (SPb) also has trolley bus routes, which drive using electricity they collect from an overhead wire. These buses can only deviate from their route where an intersection between wires is available.

There are 1,066 routes in the SPb feed.

  • 5 ferry routes
  • 48 tram routes
  • 51 trolley bus routes
  • Remaining are bus routes using conventional buses.

I couldn’t find ridership information for these routes, but the statistics on the Wikipedia article say that a much higher proportion of SPb residents ride the subway each weekday than people in Chicago ride the ‘L’  in my hometown. The ‘L’ runs mostly on elevated track, but has some subway and at-grade sections.

Speaking of the subway in SPb, we don’t have their GTFS feed yet and we could use your help. If you know the URL to the SPb’s subway feed, submit it on this form.

The Transitland connection

One of the features in Mapzen’s new Mobility Explorer, launched in late November, is to drill down into the transit routes, stops, and operators in a city – all of that data is based on what’s available in Transitland. It visualizes this data quickly and easily; think of it as an expansion of what Transitland’s Playground does.

Once you’re in Mobility Explorer, search for “Saint Petersburg, Russia” and click on the result. On the left sidebar, click on “show routes” and you’ll see that all of the routes in SPb will appear in the same color.

Click “style by: mode” to distinguish the subway, ferry, bus, and trolley bus routes in different colors.

A great feature of Mobility Explorer is that it tells you the Transitland API call to get the data in the current map view. You’ll find this link under the main “Show [xyz]” buttons in the left sidebar.

Trams in St.Petersburg - Tram nr 5409 lijn40 - 10/06/2016.

DSCN7260 Trolleybus depot 3, department 1, Saint-Petersburg 3510

It’s very common see regular length buses with three doors in Europe, while buses in North America often have two doors. Articulated buses often have 3-4 doors, 1-2 more than their counterparts in the United States.

Reviewing the City Council subcommittee’s sixteen revenue-raising ideas

September 16, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Mayor Johnson asked 6th Ward alderperson William Hall to solicit ideas about how to fund the City of Chicago budget. The Chicago Tribune reported on these:

The Google [Forms] survey he included asked aldermen to respond “Yes” or “No” to the following ideas, with no added descriptions: “Sales Tax on Services; Property Tax (CPI Increase); Monthly/Wireless Plan Tax; Increase in LGDF Share; Head Tax; Alcohol Tax; Checking Bag Tax; Video Gaming Tax; Grocery Tax; City Sticker Increase; Congestion Tax; Income Tax Surcharge; Package Tax; Vacant Lot Tax; Ticket Reseller Amusement Tax; Enterprise Zones.”

I’ll briefly describe each one based on my own knowledge of these taxes. Note that these are possibilities and not suggestions.

  • Sales tax on services. Chicago doesn’t have a sales tax on most services (think haircut or tax preparation). (Chicago has a tax on some services, like the “Personal Property Lease Transaction Tax” which applies to services that use cloud computing, including Netflix!)
  • Property tax increase based on inflation. Mayor Lightfoot implemented this for a few years but Mayor Johnson did not renew it.
  • Wireless plan tax. This one confuses me because Chicago already taxes monthly cellular service.
  • Increase in LGDF share. LGDF is the State of Illinois local government distributive fund and the idea here is to convince the state legislature to increase the share that that the City of Chicago receives. Some data points that I think could be in favor of increasing the city’s LGDF share: Cook County receives back only 88% of what it contributes to state taxes (Paul Simon Public Policy Institute, page 37).
  • Head tax. This is a tax employers would pay for each employee they have. Mayor Emanuel and City Council phased out the head tax in 2014.
  • Alcohol tax. Chicago applies its own liquor tax, currently starting at $0.29 per gallon of beer up to $2.68 per gallon for anything containing 20% or more ABV.
  • Checking bag tax. I presume this refers to the existing Checkout Bag Tax, which is set at 7 cents per checkout bag sold at retail stores (the store can keep 2 cents of this to help subsidize the cost of the bag).
  • Video gaming tax. This would mean legalizing video gambling and taxing it.
  • Grocery tax. Governor Pritzker and the Illinois General Assembly eliminated the 1% grocery tax starting in 2025, revenues from which are distributed to municipalities. In return, the state allowed cities to implement their own grocery tax. Richard Day opines why it would be a bad idea for Chicago to implement such a regressive tax.
  • City sticker increase. A city sticker is a fee for the privilege of being able to park a car for free across much of the city.
  • Congestion tax. This would create a fee, surcharge, or tax for the privilege of driving a personal vehicle, and for the city to recover the costs and negative impacts, into the downtown area during specified times.
  • Income tax surcharge. I’m not sure what the surcharge means but Chicago currently doesn’t have an income tax.
  • Package tax. I don’t know what this means, but Hall told the Chicago Tribune that the package tax would “look at weights and distribution of packages that move throughout the city.”
  • Vacant lot tax. This would probably act as a kind of land value tax but would probably be implemented as an additional property tax on vacant lots (I assume any parcel that the county classifies as “1-00” would be eligible for this).
  • Ticket reseller amusement tax. Another tax that already exists; presumably this would be increasing the tax paid by people buying tickets for amusements (which includes concerts – you can see a list of all of the registered amusement tax businesses).
  • Enterprise Zones. I can’t make sense of this because Enterprise Zones are an existing state incentive area; there are six in Chicago. This “give” money (in the form of state sales tax breaks on construction materials and waiving the state’s portion of the real estate transfer tax in some situations) to property owners.
A vacant lot in Bronzeville. Land value tax would fix this.

Further reading

The Civic Federation came up with their own list of possible revenue sources and indicated if they require a state statute to authorize.