A decades-old law designed to fight segregation by laying a path for more affordable housing in wealthy towns has led to only a smattering of new homes, with dozens of towns across the state offering scant options for people who aren’t affluent and some outright ignoring regulations. Now, as lawmakers are weighing a bid to supercharge the measure, they face pushback from local leaders who want to keep their grip on new development.
The proposed bill would both widen and sharpen the existing Affordable Housing Planning and Appeal Act (AHPAA), a law that places special administrative requirements on municipalities that offer few affordable options to residents. The proposal would roughly double the number of towns affected by the law, and it would firm up the requirements for mayors and village administrators to show they’re working to encourage more housing options.
Although the measure follows recommendations from a state-appointed task force, the bill was not included among the half-dozen housing proposals that make up Gov. JB Pritzker’s Building Up Illinois Developments (BUILD) plan to juice housing construction across the state. The governor has not endorsed the AHPAA reform bill, and officials in his office have cautioned that it calls for a modest spending increase that Pritzker did not anticipate in his February budget proposal.
Still, the proposal has already cleared multiple legislative hurdles, gathering momentum in Springfield as other housing bills remain in limbo.
“This is another tool that is really specifically targeting the people who have the most work to do to try and get to an affordable housing threshold that’s good for everybody,” said State Rep. Tracy Katz Muhl (D-Northbrook), who sponsored the bill in the Illinois House.
In the 44 municipalities across the state where less than 10% of existing homes are deemed affordable, AHPAA requires local leaders to submit reports to state officials outlining how they plan to spur the construction of affordable housing. Most of the towns with little affordable housing are suburbs north and northwest of Chicago, including several suburbs in Katz Muhl’s district. One village she represents, Buffalo Grove, would join the list of affected towns if her bill becomes law.
The existing law tasks the Illinois Housing Development Authority with reviewing the state’s nearly 1,300 municipalities every five years to catalog the local governments whose lack of affordable housing triggers the requirements. Since 2023, the last time the list was updated, adherence to the law has been spotty, and enforcement has been practically nonexistent.
In the three years since officials drew up the latest list of 44 unaffordable towns, just 15 have submitted action plans that state officials have deemed “compliant” with the law. Another 17 municipalities that sent in plans were rejected as insufficient. And the state housing authority never received plans from the rest.
Non-compliant towns are subject to an appeal system designed to let developers bypass local opposition by asking a governor-appointed board to intervene. No one has ever used it.
In the 23 years AHPAA has been on the books, local leaders in low-affordability towns have used tax credits to build fewer than 600 homes across the state, according to the policy advocacy nonprofit Impact for Equity, based in Chicago.
“We would say that it’s relatively toothless,” Suni Kartha, staff counsel for Impact for Equity, said of the law as it’s written. Kartha’s organization has in recent years produced a steady stream of research and position papers calling for broader and tougher enforcement of AHPAA by state leaders.
Mayors of wealthy towns have pushed back on the law since its 2003 inception, Kartha said. Some take advantage of vague legal criteria to repeat squishy promises in round after round of submissions with no progress. Others ignore the requirements all together.
“For the most part, it’s the same 40-some communities that, every five years when the numbers are analyzed, are [subject to the law],” Kartha said. “When we look at the most recent round … and who hasn’t submitted a plan, a lot of them are the same ones who have never submitted a plan.”
Katz Muhl’s bill, drawn up with the backing of Impact for Equity, aims to add muscle to AHPAA in three ways.
First, it would broaden the law’s reach. The current rules apply to towns with less than 10% affordable housing stock. The proposal would raise that number to 25%. It would also exempt towns with populations under 2,000 — up from 1,000 under the current law. That would about double the number of suburbs in the existing landscape that fall under the law’s umbrella, according to state officials.
Second, the bill firms up the details that municipal leaders must include in the affordable housing action plans they submit to the state. For example, the plans would be required to include “specific actions and deadlines” to encourage more affordable home construction, instead of simply calling for “actions.”
Finally, the proposal would make it easier for developers and affordable housing advocates to file appeals to the state if local leaders in rich suburbs deny their applications to build.
The bill’s overall goal is to “better address the realities of what the affordable housing shortage is in the state, and then to clarify [the] planning process so that the communities that are subject to the law can better comply with it,” Kartha said.
The proposed bill last month nabbed the support of Illinois House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch (D-Hillside) and passed the House on a party-line vote. It has since picked up sponsors in the Senate, including Senate Majority Leader Sen. Kimberly Lightford (D-Maywood), but has yet to clear a committee vote in that chamber.
Pritzker signaled caution on the bill, many of whose supporters are also pushing for the bills in the governor’s BUILD package. The governor’s office estimated the bill would require adding staff to the Illinois Housing Development Authority at an additional cost of $300,000 per year.
“Fiscal responsibility requires that [the] governor not sign bills whose costs are not accounted for in the upcoming FY27 budget,” a spokesman for the governor wrote in an emailed statement.
Meanwhile, leaders from well-to-do suburbs and the Illinois Municipal League are criticizing the reform bill since it would strip their power to guide and restrict development.
“I get the concept, and we’re open to it,” Burr Ridge Mayor Gary Grasso said in an interview about efforts to encourage more housing options in towns like his. “What we’re not open to, absolutely not open to, is the state telling us how to zone and take away the due process rights of our residents.”
Burr Ridge occupies about 6 square miles, straddling the boundary of DuPage and Cook counties, about 12 miles west of Midway International Airport. Its median family home price is more than $700,000, according to federal data, and state officials consider less than 5% of its housing stock to be affordable.
Residents “come to zoning meetings, come to plan commission meetings, come to the board [of trustees], and they say what they want and don’t want in their communities,” Grasso said. “That’s why they moved here.”
Burr Ridge village officials added that they believed the added requirements for details to include in their housing plans could be nearly impossible to carry out.
The village filed an affordable housing plan last year that state officials deemed compliant with the existing law.
Local resistance to affordable housing is common across the state. It also explains how the Chicago region became so segregated, according to Marisa Novara, vice president of community impact at The Chicago Community Trust. Novara sat on a governor-appointed task force that in 2024 recommended sharpening AHPAA among a series of state reforms designed to spur home construction.
“It’s worth stepping back and asking, how is this arrangement working for us — this arrangement where municipalities have near-unilateral power over creating new housing?” said Novara, who led the Chicago Department of Housing from 2019 to 2023. “It’s a pretty basic notion that all parts of the state need to contribute to the state’s affordable housing needs. So if that’s our basic principle, individual communities should not just be able to opt out of that and say, ‘This is some other place’s problem to solve.’”
Even counting critics like Grasso in Burr Ridge, Katz Muhl said opposition from local governments has been “less than you would think,” noting that the dozen-plus mayors who signed opposition slips against her bill did not include any from her district.
“What you heard in the community was, ‘I want my children to be able to move back. I want to be able to age in place. I want my family member with a disability to have a place to live,’” Katz Muhl said. “I want the people who work in our community … the nurses at the hospital, the staff at the schools — I want those people to be able to live here.”
