Illinois lawmakers are moving a package of bills branded as the Building Up Illinois Developments, or “BUILD,” agenda, promising more housing and lower costs. But in Chicago neighborhoods already struggling with displacement, these proposals sound painfully familiar.

We’ve heard this story before. It didn’t end with affordability. It ended with luxury development, higher rents and families forced out.

We study housing and gentrification in Chicago. One of us grew up in Logan Square as property values soared and watched as a generation of neighbors and friends disappeared. Today, he serves on the 26th Ward Zoning Advisory Board, where residents have spent years building a local planning process that produces affordable housing. From that vantage point, the BUILD bills aren’t reform. They’re deregulation wrapped in friendly language.

There are currently six BUILD bills in the Illinois Senate. They lean heavily on buzzwords like “middle housing” and “streamline.”

Backers include Illinois Realtors who stand to profit the most from luxury sales and housing instability, while rebranding themselves as the defenders of housing stability and affordability.

Yet there’s one thing missing in each bill: a requirement to build affordable housing. Not one bill mandates affordable units. None includes funding to create them. Several actively dismantle the local tools communities use to enact the kinds of affordability requirements that have kept, literally, thousands of people housed.

Chicago already failed with this approach

Chicago has spent decades hearing that deregulation will magically produce affordability by producing housing abundance. It hasn’t. It produced luxury towers, rising rents and displacement.

Logan Square is the clearest example. Thousands of new units were built. Almost none were affordable. Longtime residents were priced out and replaced by those who could pay twice as much.

The BUILD bills recycle the same logic that hollowed out communities across the Near Northwest Side. The city of Chicago had 109,000 vacant housing units in 2024, many of which still sit empty as tax write-offs because they are priced far higher than local residents can afford.

As written, the bills would bring about the kind of pure deregulation that would take us back to the disproven “trickle-down” ideology of the Reagan 1980s, now catering to the cohorts of our real-estate-developer-in-chief — our governor. They will serve to wipe out affordability not just in Chicago, but in other towns, cities and suburbs across Illinois that are facing rampant speculation.

Taken together, the BUILD bills weaken the local tools Chicago neighborhoods rely on to secure affordable housing. They reduce cities’ ability to require affordability in new development, push faster approvals at the expense of community input and standardize fees that were designed to slow speculative demolitions.

One bill, Senate Bill 4060, covers “middle housing” and would prevent our dedicated 26th Ward Zoning Advisory Board from enacting affordability requirements that allow us to approve large apartment buildings without undue local harm.

Senate Bill 4062, which would standardize fees across Illinois, overrides local municipal legislation that has imposed fees on demolitions and helped preserve local housing. Even Senate Bill 4071, which pretends to support something we all want to see — more accessory dwelling units known as ADUs — in practice simply wipes away local sovereignty. It does so with the words “without additional requirements” in a sentence that mandates municipalities issue permits for ADUs.

Without funding or supporting affordable ADUs in any way, this bill simply guts our local ability to ensure that these are built at all beyond the luxury market.

BUILD plan weakens communities

The BUILD bills borrow the language of equity and affordability, but their impact would be the opposite. They would weaken community power, accelerate displacement and deepen the very crisis they claim to solve.

We urge our state legislators and governor to reflect more deeply on how to actually build affordable housing in Illinois.

There are proven tools to solve the housing crisis:

1. Lift the ban on rent control so cities can stabilize rents.
2. Invest directly in affordable housing at the scale the crisis demands.
3. Support cooperative and social housing models that remove profit from housing.
4. Support more just municipal tax assessments based on the material conditions of each parcel, rather than nearby market speculation.
5. Strengthen local authority to require affordability and prevent displacement.
6. Impose restrictions on luxury development in neighborhoods facing displacement.

These policies work. Deregulation alone never has.

Illinois lawmakers should vote no and start listening to the communities that have lived through the consequences of “build first, ask later” housing policy. Chicago doesn’t need another experiment. We already know how this one ends.

Carolina Sternberg, Ph.D., is a professor at DePaul University. Her research focuses on gentrification, race and urban inequality in the U.S. and Latin American cities. She is the author of “Neoliberal Urban Governance: Spaces, Culture, and Discourses in Buenos Aires and Chicago.”

Jesse Mumm, Ph.D., is a professional lecturer at DePaul. He is a cultural anthropologist and ethnographer who has published on gentrification, race and racism, Latino Chicago and whiteness. His forthcoming book, “When the White People Come: Gentrification and Race in Black and Latino Chicago,” will be published next year.