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Housing

How Chicago’s Aldermen Help Keep It Segregated

For decades, aldermen have used their “aldermanic prerogative” to reject affordable housing development, confining the city’s low-income residents, who are mostly black and brown, to a few areas of the city, a new report says.
As Chicago's majority-Hispanic Pilsen neighborhood gentrifies, it has become one of the sites for battles over affordable housing.
As Chicago's majority-Hispanic Pilsen neighborhood gentrifies, it has become one of the sites for battles over affordable housing.M. Spencer Green/AP
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Chicago’s aldermen enjoy a great deal of power in their respective jurisdictions, including the ability to block or restrict new housing development. And that authority—referred to as the aldermanic prerogative—has been used to preserve racial and economic segregation, and worsen the city’s affordability crisis.

That’s according to a recent report by the Chicago Area Fair Housing Alliance (CAFHA), which states that aldermen in majority-white, well-off wards have disproportionately deployed this authority to endorse racially motivated NIMBYism in their wards, and time and again rejected the development of dense and affordable housing for 80 years. Recently, this NIMBYism has not been exclusive to the city’s majority-white wards, which count 14 of Chicago’s 50 wards, while 18 are majority-black and 18 majority-Hispanic. According to the report, aldermen of more than half of Chicago’s wards did not accept a single multifamily home funded through a city loan program meant for such housing from 1992 to 2017.