Illinois needs Pritzker’s BUILD Plan for housing

The state should follow others by passing reforms that would make building housing easier and cheaper.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s BUILD Plan is crucial to improving housing affordability in Illinois.

The General Assembly should resist opposition from local leaders and pass all of the bills key to Pritzker’s campaign promise to tackle the state’s housing costs. The measures are all pending votes in the Senate.

Illinois is short 142,000 homes, according to a report last year from the University of Illinois. To meet its growing demand, Illinois needs an estimated 227,000 new units over the next five years, the report said.

The shortage has made housing more expensive. Since February 2019, home prices have jumped nearly 50%. Rent increases in Chicago and Central Illinois are some of the highest in the country, according to a report from ConsumerAffairs.

To reverse this housing cost trend, Illinois must build more homes. That requires loosening government restrictions that have artificially depressed construction.

Enter the BUILD Plan.

The proposal is a slate of bills in Springfield that would reduce regulations that interfere with property rights and development. They include:

1. Setting deadlines for permit reviews and inspections so housing projects can’t be indefinitely stalled by bureaucracy, and letting builders hire third-party reviewers when cities miss those deadlines. (SB 4063)
2. On residential lots above a certain size, allowing more homes such as duplexes, fourplexes and cottage clusters. (SB 4060)
3. Reducing mandatory parking minimums that force builders to devote land and money to extra parking instead of homes. (SB 4064)
4. Allowing multi-family properties up to six stories tall to have one stairwell instead of two, making it easier and more affordable to build apartments on smaller lots. (SB 4061)
5. Allowing homeowners to build accessory dwelling units on their property (SB 4071)
6. Requiring impact fees — paid to a city to offset the costs of expanding infrastructure — to be calculated using a transparent statewide formula so that unpredictable or inflated charges can’t make housing more expensive (SB 4062)

This plan doesn’t dictate what a developer must or can’t build. Rather, it leaves the choice up to the developer, removing the local government prescriptions that have limited housing supply and driven up costs in Illinois.

The biggest pushback has come from local government leaders, who see the proposed legislation as undercutting their authority in land-use decisions. But when local governments stifle the production of needed housing, it’s the state’s responsibility to re-establish equilibrium.

By passing the BUILD Plan, Illinois would follow other states that have shown this kind of reform to be successful at resetting otherwise complicated local processes. In Arizona, the Permit Freedom Act has cut permitting and development times by as much as 17.7%. Similar progress is expected from reforms recently enacted in Virginia and Idaho.

The BUILD Plan isn’t state government overreach. It’s the state peeling back overreach at the local level and reaffirming property rights. That’s the kind of action Illinois needs if it’s going to grow.