A new amendment to Chicago’s Residential Landlord-Tenant Ordinance introduced by Mayor Lori Lightfoot at last week’s City Council meeting extends protections for tenants facing no-fault evictions. If passed, the changes would require landlords to give 90 days’ notice—instead of the current 30 days—to tenants whose leases they don’t want to renew. And, if landlords aren’t renewing a lease to “substantially rehabilitate or demolish” the unit, they’d be required to pay the tenants a $2,500 relocation stipend. No-cause evictions impact about a quarter of the city’s tenants, according to the mayor, who need far more time to uproot their lives and find a new home than the month currently afforded to them. Surprisingly, it wasn’t just landlord groups who balked at Lightfoot’s “fair notice” bill, but also progressive aldermen, who voted to move it to the Rules Committee—a place where draft legislation often “goes to die.”
“Not to say these measures are not important, but we need to make sure that the legislation comes from collaboration, that it comes with a debate about what’s important. And that did not happen,” said 25th Ward alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez, who’d voted to send Lightfoot’s bill to the Rules Committee. While he isn’t opposed to the idea of giving tenants a longer notice period, he says tenants need more protections from gentrification. He was also against the unilateral manner in which he saw Lightfoot advancing her own proposal. “The issue is with the process and the process is important.”
City officials, however, say that they’re planning to introduce further, pandemic-related relief in the weeks to come and expect a passage of Lightfoot’s fair notice ordinance in June. v
