In Part I, we traced the path that led Northbrook to its current framework.
In Part II, we examined how the 2020 framework actually works and why its economics are so difficult.
In Part III, we looked at what that framework has actually produced in Northbrook and how that record compares with nearby communities.
This is the last installment of the Affordable Housing Series.
Martin Cozzola, a housing policy attorney with the Chicago nonprofit Impact for Equity and a staunch advocate for expanded affordable housing across the state, has spent years studying Illinois’ Affordable Housing Planning and Appeal Act. In his recent analysis of the law’s performance, he concludes that after more than two decades, the Act has not produced the level of affordable housing development policymakers hoped for, particularly in higher-income suburbs where it was meant to expand access. Many municipalities technically comply by submitting the required plans, but those plans have often produced little measurable progress in increasing affordable housing supply.
Cozzola’s answer is to strengthen the framework. He argues Illinois should give the law more teeth by tightening enforcement, closing loopholes, and making it harder for municipalities to satisfy the planning requirements without meaningfully addressing the problem.
The Illinois Policy Institute arrives at the same basic conclusion from a very different ideological direction. In Mandating Unaffordability, policy researchers Josh Bandoch and LyLena Estabine argue that inclusionary housing mandates have produced relatively few affordable homes while discouraging overall housing construction. Bandoch, the Institute’s Head of Policy, holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Notre Dame. Estabine is a policy analyst with a background in sociology and data analytics from Harvard University. Their answer is not stronger mandates but more supply: fewer regulatory barriers, more housing of different types and price points, and a recognition that even higher-end units can improve affordability over time by easing pressure on the rest of the market.
Despite their different politics and different remedies, both analyses make the same core point: the current approach has not produced the results policymakers expected.
In his 2022 book America’s Frozen Neighborhoods: The Abuse of Zoning, Yale law professor Robert Ellickson traces modern housing shortages back to the 1920s, when Herbert Hoover, then Secretary of Commerce, promoted the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act. What began as an effort to bring order to fast-growing communities and separate homes from incompatible uses gradually hardened into something far more rigid: a system that gave local governments enormous power to limit what could be built, where, and for whom. Ellickson’s argument is that many American communities were effectively “frozen” in their mid-20th-century form, with the predictable result that housing grew scarcer, more expensive, and less accessible over time. The problems we are wrestling with today are the product of a century of accumulated land-use restrictions.
Ellickson argues that local land-use regulation has become a form of “hyperlocal regulatory capture,” with incumbent communities using zoning power to preserve the status quo and block needed housing. His remedy is straightforward: shift more authority to higher levels of government, allow greater residential density without requiring case-by-case political approval, and preempt local rules that make housing harder to build.
Governor J.B. Pritzker’s proposed Building Up Illinois Developments (BUILD) Plan reflects much of that logic. Announced alongside his February 2026 State of the State and FY27 budget proposal, BUILD combines zoning preemption, permitting reform, and capital funding intended to make housing easier, faster, and less expensive to build. The package includes middle-housing reform, mandatory ADU legalization in single-family districts, caps on minimum lot sizes, permit-review deadlines backed by third-party reviewers when municipalities miss them, and significant limits on local parking mandates. It also includes $250 million in proposed funding: roughly $100 million for site preparation and infrastructure, $100 million for middle housing through IHDA, and $50 million for first-time homebuyer assistance. The plan still requires approval from the General Assembly and has already drawn pushback from municipal groups concerned about local control.
The Illinois Municipal League has been the most visible organized opponent of the BUILD plan. Its objection is that BUILD intrudes too heavily on local authority. It also argues that Illinois’ housing affordability and availability problems are “not caused by comprehensive planning or local zoning.” That is the harder claim to defend. Zoning may not be the only force driving housing costs, but in affluent built-out suburbs it is difficult to argue that restrictions on density, use, lot size, parking, and discretionary approvals have nothing to do with limited supply.
The current framework is not producing enough housing. More than twenty years after the Affordable Housing Planning and Appeal Act was enacted, Northbrook remains well below the statutory benchmark, major redevelopment sites remain stalled, and neighboring communities with less demanding frameworks are getting units built while we continue to debate. More plans, more process, and more formal alignment have not changed that basic reality.
The core problem is hard to miss: there is no serious path to Northbrook’s housing goals without more building, and there is no serious path to more building without developers. Yet our posture often suggests distrust of the very people we need, coupled with an expectation that they should absorb most of the burden of fixing a problem they did not create.
That contradiction did not appear out of nowhere. Northbrook’s 2020 framework was shaped through extensive public process, but there was far less visible evidence that developers were meaningfully part of the conversation about whether a 15 percent inclusionary requirement would actually work in practice. The Village built a framework that depends on private developers to produce housing, then appears to have spent the years since treating them more as entities to constrain, extract from, or morally pressure than as necessary partners.
That posture carries consequences. If Northbrook asks more of developers than nearby communities do, moves more slowly, and treats ordinary project negotiation as a test of virtue, it should not be surprised when capital flows elsewhere. Glenview and Deerfield may not look as good under IHDA’s framework, but they are building. Northbrook, by contrast, continues to look like a place where even logical redevelopment can become a drawn-out exercise in friction, delay, and mixed signals.
None of this means affordability should be abandoned as a goal. It does mean Northbrook needs to stop pretending affordability can be achieved without materially more housing, or that materially more housing can be achieved while placing nearly all of the burden on private developers. That is not a serious formula. It is a way to preserve the appearance of commitment while tolerating very little actual progress.
Residents also deserve more honesty than they have gotten so far. Many people worked hard to buy into Northbrook and are working hard to stay here as property taxes continue to rise. Asking them to accept more density, more change, or more disruption as part of a broader housing solution is already a difficult political proposition. That conversation becomes even harder when the Village has not clearly shown that its current framework is effective, or that it has seriously examined why so little has been built.
At some point, we have to choose. We can continue defending a framework that sounds principled, tests well rhetorically, and produces little. Or we can take a harder look at whether our requirements, assumptions, and posture toward development are part of the reason we remain stuck. Until that happens, we are unlikely to make meaningful progress on affordability, supply, or revitalization.