This report was produced by the Chicago Metropolitan Planning Council with over two dozen contributing authors, including two Urban researchers. The report authors are Alec Singer, Chandra Christmas-Rouse, Chloe Gurin-Sands, Christina Harris, Daniel Cooper, Debbie Liu, Emily Bloom-Carlin, Emma Boczek, Jordan Bailly, Kendra Freeman, Kris Tiongson, Morgan Murphy, Rachel Gaunce, Yonah Freemark, Lydia Lo, Ana Vargas, Anne Dodge, Audrey Wennink, Haley Hecktman, Hugo Coronado, Janson Busby, Kate Mackie, Steven Quispe, Sydney Sakharia, and Zach Grand. The report assesses how Chicago’s zoning and land-use systems shape housing affordability, development patterns, environmental outcomes, and neighborhood disparities.

Why This Matters

Chicago’s planning department and city council are wrestling with a myriad of challenges, including stark economic and racial segregation, declining housing affordability, rising displacement, unequal economic opportunity and investment patterns, and concentrated environmental and public-health hazards. Many of those issues are the product of zoning and land-use regulations, sometimes implemented decades ago. Though the city has no comprehensive planning process to holistically address these issues, policymakers in the city are now considering changes to planning policy that could help deal with these challenges.

Key Takeaways

This report finds that Chicago’s current planning regulations and systems produce concentrated, inequitable outcomes across housing, employment, and health. The report finds that zoning, and the engagement processes that influence it, have the following effects:

• Severely constrained housing supply: Only 11 percent of the city is zoned to enable the construction of multifamily housing, while 41 percent is zoned to allow only single-family homes to be built. As a result of this policy, combined with local real estate markets, most new housing since 2006 was built in just five community areas, while 45 community areas added fewer than 500 homes over that time. This limited approach to zoning contributes to worsening affordability, and disproportionately harms and displaces Black and Latinx households.
• Uneven business vitality: Vibrant, walkable commercial corridors and dense areas of retail business are concentrated in wealthy areas of the city, while low-income or majority-Black tracts experience higher vacancy and fewer businesses per capita. Zoning limits opportunities for small-scale neighborhood businesses.
• Concentrated environmental and climate burdens: Zoning has concentrated pollution, industrial zoning, and low tree cover in certain neighborhoods, and Latinx residents are overrepresented in these tracts, undermining their health and increasing their vulnerability to climate change.

Additionally, the report finds complex zoning categories, overlays, heavy use of planned development planning process, and aldermanic control over local decisions make zoning hard to navigate and inconsistent with citywide goals.

To address these issues, the report recommends that zoning policies be altered to

• allow by-right construction of small multifamily apartment buildings and accessory dwelling units citywide;
• allow by-right construction of midrise apartment buildings near transit;
• reclassify industrial uses by impact to minimize exposure to pollution;
• streamline special use provisions;
• centralize zoning data; and
• tie zoning policies to a regular, comprehensive citywide planning process.

How We Did It

The Metropolitan Planning Council research team partnered with Urban Institute researchers over a three-year, intensive process to engage communities, design the assessment scope, develop comprehensive research plans and datasets, analyze empirical data, and validate findings against expert and community inputs. The team sourced data from the US Census Bureau and local government, proprietary, and primary sources.