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This past Friday, Alderman Brian Hopkins (2nd Ward) sent out a short email saying he would not support a proposed development at 1600 N LaSalle in its current form. The developer, Fern Hill Company, had proposed to build a 44-story apartment building at the address, replacing a pair of gas stations and a Walgreens with 500 homes, including 100 affordable units. The development has been under serious consideration for at least 3 years; Fern Hill has held 10 community meetings on the project and agreed to several community benefits, including expanding a nearby park and preserving the Walgreens within the development site. On top of that, the development would contribute substantially more in property taxes – $2.5m per year – than the land does today.1
Theoretically, Fern Hill’s application was referred to the City Council’s Zoning Committee for discussion. However, because the development is in Hopkins’ ward, the Committee will not put the application on the docket until he expresses his personal support for it. Hopkins left the door open for a “possible compromise proposal”, but he didn’t explain his opposition and he doesn’t have to. Under Chicago’s informal system of aldermanic prerogative, he has the final say on what gets built in his ward, period.
Any system for making decisions will produce outcomes people don’t like. But under prerogative, Chicago leaves land use decisions completely up to the whims of individual officials. There are no city-wide guidelines for a developer to follow when seeking approval, no scoring system, no public accounting of costs and benefits. The system has very few defenders outside the council and very well-known problems. It leads to mismatched and poorly planned built environments. It contributes to systemic underinvestment in housing, particularly affordable housing. It drives segregation, so much so that the federal government has formally investigated the practice. Perhaps above all else, it practically invites bribery, leading to Chicago’s unfortunately-deserved reputation as a center of political corruption in the US.
Reformers have poked at prerogative in the post-Daley era. Most prominently, Mayor Lightfoot's Connected Communities Ordinance included provisions that allow some development proposals, in theory, to push against prerogative by forcing a vote by the Zoning Committee within a year or be automatically forwarded to the full council. That theory is currently being tested by Sterling Bay’s push forward with the 1840 N Marcey St proposal in Lincoln Park despite the local alder’s opposition. But there has never been a general assault on the system of deference, either by a mayor or elements in the Council itself.
That assault may take a long time to arrive. But there is reason to be optimistic, and reformers can do much to hurry the day. The reality is that prerogative has alreadyeroded and can be eroded further by relatively small reforms. You can see this by taking the long view on the role of alders in Chicago’s political structure: the steady movement of city service administration from ward offices to central departments has changed alders from “little mayors” to a mix of legislators and ombudsmen. In most situations today, alders act as advocates for their constituents rather than unilateral actors in their own right. Land use decisions are the exception to this trend, not the norm. And by considering what led to other reforms in the past, a path out of prerogative starts to emerge.
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Prerogative used to be part of something much bigger
Rather than a monolithic constant of Chicago politics, aldermanic prerogative over land use should be seen as the remnant of a larger system of aldermanic control over wards that has weakened over time.
Chicago’s political structure took shape in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the city was by some measures the fastest-growing city in the world. Between 1870 and 1920, Chicago grew at an average of more than 50,000 people — the equivalent of a modern ward — every year. With such high growth, Chicago developed a system where alders (alongside committeemen) had tight control over city functions in their wards through both formal and informal means.
This control extended far beyond land use. Residents could appeal to aldermen to intervene on sewage, garbage collection, and road repairs. Police captains were appointed through political connections and policed their precincts as directed by local politicians. Bars and restaurants could only open with the tacit permission of the alder. Alders could unilaterally ban or unban the sale of alcohol. They ordered trees cut down and parks built.2 They were expected to defer to Chicago’s mayor on city-wide policy, but in return were free to act as ‘little mayors’ of their own wards.
Today this system seems hopelessly arbitrary and inefficient, but critics should consider its benefits seriously. Alders were — and still are — likely to deeply understand their wards and be well-positioned to represent the particular needs of their communities within a huge, diverse city. Moreover, with city departments at the time staffed through the patronage system, aldermanic control gave residents a responsive “throat to choke” when demanding effective services.
Still, by the mid-20th century the tide started to go out. The elder Daley standardized the process for applying for a zoning variance in 1955 and moved hundreds of parks into central office control. In 1960, the Daley-backed Orlando Wilson, Chicago’s first civilian police commissioner, deemphasized political control of police districts, redrew precinct boundaries to no longer align with wards and moved CPD headquarters out of City Hall. Centralization took a pause during the council wars of the 70s, but the younger Daley restarted things by introducing the city-wide 311 service and starting the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS)3, an initiative which led to standing community meetings where residents could ask for help with city services without going to their alder. More recently, Rahm fought to move garbage collection to a grid system rather than the ward-by-ward system that preceded it. Johnson made a similar reform to tree trimming in 2024.
Tellingly, these recent moves were opposed by alders on the grounds that they made it harder for them to respond to constituent requests. Discussing Rahm’s changes to garbage collection, Will Burns (then-4th Ward) said "The residents of our wards don't go to City Hall to scream at the mayor. They come to our ward offices and scream at us." Scott Waguespack (32nd Ward), who supported the measure, made a particularly insightful comment for future reformers, saying he wouldn’t oppose the garbage plan "so long as there is still an ability to have a staffer or superintendent who can handle unique situations."
Something has to take prerogative’s place
Waguespack’s remark highlights an obvious issue with eliminating prerogative: we need something to replace it. The historical pattern we’ve seen is for a city department to take the place of aldermanic control, leaving the alder as an advocate for their constituents rather than as a unilateral actor in their own right.
It’s tempting to jump to big changes to land use rules, but Chicago can continue this trend incrementally with much smaller changes around transportation planning and menu money:
- Centralize bike infrastructure planning. CDOT took a major step towards city-wide bike path planning with its 2023 Cycling Strategy. However, it only allocated funds for “citywide connections,” leaving neighborhood infrastructure — a key part of actually biking anywhere — reliant on alder-controlled menu money. The result is a continuation of the current, haphazard biking experience where the quality of infrastructure often changes abruptly. Once the citywide connections are complete, CDOT should go a level deeper and carry out its own implementation of neighborhood level bike infrastructure.
- Make CDOT truly responsible for road repairs. Menu money also plays a key role in inequity on Chicago’s roadways: a 2019 inspector general report pointed out that because each ward receives a fixed amount regardless of how many residential streets it contains, less densely-populated wards on the South and West Sides are far more likely to have streets and alleys studded with potholes. CDOT should adopt a common set of standards (and funding) citywide wide. Alders might even favor this change, since while it would free up their menu money for other improvements.
These changes set the stage for larger reforms to further reduce alders’ direct control of land use. Again, the goal is not to push alders out of these processes entirely, as they are experts on their wards and legitimate representatives of their constituents' interests. Rather, reformers should seek to shift the site at which alders exercise authority to larger discussions of the city’s interests. Many developments have – or at least are perceived to have – city-wide benefits but local costs, e.g. more tax revenue for the city but also a bit more traffic in the neighborhood. Elevating the level at which these proposals are discussed will help alders consider the bigger picture:
- Reform the zoning ordinance to be more generally permissive so fewer changes require council review. The Johnson administration’s “Cut The Tape”initiative takes steps in this direction, calling for eliminating parking minimums (item 3) and eliminating zoning approval for new barber shops and nail salons near other such businesses (seriously, item 67). Other small changes, like allowing more signs without a variance, would also cut down on needless council review. However, larger reforms, such as legalizing 4-flats across residential zones would have a correspondingly larger impact. Collectively, these changes would both de-emphasize aldermanic prerogative and make development faster, cheaper and more predictable.
- Proactively initiate and incentivize area development plans. One encouraging trend we’ve seen recently is alders coming together with the city’s Department of Planning and Development to proactively rezone areas of the city. About half of northern Western Avenue was rezoned this way last year, and a similar process is underway on Broadway. As discussed previously on A City That Works, these moves are a recipe for lower rents, higher tax revenues and more vibrant neighborhoods. The city should be doing much more to push these initiatives along: DPD should proactively identify areas that are ready for similar changes and suggest them to the relevant alders. Beyond that, the city should consider tools for incentivizing alders to participate in these plans. There are various ways to do this, such as using funds from development bonds, but these incentives should be designed carefully so as to avoid creating another system of backroom deals.
Taken together, even a few of these proposals would be a big step towards fixing Chicago’s approach to land use. But the biggest step forward, which would start to truly unwind prerogative, would be the creation of a city-wide development plan. A city plan would take a huge amount of work and is far from a new idea, but the juice would be worth the squeeze.
The experience of New York City, which recently adopted the “City of Yes”, the largest change to New York’s land use rules in 60 years, shows that big reforms are possible. City of Yes is not a city development plan per se: it does not make large changes to zoning classifications and does not create a new long-term planning framework for New York. It is nonetheless expected to significantly alter the way New York’s land use patterns for decades to come.
Big reforms are possible with focus and determination
It’s worth taking a moment to consider both what New York has achieved with City Of Yes and how they pulled it off. While most media has focused on the debate over the initiative’s housing measures, City Of Yes is actually several distinct packages of legislation: a set of environmental reforms passed in December 2023, a set of economic and commercial zoning changes passed in June 2024, and finally a housing package passed in December 2024. A further set of family-focused reforms is planned for 2025. This legislative structure makes sense: it allows Mayor Adams to gain momentum on less controversial changes while building consensus on the larger changes. Packaging too many reforms together often gives every legislator something to vote against; spacing them out a bit – but not too much – is more fluid.
The housing package that the NYC Council adopted is significant but less ambitious than Adams first put forward. Like Chicago, New York has historically seen intense investment in dense, wealthy neighborhoods adjacent to the central business district, and for decades pursued a housing strategy focused on using inclusionary zoning to layer affordability into new developments as wealthy areas expand. City Of Yes takes a different approach, encouraging “missing middle” development across the city without significantly changing how high rises are built.4 For example, the reform allows developments in medium-density districts to exceed building size limits without a zoning variance if they add additional affordable units. This helps mid-sized developments pencil while still keeping their approval process predictable. Emphasizing missing middle housing was both good policy and good politics, as it allowed council members from less wealthy areas to sign on to new housing in their districts without worrying (probably incorrectly, it should be said) that they were opening the floodgates to a wave of displacing development.
City Of Yes also significantly expanded the power of New York’s Transit Oriented Development rules, generally permitting mid-sized apartment buildings by right in TOD zones, something Chicago’s TOD ordinance frustratingly fails to do. This is a key provision for unlocking development across the entire city as it makes mid-sized apartment construction much harder for locals to stop. In general, Adams’ rhetorical emphasis when touting City Of Yes has been on spreading new housing across the city, saying in November, “We’re no longer going to have the days when you have 59 community boards, and 10 community boards are doing more for housing than 49 others combined.”5 Adams also frequently spoke of “a little bit more housing in each neighborhood”, a phrase that emphasizes both shared commitment and the relatively small scale of changes of each individual community. This we’re-all-going-to-do-our-part approach is exactly the right framing for overcoming persistent resistance to new housing and certainly something we can import to Chicago.6
The other item Chicago can import from New York is the focus and attention of a mayor willing to make housing a central theme of his administration. Writing in January 2025, Eric Adams seems unlikely to be reelected and was unpopular even before being indicted for bribery. Nevertheless, as in Chicago, the mayor holds enormous influence over the city council and can set the focus of a legislative session like no one else. Adams made it clear that something was going to get done on housing, and that’s what happened. Moreover, Adams was not a purist; the version of City of Yes housing package the council adopted was replete with carve outs and exceptions, to the frustration of some activists. But Adams was willing to accept this if that’s what it took to get it done.
Of course, there are differences between New York and Chicago. Virtually all of New York sees market pressure to intensify land use. While Chicago’s North Side sees similar pressure, much of the rest of the city suffers more from a lack of demand than too much of it. Moreover, the ratio between development costs and rents are wildly different. Rents in New York are so high that the city can mandate expensive inclusionary zoning requirements and still see significant development; in Chicago, the ratio of costs to revenues is much tighter and the city has to be much more careful. Despite these differences, though, the essential ideas in City Of Yes seem to translate well to Chicago’s political and economic context.
From ‘little mayors’ to legislators
I’ve listed several ideas for reform which would, both on their own and collectively, weaken the ability for alders to make ad-hoc decisions about land use and development in their wards. But that doesn’t mean I want alders out of land use planning; quite the opposite, when implementing each of these reforms, we would still expect alders to play a leading role in shaping them. But critically, these discussions would happen in a broader context than any one particular development, nudging alders to take a larger variety of interests into consideration. Even if we adopted every single item I proposed, alders would still have significant influence over land use decisions in their ward. But this influence would be just that: influence, not control. That’s appropriate for an official elected to represent a neighborhood.
I’ll close with two thoughts on the role of alders in Chicago’s political system.
First, a note of caution. While alders’ use of prerogative in obstructionist or petty ways often frustrates people, the alternatives could easily be worse. Alders are democratically elected, have a mandate to represent and listen to constituents, and can be challenged and unseated if they screw up. If authority was concentrated exclusively in the Department of Planning and Development, for example, it would be far harder for anyone to challenge a bad decision. Similarly, a planning regime that exclusively deferred to local community groups and nonprofits would be an unaccountable NIMBYist nightmare. Reformers should think hard not just about pulling prerogative down, but about building something better up.
Second, I can imagine someone reading these proposals and concluding that opponents of prerogative are just sour grapes who want to change the rules when they don’t get their way. This badly misreads the heart of the critique of prerogative.
The deal at the heart of Chicago’s political structure in the 20th century was that alders had tight control of their own wards, and in return were expected to defer to the mayor on city-wide policy. This deal led to a fundamentally passive culture in the City Council that has survived into the post-Daley era and contributed to many of the council’s worst moments, such as the infamous parking meter deal.7 Critics of prerogative are frustrated with arbitrary decision-making, but more than that we’re frustrated that our representatives occupy themselves with minutia like individual zoning decisions or constituent requests when they need to be focused on shaping one of the world’s great cities.
An end to prerogative would upset the arrangement that leaders are used to in the short term. But in the long run, it would free them to set their sights higher. That’d be good for all of us.