Blog Newsletter: April 2025

April 22, 2025

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🏗️ Project Board

Keep an eye on our Project Board to see our priority projects, sign petitions, and find volunteer opportunities. 

🌇 Multiple Housing Wins in April!

We helped approve so many homes in April that we had to write a blog postabout it! Highlights include:

  • Old Town Canvas (Fern Hill)
    • 349 homes, including 20% on-site affordable
  • 3819 N Kedzie (Base 3)
    • 50 homes, including 20% on-site affordable
  • 5853 N Broadway (Bickerdike)
    • 90 affordable, all-electric homes

Thank you to everyone who attended a community meeting, wrote a letter of support to their alder, or gave public comment in support of these projects at Plan Commission or Zoning Commission. 489 new homes are now approved thanks to your efforts.

Check out our housing wins blog post

🗞 AHIL Members in the News

Remember when we got excited about being published once per month? Those days are long gone! We just checked out our press page and counted at least fourteen AHIL member op-eds or interviews in 2025!

April highlights:

  • AHIL member Eshan's op-ed on the threats that manufactured home residents face from investors was published in the Chicago Tribune
  • AHIL member Alicia's op-ed on replacing Chicago's mega-developments with courtyard blocks was published in Crain's Chicago Business
  • AHIL Lead Ratnika was quoted in a Sun Times article discussing the 366 homes proposed next to the second-oldest Black church in Chicago

Manufactured homes are one the most affordable housing options we have, and yet we’ve made them extremely difficult to build. And when you keep any asset artificially scarce, you increase the market power of those who already own it. As Blackstone — one of the largest private equity firms in the country — wrote in a 2023 letter to stockholders, a “structural shortage of housing has resulted in pricing power for rental housing assets.” In a 2024 update, it described “declining new supply” as a reason for “optimism” for shareholders. - Eshan

Check out our press page

😎 Broadway Rezoning Moves Forward!

The Broadway rezoning is moving forward largely unscathed! However, opponents are turning up the heat (exclusionary zoning rally in a strip mall parking lot, anyone?), so we need to keep pushing to ensure our Broadway abundant housing efforts make it over the finish line. That's why we've launched a new petition for our members to reiterate their support for the Broadway rezoning.

If you want to help put us put up the flyer shown above on Broadway in Edgewater, please let us know and we'll print out some copies for you! Also, stay tuned for an update regarding Broadway rezoning's hearing at the Zoning Committee.

Support abundant housing on Broadway!