1) Campaign Email - hello@dylanforillinois.com
2) Your Platform: Link to your website about housing - https://www.dylanforillinois.com/issues/build-affordable-housing
3) Your Community: Is your district suffering from a housing shortage?
Our district does not possess enough housing to house everyone in our district; the housing that does exist is not affordable for most families. Our unhoused population is rapidly growing throughout the district, due to wage stagnation, job cuts, and rent and mortgage inflation.
4) Your Record: Are there pro-housing policies or specific housing developments you have supported in the past that you would like to highlight?
Not applicable
5) What are the primary hurdles facing building new housing in Illinois, and what are the best ways to resolve them?
Key hurdles are: severe housing shortage, especially for renters and “missing middle” households, exclusionary zoning and bans on "missing middle" housing, slow, unpredictable and expensive permitting, high construction costs, labor shortages, and capital gaps, and local political incentives that reward saying “no."
Recent estimates show Illinois (as a state) is short roughly 140,000+ homes today and needs about 227,000 new units over the next five years just to stabilize the market. Vacancies are at historic lows, so renters and first-time buyers are bidding against each other for too few homes.
Large areas of the state – especially high-opportunity suburbs – still effectively ban duplexes, 3-flats/4-flats, and modest multifamily buildings through single-family-only zoning, height limits, and parking mandates. Many cities and fail to meet even the modest 10% affordability benchmark under the Affordable Housing Planning and Appeal Act.
Complex local permitting, layers of discretionary approval, and high fees add months or years of delay and tens of thousands of dollars per unit. Uncertainty kills smaller projects and deters affordable and nonprofit developers.
Builders face higher land and material costs, a shortage of skilled trades, and a big “capital gap” between what it costs to build and what working- and middle-income households can afford to pay—especially for missing-middle housing.
Property-tax-driven school funding and car-centric infrastructure make many municipalities fear that new homes, especially affordable ones, are a fiscal burden instead of a benefit. NIMBY opposition can stop compliant projects cold, even when state housing goals say the opposite.
6) If elected, what kind of policies would you propose or support at the federal level to increase housing production, including using federal preemption?
To fix our housing shortage, we need to treat housing like infrastructure: it’s essential to the economy, to families, and to our climate goals. If elected, I would support a federal pro-housing strategy built around three pillars: incentives, standards, and targeted preemption.
We will do this by tying federal money to pro-housing zoning and permitting. We can condition portions of federal transportation, infrastructure, and competitive grants on local governments having pro-housing land use policies. Additionally, we can reward jurisdictions that actually permit and build new homes at all income levels, not just write “plans” that sit on a shelf.
We can establish minimum national standards that protect the right to build more homes, especially near transit, jobs, schools, and downtowns, while still letting communities go further if they choose.
We can also expand federal tools to close the financing gap and build at scale. I would expand and modernize the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit and Housing Trust Fund, with a focus on deeply affordable and mixed-income developments. I would also create new tools for “missing middle” housing - 2–20 unit buildings that are too small for most subsidies but too expensive to build without help and support public, nonprofit, and community land trust developers that build permanently affordable housing and protect communities from displacement.
Last, I will ensure to align housing, climate and transportation policies. We will prioritize housing growth in walkable, transit-rich areas, and align federal transit and climate dollars with local pro-housing reforms.
7) What is your position on the ROAD to Housing Act?
I believe the ROAD to Housing Act is an important step forward on the road towards ensuring that housing is a human right in America. While there are parts of the bill I strong support, other parts fall short.
The Act takes seriously the supply-side of the housing crisis: it combines roughly 40 provisions spanning housing supply, manufactured housing, homeownership, program reform, and vouchers. Several provisions align with progressive priorities: converting vacant/abandoned buildings into housing (“Blighted Building to Housing Conversion” pilot) is in the bill.
As a progressive candidate who will continually fight for affordable housing in Congress, the bill does fall a short of the mark. Every pro-housing bill must also be pro-equity, pro-tenant, and anti-displacement.
Future legislation must include strong tenant protections and anti-displacement safeguards, equity in place-making and/or community control, assurances the housing built will actually be affordable, embedded labor and climate standards, accountability and monitoring programs, and a stronger federal role in zoning reform/preemption.
In short: the ROAD to Housing Act is a meaningful step and I’d be proud to support it because it moves the housing agenda forward rather than stay stuck.
8) The Build Now Act creates a carrot-and-stick system to modestly reallocate CDBG grants from high-cost-of-living municipalities that are blocking new housing to those that are facilitating it. Do you support tying federal infrastructure, housing, or transportation funds to local zoning and permitting reform? Why or why not?
Yes, I support tying federal infrastructure, housing, and transportation dollars to pro-housing zoning and permitting reform, because public money should advance public values.
For decades, the federal government has poured billions of dollars into transportation, infrastructure, and community development, but many high-opportunity municipalities still use exclusionary zoning, endless discretionary review, and permitting barriers to block new homes, especially affordable ones. These local rules drive up housing costs, perpetuate racial and economic segregation, and force families into long commutes that worsen pollution and climate impacts.
9) When it comes to increasing housing supply, what is the correct balance between local control and federal preemption?
Local governments should control how housing gets built, but the federal government must ensure that every community allows enough housing to meet national equity, affordability, and climate goals.
10) Would you support a change to the allocation of Department of Transportation funding between public transportation and highways? What would be the optimal allocation between the two?
Yes, I support rebalancing federal transportation funding toward public transit, and doing so is essential for housing, climate, equity, and economic growth. For decades, the federal government has funneled the vast majority of transportation dollars into highways, even as our communities face rising housing costs, crumbling transit systems, worsening traffic, and mounting climate risks. That imbalance has distorted local planning, encouraged sprawl, and made it harder to build homes near jobs, transit, and opportunity.
I believe optimal allocation is 60% for highways and 40% for public transportation. This doesn’t eliminate highway funding (rural, suburban, and freight corridors still need investment) but it dramatically upgrades transit from an afterthought to a true pillar of national transportation policy.
11) Other than CDBG grants, what are some other enforcement mechanisms the federal government can use to ensure state and local governments are building enough new homes to reverse the national housing shortage? How would you support these mechanisms?
To solve the national housing shortage, the federal government needs more than just one grant program. It needs a full enforcement toolkit that aligns federal dollars with federal priorities: affordability, equity, climate, and increased housing production.
Some enforcement mechanisms include tying federal transportation and infrastructure dollars to pro-housing zoning, conditioning federal education and workforce grants on fair-share housing, and enforcing the Fair Housing Act and civil rights laws against exclusionary zoning. We can also use the tax code as an incentive and accountability tool, tie federal disaster relief and climate resilience funding to housing production, streamline federal preemption in transit-rich and job-rich areas, and prioritize pro-housing jurisdictions in federal competitive grants across agencies.
Some of these mechanisms require new laws, while others require expanding enforcement capability within the government. For example, expanding the HUD's Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity enforcement capacity would enable them to better enforce civil rights violations regarding exclusionary zoning.
The federal government has powerful tools to ensure every community builds its fair share of housing. As a member of Congress, I would support these mechanisms because they advance racial and economic justice, address climate and energy goals, reduce housing costs, reward communities that build, and stop subsidizing exclusionary practices with federal dollars.
