Five names are in the mix for the most powerful seat Chicago’s school board has ever elected — and one of them still hasn’t filed yet. I’m Sarah. This is Chicago Politics and Urbanism Daily — school board president race, a Humboldt Park housing win, and the reason that win had to fight so hard just to happen. Brian here. The Council signed off on a building on Division Street, and five people want to lead the first elected school board in city history — so today, we’re grading whether any of this follow-through is real. WBEZ Chicago, with Sarah Karp and Emmanuel Camarillo:
It’s a high-stakes race because the president has the power to decide what issues get debated and brought up for a vote. The president is the only citywide position that all Chicago voters will get a chance to weigh in on and it’s likely to attract big campaign contributions.
WBEZ and the Sun-Times have the field now — four filed, one more expected Tuesday. Hilario Dominguez is CTU’s pick, and you can see it in his résumé: he’s the union’s deputy political director. That’s a statement. Five people running to lead a board nobody elected for decades — fine, that’s real. But I want the one who’s looked at the structural deficit and said something specific, not just, 'I believe in our kids,' or whatever. That’s the question underneath all of it. WBEZ says the mayor used to hold this seat and decide what got to a vote, and now whoever wins gets that leverage. So does the CTU candidate come in with a board majority already behind them, or does Dominguez’s union tie spark a faction fight before this board even gets through year one? From Europe Says:
The Chicago City Council has approved zoning for the upcoming mixed-use affordable development at 3251 West Division Street in Humboldt Park. Revealed earlier this year at the intersection with North Spaulding Avenue, the project would replace a large vacant lot on the western end of the neighborhood.
3251 West Division finally has a vote behind it — City Council approved zoning for the HHDC project. It’s 44 affordable units at 30 to 60 percent AMI, five stories on a vacant lot at Spaulding. We had this in Wednesday’s Council rundown; now we’ve got the building, the architect, the $36 million price tag, and the developer. Hispanic Housing Development Corporation has been in that corridor for years, so no, this isn’t some parachute developer dropping in. And seven three-bedrooms? That’s family-sized housing, which is usually the first thing to get shaved off when a project needs to pencil. And this is the part that ties back to the zoning explainer: HHDC still had to go get a Council vote to get here. Vacant lot, affordable project, community-based developer — none of that got it around the discretionary approval process. That’s the system doing exactly what the system does. Meanwhile, a 32-story West Loop tower cleared in one cycle. I’m not saying block the tower — I’m saying that asymmetry is the story. Forty-four affordable units for families at Division and Spaulding had to clear a higher political bar than a luxury high-rise downtown. That’s not a coincidence. Okay, Step Back for me — if a developer wants to build an affordable apartment building in Chicago and it meets every code requirement, why does it still have to go ask the City Council for permission? Short answer: in Chicago, most land isn’t zoned dense enough for an apartment building to pencil out, so the zoning map itself says no before anybody even gets to a meeting. If a developer wants more height or density than the map allows, they have to ask for a zoning change, and that sends the project straight through the local alderman’s office. The informal rule is called aldermanic prerogative — it’s not in the law anywhere, but City Council custom is to defer to the local alderman on land use in their ward. Per The City, the same idea is called member deference in New York and councilmanic prerogative in Philadelphia, so Chicago is not alone, but it is especially entrenched here. In practice, one elected official can kill a project outright just because of neighborhood opposition, even if the project is otherwise legal and meets a public need. We saw that in Edgebrook last fall, when Alderman Gardiner rejected a five-story residential project after a heated community meeting, citing constituent feedback — full stop, no further process. And the Sun-Times found that as of earlier this year, 138 development projects were sitting in a backlog, frozen largely because the Mayor and the Council were at odds. So if the city actually upzoned an area — changed the map so denser buildings were already allowed — would that get around the alderman? In theory, yes — that’s the case for citywide zoning reform, and we’re already seeing little experiments, like the recent upzoning along Broadway in Edgewater and Rogers Park that now allows buildings up to seven stories where only three or four were allowed before. But that 138-project backlog tells you the pipeline is still very political, and watch whether new Zoning Committee chair Gilbert Villegas can actually move those stalled projects through. That number is the cleanest scorecard we’ve got right now on whether the system is loosening up or just changing hands. Got a tip, a correction, or a story idea about Chicago politics or urban life? Send it to chicagodailyfix at lantern podcasts dot com. We’d love to hear what you’re seeing.
You’ll find links to every story we covered today in the show notes, so if something caught your ear, that’s the place to dig in a little deeper.
That’s Chicago Politics and Urbanism Daily for this Monday, May 25th. This is a Lantern Podcast.