Testimony to the Oak Park Village Board
Opticos Zoning Recommendation, Public Comment, July 28, 2026
Prepared by Mark Sneathen
Read aloud
Good evening. My name is Mark Sneathen. I'm an Oak Park resident and a former member of the Indianapolis Zoning Board of Appeals, and I spent years earlier in my career in residential and commercial real estate development. Today I work as a management and technology consultant: I help clients make data-driven decisions for a living. That's the lens I want to bring tonight.
My wife and I chose to raise our family in Oak Park, specifically, because it's diverse. That's the standing I bring tonight. This issue has been called too complex for voters to weigh in on directly. I'd argue the opposite: its significance is exactly why it deserves rigorous debate, not less scrutiny.
Before we debate solutions, I want to put three facts on the record: claims I've heard about our situation that the data doesn't actually support.
Fact one: the data show Oak Park's affordability picture hasn't changed much, pretty much in line with the rest of Cook County.
● Most of our housing stock is already multi-unit: 57% of units are in buildings of two or more, not single-family homes.
● The single-family price we keep hearing, $596,000, isn't the whole story. Condos, at $200,000, are a much more affordable entry point, and they're about 32% cheaper than Evanston's condos, too.
● Purchase: over the past three years, after adjusting for inflation, condo (+5.8%) and single-family (+7.2%) prices rose modestly, a bit slower than the broader Cook County market (+8.0%), so price increases in Oak Park went up less than the rest of the county.
● Rental: real rents have actually fallen about 3.4% over the last three years, a genuine improvement in rental affordability.
● Affordability here is holding steady, in line with the county, not falling behind.
Fact two: Oak Park is getting more diverse, not less. Since 2000, our total population-of-color share has risen from about 34% to about 39%. It's true our Black population share has declined, but far less than in Evanston or Chicago: Oak Park fell 4.4 points, Evanston fell 8.0, Chicago fell 7.7. And when you count Black and multiracial residents together, Oak Park's decline shrinks to just 1 point. That is not a mass exodus.
Fact three: eliminating single-family zoning doesn't just conflict with one line in our 2014 Comprehensive Plan, it contradicts nearly every relevant part of it. The plan's land use designation names single-family the predominant use. Its foundational goals commit to protecting neighborhood character and historic integrity. Its actual growth strategy is scoped to transit corridors and specific identified sites, not the village as a whole. And its own stated implementation approach is incremental and voluntary, not a blanket rezoning of every private lot. That plan has never been amended. Adopting a zoning change this inconsistent with an unamended comprehensive plan is exactly the kind of gap that's gotten other communities sued: Arlington County, Virginia adopted a nearly identical missing-middle policy and has already spent over $1.3 million in legal fees defending it in court, with the case still unresolved two years later. That's a real, avoidable risk this board hasn't addressed.
So what problem, specifically, are we trying to solve? More housing units? The Village's own 2024 report estimates, best case, this adds about 5 units a year. Increasing diversity? Our current policies are already doing that. Affordability? We have a range of affordable entry points, and the picture hasn't changed much. So what exactly are we solving for? Opticos coined "missing middle housing" 25 years ago; if it worked, there should be dozens of measured examples by now. Their own year-end recap doesn't name one.
My asks of the board are four. First, name the measurable problem we are trying to fix. Second, how is this change consistent with our Comprehensive Plan? Third, if the goal is more housing units, why not extend a corridor strategy that's already working and consistent with our plan? Fourth, if the board moves forward despite the public opposition and risk here, start with a couple of small pilots, not village-wide, so we can see how this actually plays out on a small scale first.
I've submitted a longer written statement with the full data and sourcing behind these points, along with additional analysis on alternatives the board should consider. Thank you.
Submitted in full; not read aloud due to time constraints
Most of Oak Park's housing stock is already in multi-unit buildings, with purchase and rental price points that provide genuine entry into a highly desirable community, not a village where affordability is disappearing. The evidence below covers housing type composition, sale prices, rents, and price growth relative to the surrounding region; every measure points the same direction.
Cook County Assessor data: official reassessment figures, single-family and condo tracked separately. Note: Oak Park and Evanston are on different points in Cook County's triennial reassessment cycle, so their native reporting years don't align; each town's own figures are internally consistent (same source, correct years), and the Cook County FHFA index is shown for each town's exact matching window as the common benchmark.
Nominal figures are the raw dollar change; real figures are adjusted for inflation over each matching window using annual CPI-U (cumulative inflation: 9.9% for 2022-2025, 15.7% for 2021-2024) and are the more accurate measure of whether affordability is actually improving or worsening.
Both Oak Park and Evanston appreciated more slowly than the county-wide index in real terms as well as nominal terms, over their respective windows: evidence against the idea that either town is experiencing an outsized, above-market affordability crisis relative to the region as a whole. In Oak Park specifically, this is modest, healthy appreciation for homeowners, not a crisis: real home values rose 5.8-7.2% over three years, well behind the county's 8.0% pace.
Housing stock composition, by structure type (CMAP/Census, 2020-24):
Oak Park's total housing stock is 24,872 units (U.S. Census Bureau/ACS). Applying the percentages above gives actual unit counts:
Note this unit count is distinct from the parcel-stock table below: a parcel is a legal/tax lot, and a single large apartment building sits on one parcel regardless of how many individual units it contains, so parcel counts understate total dwelling units in larger buildings. The 24,872 figure is the accurate measure of how many homes exist in Oak Park; the parcel counts below are the more relevant figure specifically for how many individually-purchasable properties exist on the ownership market.
In Oak Park, that means 57.0% of housing units, a clear majority, are in buildings of two units or more, not single-family homes. Note: "condo" is a legal/ownership classification that cuts across all of these structure-size categories (a condo unit can exist in a small building or a large one). The Assessor's condo-vs-single-family sales data above is the more precise lens for affordability, while this table shows that neither town is remotely dominated by single-family detached homes to begin with.
Transaction/parcel volume:
Condos meet or exceed single-family transaction volume in Oak Park; Oak Park's condo parcel stock was already roughly a third of its ownership housing base back in 2019-20, well before this zoning debate began.
Rental market: the piece of the housing stock most often left out of this debate entirely:
Rents are rising both in Oak Park and in Forest Park, directly next door, at nearly identical, modest annual rates, both well under general inflation. In real, inflation-adjusted terms, Oak Park's rents have actually declined roughly 3.4% cumulatively over these three years (nominal +6.2%, cumulative inflation over the same window +9.9%). This is not a market where rents are spiraling anywhere nearby, in Oak Park or in a lower-cost neighboring town.
Forest Park is directly adjacent to Oak Park, shares the same Blue Line and Green Line access, and rents for roughly 30-45% less. If price alone were the deciding factor for residents, Forest Park would already be the obvious substitute. That residents continue to choose Oak Park at a premium is evidence that they are purchasing more than housing units: they are purchasing access to Oak Park's specific schools, safety, diversity, and services, which are not fungible with a cheaper neighboring town.
No one on this board is proposing to make Oak Park itself less desirable in order to match Forest Park's prices, nor should they. That means matching a cheaper neighboring town's price level was never a coherent or realistic policy goal in the first place. The actual, achievable goal is that Oak Park itself offers entry points at a range of price levels for people who want what Oak Park specifically offers, and the data above shows that it already does, through an active rental market from roughly $1,600-2,300 and a condo market at $200,000, both sitting alongside the $596,000 single-family market. Combined with the finding that Oak Park's home price growth in both segments has trailed the broader Cook County market, the honest conclusion is that Oak Park's affordability picture hasn't changed much, purchase prices show a small relative improvement against the region, and rental affordability has genuinely improved in real terms.
Oak Park (full time series), with Evanston and Chicago shown as percentage-point change over their own comparable windows:
*Chicago's years are 2000/2010/2020 (decennial Census), not 2000/2010-14/2020-24 (ACS 5-year estimates): a slightly different window, noted for transparency.
Evanston (full time series, CMAP/Census):
Chicago (full time series, Census/Wikipedia compilation):
Interpretation: Oak Park and Evanston moved almost in lockstep on Total People of Color (+4.7 vs. +4.6 points) despite very different zoning regimes and no comparable zoning debate in Evanston. Chicago's aggregate People of Color share barely moved because it started from such a high baseline that shifts between groups mostly offset each other. The Black+Multiracial row is where Oak Park stands apart: its decline (-1.0 point) is far smaller than Evanston's (-5.0 points) or Chicago's (-6.5 points), and is the one of the three most plausibly explained mostly by reclassification in how people self-identify rather than a real compositional shift.
District 97 (K-8):
OPRF High School (District 200: note this district also draws from River Forest D90, a separate, whiter, higher-income community, so its figures are a blend, not a pure Oak Park readout):
Enrollment decline, 2018-2024, in regional context (Illinois Report Card data):
Evanston's own district demographers attribute their much larger decline to falling regional birth rates and smaller households, not displacement: a conclusion that applies at least as strongly to Oak Park's milder decline.
Why comprehensive plan consistency matters legally, not just as a matter of process. Illinois courts evaluate the validity of a zoning classification under the LaSalle factors (La Salle National Bank v. County of Cook, 1957), which include the zoning's consistency with the community's comprehensive plan, alongside existing surrounding land use, impact on property values, and public benefit. A zoning change that conflicts with the community's own adopted comprehensive plan, without that plan itself being formally amended, is a real vulnerability under this doctrine, separate from any policy debate about the change's merits.
The 2014 "Envision Oak Park" Comprehensive Plan is still the Village's only formally-adopted comprehensive plan. It was adopted by the Village Board in September 2014, with a planning horizon to 2030, and it has not been amended since. It remains listed, alongside the 2017 Zoning Ordinance, as the Village's official governing land-use document as recently as a December 2024 Village staff development checklist, which lists both documents by name as ones applicants must consult.
The plan explicitly designates Single Family as "the predominant land use in Oak Park," a distinct category from Mixed Residential and Multi-family, which the plan reserves for specific locations: transition areas near commercial districts and areas near downtown. The plan's own residential land use definitions state:
● "Single Family areas are blocks with mostly detached housing... This is the predominant land use in Oak Park."
● "Mixed residential areas include a balanced mix of single-family detached housing, townhouses, and multi-family structures... often provid[ing] a transition between commercial areas and single-family areas."
● "Multi-family residential areas include primarily multi-family structures... typically located near the Downtown core or adjacent to other commercial districts."
The plan's own Future Land Use Map confirms this in practice. Single Family Residential is the dominant designation across nearly the entire residential interior of the village, with Multi-Family, Mixed Residential, and Commercial/Mixed Use concentrated almost exclusively along North Avenue, Chicago Avenue, Lake Street and the downtown core, Washington Boulevard, and Madison Street, the same corridors identified throughout this testimony.
The Land Use & Built Form chapter's first two goals, listed before any goal about transit-oriented development or mixed-use growth, are about protecting neighborhood character and historic integrity, not restructuring residential zoning:
● Goal 4.1: "Strengthen and protect the character, integrity, and cohesion of the village and its neighborhoods," with objectives including "context-sensitive infill development that is complementary to the scale and character of surrounding residential neighborhoods" (4.1.2) and ensuring "residential areas have adequate buffering and/or screening from incompatible adjacent land uses" (4.1.4).
● Goal 4.2: "Enhance the architectural integrity of the village through both preservation and innovation," with objectives supporting "the preservation of the historical and architectural heritage through public policy, sensitive development practices" (4.2.1) and promoting "private initiative and public stewardship in maintaining and improving the village's landmarks and historic districts" (4.2.2).
These are the chapter's foundational commitments, anchoring the plan in neighborhood character, scale compatibility, and historic preservation, Oak Park's defining, internationally-recognized qualities, before it ever addresses growth or housing variety at all.
Only after those two goals does the plan turn to housing variety and mixed-use growth, and even then, it scopes that growth explicitly to transit and commercial corridors, not the village as a whole:
● Objective 4.3.4: "Encourage the growth of transit-oriented development (TOD) in order to... expand the variety of housing options... throughout the village," measured specifically by "Mix of uses in areas within 1/4-mile of rail transit stations."
● Objective 4.4.4: "Create focused nodes of commercial activity in areas with high levels of accessibility along the Village's commercial corridors, allowing other areas of the corridors to become more residential in nature," measured by "Total amount of mixed-use development in commercial districts and near transit stations."
No goal, objective, or metric in this entire chapter calls for, or measures, village-wide single-family zoning elimination. The plan's own priorities run the opposite direction: protect character and historic integrity first, then channel growth specifically into corridors.
The plan already identifies the Village's chosen growth mechanism, and it is transit-oriented, not village-wide. With HUD funding specifically tied to this purpose, the plan designates seven Housing Development Focus Areas along both the Green Line (Harlem/Lake, Oak Park, Ridgeland, Austin) and Blue Line (Harlem, Oak Park, Austin/Lombard) corridors. It further identifies 29 specific Housing Development Opportunity Sites, all already zoned commercial or mixed-use, not single-family, most currently underused (surface parking, vacant lots, a parking garage, auto repair shops), clustered on the same corridors.
The plan's own stated implementation philosophy is incremental and voluntary, not a blanket rezoning of every private lot. It explicitly states that Village government should not use "aggressive means to acquire or redevelop privately-owned properties," describing its approach instead as working "with property owners to explore the feasibility of new housing development" through incentives and programs, anchored around specific identified sites, most already publicly owned.
The 2024 Strategic Vision for Housing does not replace or amend this plan, and should not be treated as though it does. This is a critical distinction for the board to address directly:
● The document explicitly self-describes its own goals as "aspirational," not regulatory.
● It is listed as a separate document from the Comprehensive Plan in the Village's own official planning checklist, not a superseding or amending document.
● It has not gone through the Comprehensive Plan's own formal amendment process under the Illinois Municipal Code.
● Even on its own terms, the 2024 document does not recommend immediate, village-wide elimination of single-family zoning. Its own Strategy #2 (Missing Middle Housing) explicitly defers implementation scope to further community process: it recommends forming a "Zoning Reform Advisory Task Force" to build consensus before any zoning change, evaluating parking, building-size, and housing-type tradeoffs, and leaves open a choice between piloting in limited areas, applying only within a quarter-mile of transit stations, or going village-wide. There is no public record that this task force was ever convened. Notably, even advocates for more aggressive housing reform than what's currently proposed have publicly made this same observation, that the deliberate, consensus-building process the Village's own report called for was skipped.
● The document's own Strategy #1, its lead recommendation, is increasing by-right density in business districts, not eliminating single-family zoning, consistent with, not contrary to, the 2014 Comprehensive Plan's corridor-based framework.
● The document's own data offers a sobering pace estimate: scaling Portland, Oregon's actual first-year Missing Middle Housing results (the most successful comparable precedent available) to Oak Park's housing stock size yields an estimated 5 units in the first year, roughly 0.05% of the single-family stock.
● The document's own data shows the corridor/business-district strategy already has a substantial, real track record: 1,751 multifamily units approved and built across 17 buildings since 2012, entirely in business districts and corridors, none requiring single-family rezoning.
In short: Eliminating single-family zoning village-wide doesn't conflict with a single data point in the 2014 Comprehensive Plan, it contradicts nearly every element of the plan that bears on this decision. It conflicts with the plan's land use designation, which names single-family the predominant use. It conflicts with the plan's foundational goals to protect neighborhood character, cohesion, and historic and architectural integrity (Goals 4.1 and 4.2), commitments the plan lists before it ever addresses growth or housing variety. It conflicts with the plan's actual growth strategy, which is scoped specifically to transit corridors and 29 named opportunity sites (Goals 4.3 and 4.4, the HUD-funded Housing Development Focus Areas), not the village as a whole. And it conflicts with the plan's own stated implementation philosophy, which is incremental and voluntary, working with willing property owners on identified sites, not a blanket, involuntary rezoning of every private lot in the village. Oak Park's only formally-adopted Comprehensive Plan does not support this proposal on any of these dimensions. The 2024 Strategic Vision for Housing document, however useful its data, is an aspirational report, not a plan amendment, and does not resolve this inconsistency. I'd ask the board to confirm whether the 2014 Comprehensive Plan will be formally amended, through its own required public process, before or in connection with any vote on this proposal.
What Opticos has recommended: Eliminate the single-family-only zoning classification; proposed map allows multifamily in most of the village. Opticos itself has identified companion barriers (building/lot-size rules, ADU restrictions, parking, design standards) and its own consultant has stated these projects "are hard to make pencil in today's market" without added incentives. The board approved $128,000 in June 2026 for economic feasibility testing not yet delivered publicly.
What would actually have to be true for this to work, based on comparable cities:
1. Real population/demand growth pressure strong enough to make redevelopment profitable, not just legal.
2. Building-size caps paired with the use change (the actual mechanism behind Portland's positive results).
3. Streamlined, by-right approval, removing discretionary review.
4. Removal of the other barriers Opticos itself flagged.
5. Safeguards against the documented pattern (Minneapolis, Portland) of the smallest/cheapest existing homes being targeted first for redevelopment.
6. A published, Oak Park-specific feasibility study before the vote.
Opticos's own 25-year track record: Opticos coined the term "missing middle housing" in 2010 and has been in business since 2000. Their own published 2025 year-end project recap lists policy adoptions and studies in progress across multiple cities: Columbus, Ohio's zoning rewrite; a Utah statewide toolkit; continued Sacramento work; credit for Portland's "Smart Stair" building-code reform. But it does not name a single completed project with measured affordability results. If this approach demonstrably makes housing more affordable, there should be a handful of examples by now, if not dozens. There do not appear to be any.
Comparable city track record: Berkeley: near-zero uptake (12 applications, zero built) under the equivalent state law; Berkeley's own study found only ownership-model, not rental, middle housing pencils today. Sacramento (Opticos's own flagship project): too new for outcome data; the city's own planner has said design requirements could raise costs 10-20%. Portland's Residential Infill Project, the one case with genuine positive results, was not an Opticos engagement, applied to existing single-family zones, and was driven by aggressive size caps in a roughly 650,000-person growth city under real population pressure, a different starting point than Oak Park's.
What happens without real size controls, and what happens with no zoning at all: The well-documented national pattern when redevelopment proceeds without size caps, seen in Minneapolis and in affluent suburbs like Birmingham, Michigan, is teardown and mansionization: modest older homes replaced with larger, far more expensive ones, inflating neighborhood prices without adding net affordable supply. At the opposite extreme, Houston, the most deregulated major U.S. city, with no use-based zoning at all, shows that removing zoning doesn't guarantee affordability either: wealthy neighborhoods there maintain exclusivity through private deed restrictions regardless, while the absence of use-based zoning produces real incompatibilities elsewhere in the city, homes built adjacent to malls and high-rises. Eliminating single-family zoning is a blunt policy tool, and blunt tools in the hands of developers can produce exactly the outcome this board is trying to avoid, not the one it's hoping for.
Direct alternative levers:
● Large-parcel redevelopment (e.g., West Sub hospital site): potentially 100-200+ units on a predictable timeline, though currently complicated by litigation and disputed ownership.
● ADU legalization/streamlining, by-right: California's shift to by-right approval drove a greater than 15,000% rise in statewide ADU permits; 27% of completed California ADUs qualify as affordable. Preserves existing single-family lots and character.
● Targeted affordability subsidy/incentive program: even Opticos's own Sacramento report calls for this as necessary alongside zoning changes.
● General permitting/approval streamlining.
Historic district protections: Roughly one-third of Oak Park's housing stock sits within three historic districts where demolition of a contributing building is essentially prohibited regardless of underlying zoning. The Village Board has, on the record, rejected a demolition proposal inside a historic district that would have replaced two homes with an 8-unit condo building. As of May 2026, two trustees sponsoring this zoning push requested a staff study on whether historic district rules themselves impede the "missing middle" goal. I'd ask the board to explicitly and permanently commit to preserving historic district review, independent of whatever happens with the underlying zoning.
If the board's actual goal is more housing units in Oak Park, the more direct question is: why not extend a strategy we already know works, and that our own 2014 Comprehensive Plan already identifies as the Village's chosen approach, rather than adopt one that both conflicts with that plan and has produced near-zero results everywhere it has been tried elsewhere? This is not a novel idea; it is the same "smart growth" model behind Arlington County, Virginia's Rosslyn-Ballston corridor, one of the most-cited transit-oriented development successes in the country. Arlington concentrated its high-density growth within a quarter-mile of five Metro stations, 22% of county land, housing 53% of county residents, while leaving roughly three-quarters of its residential land as untouched single-family zoning. When Arlington later debated extending density reforms countywide, even some pro-housing advocates argued the corridor-first approach should have been the model, not a village-wide rezoning.
The case for a higher-density, expanded-corridor strategy rests on seven specific benefits:
1. It has already worked in Oak Park, without touching single-family zoning anywhere, and it's what our own Comprehensive Plan already calls for. The Village's own 2024 Strategic Vision for Housing report documents 1,751 multifamily units approved and built across 17 buildings since 2012, entirely in business districts and corridors. Separately, the Greater Downtown Master Plan redevelopment concentrated along the Lake Street/Green Line corridor delivered $333 million in new mixed-use development. That is more units than the "missing middle" approach has produced in any comparable city that has tried it (Berkeley: zero built under the equivalent state law; Sacramento: too new to measure, with the city's own planner warning of 10-20% higher construction costs under the design rules that survived).
2. Oak Park has an unmatched transit asset to build the strategy on, one our own plan already designates for growth. Oak Park is one of only two Chicago suburbs served by both CTA rapid-transit lines, and the only one where both lines run the full length of the village rather than touching only a corner (Forest Park, the other suburb with both lines, has its stations clustered at a single corner near the Oak Park border). The 2014 Comprehensive Plan designates seven HUD-funded Housing Development Focus Areas along these exact corridors. These corridors already intersect an existing grid of higher-density streets that have carried multi-family housing for decades: Washington Boulevard, described by the Historical Society of Oak Park and River Forest's own executive director as having "long been an apartment building corridor in the village"; Harlem Avenue, a major mixed-use corridor with multifamily housing above ground-floor retail along the village's full western edge; the North Avenue Business Corridor, with nearly 500,000 square feet of retail alongside existing multi-family housing; and Ridgeland Avenue/South Boulevard, where new multi-unit development is already under active consideration near the Ridgeland Green Line stop. The Blue Line/Eisenhower Expressway corridor on the village's south side has not seen comparable redevelopment yet, despite equivalent transit access. This is the clearest untapped opportunity.
3. Real, identifiable sites already exist to build on, and 29 of them are already named in our own Comprehensive Plan. These include the West Sub hospital site, which could plausibly deliver 100-200+ units on a predictable timeline, alongside 29 specific Housing Development Opportunity Sites the 2014 plan identifies by name, all already zoned commercial or mixed-use, most currently underused. The board should direct staff to report on the development status of these 29 sites in the twelve years since they were identified, and prioritize completing that pipeline before adopting an unrelated, untested village-wide policy.
4. Concentrated redevelopment has better economics than scattered, lot-by-lot conversion. A single controlled site with one developer and one financing package can deliver 100+ units on a known timeline. Scattered "missing middle" conversion depends on thousands of individual homeowners independently deciding to sell to a developer, one lot at a time. This is exactly why Berkeley saw only 12 applications and zero completed projects, and why Opticos's own consultant has told this board that these projects "are hard to make pencil in today's market" without added subsidy. The Village's own 2024 report, scaling Portland's best-case results to Oak Park, projects only about 5 units in the first year under the missing-middle approach. Larger corridor sites can also more easily support the density bonus and affordability-set-aside structures that even Opticos's own Sacramento report says are necessary to produce genuinely affordable units, rather than relying on market-rate construction alone.
5. It avoids the specific risk this board's own process has already surfaced: developer teardown of Oak Park's existing affordable single-family stock. Trustee Taglia has raised this concern directly, and the evidence from comparable cities supports it: Minneapolis's own post-upzoning data found that smaller, cheaper homes near larger ones saw the largest price increases and were the first targeted for redevelopment after that city eliminated single-family zoning. A corridor strategy sidesteps this risk entirely: it adds units on underused commercial and institutional land, not by demolishing the entry-level single-family and small-multifamily housing stock this village already has.
6. It is the more climate-favorable strategy, for a specific and well-established reason: it reduces car dependency. Transportation is typically the largest controllable source of household carbon emissions in a car-dependent suburb, and the relationship between transit proximity and reduced vehicle miles traveled is one of the most robust, replicated findings in urban planning research (the foundational work is Ewing and Cervero's meta-analyses of the built environment and travel behavior). Residents within walking distance of rapid transit drive substantially less than residents in car-dependent locations, and that effect holds regardless of the size of the specific building they live in. A corridor strategy concentrates new housing exactly where this effect is strongest, directly on top of Oak Park's rail lines, while scattered infill across the interior of the village, farther from transit, would not capture the same benefit to nearly the same degree.
7. It requires no comprehensive plan amendment, no LaSalle-factor consistency fight, and no risk of the multi-year litigation Arlington County is still enduring. Because this strategy is what the 2014 Comprehensive Plan already calls for, pursuing it does not raise the consistency problem detailed in Fact Three above. Eliminating single-family zoning village-wide does raise that problem, and does so without any corresponding, demonstrated benefit to offset the legal and financial risk.
Taken together, this is not a proposal to invent a new development pattern. It is a proposal to finish executing the plan Oak Park already adopted in 2014: a grid of established corridors, anchored by two full-length transit lines, seven designated focus areas, and 29 named opportunity sites, extended into the one part of the village, the Blue Line/Eisenhower corridor, that hasn't yet captured the same benefit. It offers a faster, more predictable, better-financed, and legally consistent path to more housing units than the current proposal, without requiring the village to rezone a single interior residential neighborhood, amend its own Comprehensive Plan on questionable footing, or risk the teardown of its own affordable housing stock in the process.