I recently read The Politics of Place: A History of Zoning in Chicago, by Joseph P. Schwieterman and Dana M. Caspall. It’s a short, readable overview of how zoning has developed in Chicago over time.
Beginning with Chicago’s late 19th-century boomtown era, the book discusses the initial development of zoning codes in the 1910s, then goes through a variety of instances where Chicagoans adapted zoning rules to grapple with urban growth and development throughout the 20th century (it was published in 2006, so the history stops there).
Altogether, I found The Politics of Place rich with detail and quite informative about how Chicago’s land use system arrived at its current state. Those of us hoping to make crucial improvements to this system ought to be familiar with its origin. If we think existing rules and systems are bad, we can learn a lot from understanding the rationales under which these rules and systems were established.
Here are three major takeaways from the book, and how it helped me understand some of the zoning and land use issues that Chicago faces today.
Chicago’s land use rules have long been haphazard and unsystematic
To me, one of the biggest problems in Chicago’s zoning and land use system is a general sense of arbitrariness, with too much time spent on development-by-development details to the detriment of larger citywide goals. The result is a system that makes housing development needlessly complex and uncertain, while reinforcing exclusivity and inequality in the city. The authors of The Politics of Place make clear that this is not new in Chicago.
Consider Planned Developments. Starting in 1957, Chicago began to rely on Planned Developments as a way to manage large development projects, which often required extensive negotiation and some kind of relief from the existing zoning code. For major, multi-building development projects like Dearborn Park, the Illinois Institute for Technology, and Marina City, it probably makes sense to have some bespoke planning processes.
But the purview of PDs was ever-expanding. A 1974 ordinance greatly increased the range of developments that were required to go through this process. Any multifamily housing development over 120 feet tall (about 12 stories) or with more than 150 dwelling units now required a PD. The Richard M. Daley administration relied heavily on them, issuing more than 100 PDs between 1989 and 1993.
That trend has continued: according to research by the Urban Institute's Yonah Freemark, nearly 60% of housing units built in Chicago between 2006 and 2024, representing hundreds of housing developments, were under a PD.
This has costs. As Freemark writes, PDs necessitate an uncertain process that can take months and require tens of thousands of dollars in fees. Chicago’s heavy reliance on this process has clear tradeoffs against the goals of expanding the city’s housing supply to support broad affordability.
This unsystematic type of planning extends beyond the project-level. Consider the wave of downzonings that happened across the Northside in the 1970s and 1980s. These downzonings were largely driven by hyperlocal opposition to the development of highrises and other apartment buildings along the Northside lakefront.
It’s hard to argue that this piecemeal series of changes, often occurring at scales far smaller than a neighborhood, represent any systematic vision for how a city should develop over time. Instead, these changes look like a reactionary and uncoordinated way to plan the city. As urban planner Philip Zeitlin wrote back in 1982, “when ‘hopscotch’ downzoning is used to falsely maintain and protect community benefits, the local government no longer may attest that zoning is ‘in accordance’ with a comprehensive plan.”
Similarly, the book documents that aldermanic control over development in a ward has been standard practice for many decades. The authors strike an optimistic tone about the 1970s-era growth of local organizations, such as community zoning boards, arguing that such groups help keep alders accountable to their constituents. But while this might be a check on corrupt backroom dealing by alders, this change doesn’t solve the lack of coordinated planning around housing development across the city. Indeed, by empowering residents of exclusionary neighborhoods, it probably worsened this issue — today, it’s easy to find instances of these neighborhood groups preventing new housing in their neighborhoods.
Historically, Chicago has mostly lacked a reliable constituency for more housing
Parts of this book made me want to pull my hair out, as I read about previous decisions to make Chicago’s zoning more strict and prevent new housing. The Politics of Place details many moments in Chicago’s history where both grassroots neighborhood activists and civic leaders came together to make Chicago’s zoning and land use laws more restrictive.
Surprisingly, in most of these circumstances, the authors do not document an effective constituency that could argue against these changes. As one example, in the early 1970s, residents of Northside neighborhoods including Lakeview and Lincoln Park led an effort to restrict “four-plus-one” apartment buildings, named for their first floor parking with four stories of one-bedroom or efficiency units. Residents thought these buildings were ugly, too dense, and likely to attract the “wrong” kinds of residents, and attempted to effectively ban them through the use of parking requirements and building size regulations.
According to this book, the main opposition to the four-plus-one ban came from architects and real estate professionals1. For example, the mortgage banker Albert C. Hanna was one of the most prominent opponents of the anti four-plus-one movement, arguing that raising parking requirements for this type of development had “no rational support”. While Hanna was outspoken about this issue (and continued to be outspoken for decades more), he doesn’t seem to have built a strong constituency against the anti four-plus-one downzonings. Ultimately, zoning restrictions and parking requirements on these buildings were substantially increased.
Later on, the Richard M. Daley administration led a rewrite of Chicago’s zoning ordinance, which was completed in 2004. Large swathes of this zoning ordinance focused on “preserving” neighborhoods, with an emphasis on preventing development that would surpass the existing density and building sizes of a neighborhood. Once again, the authors of The Politics of Place document no constituency that pushed for zoning to allow more density, except for real estate interests.
Developers and real estate interests do not always make for the most politically effective supporters of more housing development. Developers have an obvious economic self-interest around loose zoning laws, and so they might struggle to convince an alderperson who is supporting the interests of neighborhood advocates who oppose additional density. (Of course, in other contexts developers can be very politically powerful due to their economic might, so I certainly don’t think this is a straightforward description of urban political economy).
Otherwise, there doesn’t seem to have been a strong political force to counterbalance NIMBYism, particularly on the grounds that downzonings would hurt housing affordability in Chicago.
That has certainly changed. At a high level, the modern YIMBY movement has helped initiate a widespread change in how people understand the negative consequences of hyper-restrictive zoning laws, and dozens of cities and states have passed zoning reforms in the past few years. To be sure, critiques that restrictive zoning is exclusionary and drives housing scarcity have existed since zoning’s inception — but today, the issue enjoys far more attention than in previous eras.
Nowadays, Chicago has both an active network of activist groups supporting these changes (full disclosure: I am a member of Abundant Housing Illinois), and more focus on these issues from political elites, including some alders and the Mayor’s Office. The Metropolitan Planning Council has extensively discussed the downsides of Chicago’s overly stringent zoning. In the very same Northside neighborhoods that downzoned in the 1970s, I have sat in meetings where the majority of attendees testified in favor of new housing development.
As one example of the resulting changes to actual policy, there have been efforts to proactively upzone stretches of the Northside arterial streets Western Avenue and Broadway. Ironically, these are still piecemeal, hyperlocal efforts, instead of a coordinated, citywide effort. But they still represent positive progress, especially within existing political constraints, and show that more Chicagoans are starting to take these issues seriously.
Even more positively, Mayor Brandon Johnson’s office is calling for altogether eliminating minimum parking requirements in Chicago and allowing accessory dwelling units to be built across the city. In addition to being good housing policy, these changes demonstrate a more systematic path for land use reform — and as Lionel Barrow writes for A City That Works, they also represent a path out of Chicago’s current fragmented, piecemeal system of zoning and land use.
Everyone is sometimes shortsighted about contemporary issues
To a degree, everyone who thinks about policy issues is beholden to the debates and worries of their day. Sometimes, this can lead us to pursue reforms — even when done with laudable goals in mind — that look myopic and wrongheaded in retrospect.
As one rather comical instance of this in The Politics of Place, Chicago planners in the early 1960s had a panic that residential highrises in downtown Chicago would “Manhattanize” the area, turning it into a “skyscraper jungle”. Tall residential highrises had increasingly begun to pop up in the Loop and River North, boosted by the area’s looser land use laws. Some civic leaders feared that downtown could not support the services that full-time residents needed, and that residential development would displace downtown office buildings. In response, the city implemented minimum parking requirements and residential density limits on downtown development.
Nowadays, Chicago seems rather fortunate to have developed a downtown residential population more quickly than other cities, which has provided some damage control for the impacts of remote work. Continuing this trend is a prominent city priority.
As another example, in the 1950s and 1960s it seems to have been common to split houses or apartments into a larger number of cheaper, smaller units. The authors of The Politics of Place write that these conversions were a “major problem”, deserving of substantial attention in the city’s zoning code.
On the other hand, one of the most talked-about housing issues in Chicago today is precisely the opposite: deconversions, or when small multifamily housing (such as a two-flat or three-flat) is converted into a large single-family home2.
Even some of Chicago’s neighborhood downzonings, and the introduction of rules like minimum parking requirements and strict building form regulations, were earnest responses to a rapidly changing urban environment. Of course, classist and racist behavior also drove these decisions, but I don’t think these were the only drivers.
In each of these circumstances, policymakers were responding to legitimate concerns and challenges in their respective moments. Decades later, however, I don’t think that their responses hold up very well.
These instances remind us to maintain some epistemic humility as we try to diagnose and address our current problems. It’s easy to think that many bad historical policy decisions were made for bad reasons, and this is sometimes true. At the same time, many people in the past have made bad policy decisions with good intentions.
Even when we do pursue policy choices that are correct or ideal for the current moment, these stories teach us that we also ought to stay on our toes. Cities are dynamic places, and the planning decisions that we make today may not hold up in the future — no matter how meritorious those decisions are today.
Chicago’s zoning and land use system does not work very well. As The Politics of Place describes, this is a longstanding issue in the city, and it has been created and upheld by many different actors — some who have had good intentions, and some who have had bad intentions. But recent years have seen increasing attention paid towards this issue.
In fifty years from now, when people read about Chicago in the 2020s, I’m sure that they will find many efforts of today’s reformers that look foolish in retrospect. I’m hopeful, however, that these readers will not be disappointed to learn that we failed to address some of Chicago’s pressing shortcomings to its zoning and land use system.
As Daniel Kay Hertz documents in The Battle of Lincoln Park, there was certainly opposition to some of the actions of these Northside neighborhood associations. In particular, some community organizations valiantly fought anti-poor urban renewal policies around this time in Lincoln Park, which was a much more immediate issue. But as far as both The Politics of Place and Hertz's book document, there was less contemporaneous pushback to the larger zoning reforms.
I’ll once again footnote to Hertz’s The Battle of Lincoln park, which describes how deconversions were an explicit goal of Lincoln Park rehabbers in the 1950s as they sought to "upgrade" their neighborhood and bring in more middle and upper class residents (and reduce lower-cost living options in the neighborhood).
hadn't heard of this book before! awesome resource definitely going to check it out.
Great writing on the topic of (disastrous) Aldermanic Preference in Chicago.