Chicago City Council Group Aims to Modify Rental Ordinance

Chicago’s City Council is attempting to revise Mayor Brandon Johnson’s renter protection ordinance with an altered version to attempt to avoid adding struggles for smaller housing providers.

The new, altered proposal is called the fair and accountable Illinois rental ordinance, or FAIR for short. The revisions would nix just cause eviction, portions of a proposed rental registry effort, along with provisions that would require owners to financially assist renters with moving costs if the landlord chooses not to renew their lease. Instead of a one-size-fits-all system of penalties, the new legislation would open up a tiered system for regulations.

Previously, the ordinance came under fire for treating every landlord the same. Detractors argued that the legislation would effectively push smaller owners and landlords out of the market, making way for bigger companies to take an even larger slice of the pie, Crain’s reported. Additionally, there was a reluctance to pass the ordinance because of its lack of methods for forbidding landlords to simply pass the elevated costs onto tenants.

“The way to deal with reducing the amount of rental costs is to build,” said Alderman Gilbert Villegas at a press conference. “The mayor talks about cutting the red tape, but introduces policies which in some cases are duct tape.”

Illinois Realtors, a statewide real estate trade association, told the outlet that they’d need some time to review the revised ordinance, and has not explicitly taken a side.

Johnson isn’t backing down. According to the outlet, he said in a post City Council press conference that he will continue to push for parts of the original ordinance, which includes the just-cause evictions policy, the relocation payments and a ban on junk fees. Johnson said that the revised ordinance is more or less the same as the old one, just with key features either retooled or tossed.

— Hunter Cooke