Two Ways to Freeze a Neighborhood

Editor's note: This article is a commentary on the BUILD plan as it existed in May. The plan has not yet been voted on, and we anticipate it may undergo changes in the fall.

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The governor of Illinois recently came on the Strong Towns Podcast to talk about his administration’s BUILD initiative, a package of housing reforms that has received praise from many housing advocates, including many of our members and Local Conversations leaders. And to be clear at the outset: there is much in the legislation that I support.

In our conversation, Governor Pritzker repeatedly emphasized that he wanted cities to retain the ability to govern themselves and adapt to their own circumstances. The animating impulse behind the legislation was not to abolish local control, but to help break through decades of accumulated inertia, procedural friction, and often unexamined rules that have made it increasingly difficult for neighborhoods and cities to evolve naturally over time. That instinct overlaps substantially with the Strong Towns approach.

The bill takes aim at some genuinely destructive practices. It pushes cities toward objective standards instead of discretionary review. It speeds up permitting timelines. It weakens exclusionary zoning. It legalizes incremental housing types in places that have long outlawed them. These are all meaningful reforms.

There is no reason for someone in the Strong Towns movement to actively oppose this effort. In many ways, it represents progress.

And yet, after spending time reading through the legislation, I found myself increasingly uneasy. The legislation, like nearly all statewide housing reforms I’ve seen, is built around an understanding of the problem that is incomplete. It treats the housing crisis primarily as a failure of rules and permissions that can be adjusted at the correct level of government. In other words, housing is treated as a mechanical problem.

It’s not.

Housing is a wickedly complex problem with multiple feedback loops: financial, political, cultural, and institutional. Places are not machines that can simply be recalibrated from above. They are living systems that either retain the capacity to adapt over time or gradually lose it.

What this moment requires is not a mechanic’s approach so much as a gardener’s. When it comes to housing, the role of the state should be less about engineering precise outcomes and more about building the conditions where healthy local adaptation can occur. 

Less like repairing a machine and more like building a trellis.

The Housing Debate’s False Choice

Right now, housing politics tends to oscillate between two poles.

On one side is anti-growth localism: a politics of neighborhood preservation that often treats any change as a threat. This approach relies heavily on discretionary review, procedural delay, and local veto points. It tends to freeze neighborhoods in place and make incremental adaptation nearly impossible. In many cities, this has contributed directly to housing scarcity and rising costs.

On the other side is what I would call technocratic centralization. This approach correctly identifies that local governments often block needed housing, but it responds by increasingly shifting planning authority upward to the state level. State lawmakers impose density mandates, parking standards, approval formulas, and standardized development rules across wildly different places and contexts.

One approach freezes adaptation through local veto points and discretionary review. The other freezes adaptation through substitute planning regimes that impose static rules from above. Both approaches ultimately treat neighborhoods as static objects to be managed instead of living systems capable — and in need of — continual adaptation and maturing.

As I read through Illinois’ reforms, it is evident that the current housing reform energy in Illinois has drifted toward the second model. The assumption increasingly seems to be that if local governments cannot be trusted to adapt, then the state must step in and design the adaptation for them. 

That may feel pragmatic in the short term, but governance substitution risks recreating many of the same rigidities and distortions that got us here in the first place.

Take the Illinois bill’s “missing middle” provision. At first glance, it’s a straightforward reform. The legislation requires cities to allow up to four units on lots between 2,500 and 5,000 square feet, up to six units on somewhat larger lots, and up to eight units on lots over 7,500 square feet.

But the rule applies essentially anywhere single-family housing is allowed. That means an eight-unit building could theoretically be built on a greenfield lot at the edge of an exurban cul-de-sac, or on farmland with no public utilities, simply because single-family housing is also permitted there. There is no meaningful relationship between the requirement and the actual urban context.

The same problem appears in the parking provisions. The bill caps parking requirements at one space per single-family home and one-half space per multifamily unit, while prohibiting parking minimums altogether in certain contexts.

Again, there is much here to appreciate. Parking mandates have done enormous damage to the financial productivity and adaptability of our neighborhoods. Eliminating them is good policy and reducing them is generally a step in the right direction.

But codifying parking minimums into state law is also problematic. Parking demand is highly dynamic and shaped by local conditions that vary enormously from place to place. A statewide mandate — even one lower than what many cities currently require — risks replacing one static parking regime with another. Instead of restoring local adaptability, it creates a new state-sanctioned baseline that local governments will be reluctant to move beyond.

The permitting reforms reveal the same tension. The legislation establishes deadlines for local approvals, something I strongly support. If a city says something is legal, then the process to approve it should be predictable and timely. And if a city fails to act within that timeline, there should be a real consequence. Automatic approval is a reasonable one.

But in the Illinois legislation, if local governments fail to meet the timeline requirements, outside private firms can step in and review applications instead. That is a different kind of response. The goal should be to make local government competent enough to perform its responsibilities, not to create a parallel approval system when it fails. Timelines restore accountability. Outsourcing approval risks turning a failure of local capacity into yet another layer of governance substitution.

Similarly, instead of reforming the dysfunctional structure of impact fees, the bill creates a statewide fee schedule administered by the state commerce department. Chicago and Peoria would operate under the same framework despite being radically different places with radically different infrastructure realities.

This is not an approach that prompts local adaptation. It is merely another version of standardization. That distinction matters enormously.

Establishing A Framework for Local Adaptation 

I do not think the most important divide in housing politics is between pro-growth and anti-growth positions. That framing obscures a much more important tension we need to wrestle with: two fundamentally different theories of governance.

One theory believes the role of the state is to centrally coordinate housing outcomes through increasingly sophisticated planning frameworks, replacing one static regulatory regime with another imposed at a higher level. This is state government as mechanic, fixing what is broken. It may produce gains in the short term while quietly laying the groundwork for a new generation of rigidity and dysfunction. 

The other — the one Strong Towns brings to the table — believes the role of the state is to remove barriers that prevent communities from adapting organically over time. This is state government as gardener, clearing space, building trellises, and creating the conditions where neighborhoods are allowed to mature organically over time. 

The purpose of state preemption should not be to replace local planning with state planning. It should not be governance substitution. When we use state preemption, it should be to restore the ability of neighborhoods, cities, and towns to evolve incrementally in response to real conditions.

That means state preemption should focus on removing barriers to adaptation:

• Legalizing incremental housing in traditional neighborhoods,
• Requiring objective approval standards,
• Protecting small-scale projects from discretionary review,
• Preventing procedural abuse,
• Eliminating exclusionary zoning practices,
• Allowing adaptive reuse, and
• Requiring fiscal transparency around infrastructure obligations.

But it should avoid imposing detached formulas and substitute planning systems:

• Arbitrary statewide density mandates,
• Universal parking ratios,
• Centralized infrastructure pricing,
• Greenfield intensification disconnected from public utilities, or
• State bureaucracies that override local judgment without building local competence.

The distinction may sound subtle, but it is profound. One approach strengthens the capacity of cities to adapt, evolve, and mature in response to local conditions as they actually exist. The other increasingly treats cities as administrative obstacles to be managed from above.

Strong Towns has long argued that healthy places evolve incrementally. They mature over time through thousands of small adaptations made by people close to the ground. The job of governance is not to try and perfectly engineer those outcomes in advance. It is to create conditions where adaptation can happen productively and continuously.

That may require state intervention at times, and we’ve supported that when it does. Some local governments absolutely do abuse process, weaponize zoning, and suppress incremental growth, and that’s wrong. But if the answer to every local failure is a new centralized planning regime, we risk recreating the same brittleness or worse under a different banner.

Right now, American housing politics is largely organized around two competing instincts: anti-growth localism and technocratic centralization. But there is another path.

Across the country, Strong Towns members, Local Conversations leaders, neighborhood advocates, and local officials are already doing this work: talking to their neighbors, legalizing incremental housing, reforming approval processes, removing barriers to adaptation, and helping neighborhoods mature organically over time.

Not state planning. Not governance substitution. Not local vetoes.

A framework for adaptation.

For those looking for a third path, we’re right here.

The role of the state is not to engineer perfect housing outcomes from above. It is to remove barriers, build support structures, and create the conditions where communities can evolve naturally over time.

That is the kind of reform that will actually build strong towns.