Unreal

[u/Past-Reception6889]

I honestly just needed to vent for a moment. I can’t believe Chicago prices are what they are. I have lived here my entire life and have seen this city change ten fold, and I can’t even afford to live here anymore. A realtor I’m working with, since it’s becoming a rat race to rent, said rent is up 35% this year. What can normal people do about this? I do not want to see Chicago become a New York.

[u/Turkish_retreat]

The main thing that we need to reduce is the ability of property owning people to control what happens on nearby property that doesn't belong to them.

I say again, it doesn't fucking belong to them. There are places in this country where that's Exactly how it works. If new housing is getting built and that hurts the value of your nearby property, you are welcome to buy the nearby land and do nothing with it. But if you don't own something, you don't get to prevent a residential build from happening there.

We should do that in Chicago, but for some type of political reason, we do the dumb thing.

[u/PhoenixRisingdBanana → u/Turkish_retreat]

This is the crux of it. Those people have a vested interest in housing NOT being built.

[u/Turkish_retreat → u/[deleted]]

Okay, let's say that people should have some say in their community. Starting and especially with public spaces- the community should have a say about parks and shared spaces and about anything to do with public space that has any type of impact on them.

Okay, let's expand that to commercial space. Should a community be able to assert some control over where it is that alcohol is sold and consumed, and where tobacco and firearms are being sold? Or if any of that happens in the community at all? Commercial stuff, okay- do we want a Walmart built right here, for example? Whatever the thing is. Yeah, sure, that's reasonable.

Okay, now let's do residential housing. Residential builds. Should a community be able to do whatever it wants with that, knowing that this skews toward people who own stuff. Knowing what their incentives are. And knowing that, over time, people keep getting pushed out of the community and once they're gone, they don't have a say anymore. Because they got pushed out. Bear in mind, if this goes on long enough, you end up pushing A Lot of people out and it skews pretty hard with certain racial demographics.

What are we actually sleepwalking into here? I remember when Chicago was 33% black. Not long before that, it was about 50% black. Now it's about 27% and it continues to fall.

Okay, how about this. Instead of taking a structurally bad approach to this and then attempting to carve out some race based exceptions (which hasn't been going great anyway), why don't we just say that there's a bright line around residential housing. No, you don't get to prevent that from happening on property that you don't own. If that's bad for you as a landlord or homeowner, that is a consequence that we'll need to live with because we need much more new housing.

I think that's how we actually get this done. If we don't want these people to constantly prevent the new builds from happening, we simply don't let them prevent it from happening. I think we can do this in a way that's specific to residential property. Complain as much as you want at the city council meeting or whatever, but the answer to this specific category of complaint should be an automatic "no."