Illinois should lift the ban on rent control.
I run a little series on my Facebook feed.
Whenever a single family house goes on the market in the neighborhood that is priced at a million dollars or more I post a picture of it with the hash tags #AffordableHousing, #LiftTheBan and #Transfer Tax
The idea of a transfer tax on home sales over a million bucks is supported by Mayor Brandon Johnson and members of the Chicago City Council. The transfer tax would go to address homelessness and housing affordability.
I post a house a couple a week. Sometimes more.
Most are newly and cheaply constructed clones of one another that replaced a tear-down.
Often what are torn down are Chicago graystones or brick worker’s cottages which are not without architectural and historic significance.
They have what are called “good bones”.
They have provided affordable housing for working people for over a hundred years.
The city does nothing to protect most of them.
The Logan Square neighborhood we moved to in 1975 was a majority Latinx community which had historically been home to waves of the city’s working class immigrants.
Lucy Parsons, activist and wife of Haymarket martyr Albert Parsons, had a house nearby.
A decade long fight to build just 100 units of below market apartments on a city-owned parking lot in the heart of the community recently was completed and named in here honor.
But the need for affordable housing is great as more of the million dollar single family homes replace multi-family affordable rental units.
And the rents on those that are still available keep going up.
And up.
Illinois has a state law, passed in 1997, that bans local municipalities from enacting rent control.
It’s crazy that the state legislature, dominated by down state legislators, can prevent Chicago from making a choice to do something about homelessness and housing affordability.
HB 4104, also known as the Let the People Lift the Ban Act, was introduced June 6 in the Illinois House. It would allow local governments to adopt rent-control provisions if a majority of voters in the locality support a pro-rent control referendum.
It has not yet been assigned to a committee.