Silence settled on City Council chambers Tuesday afternoon as zoning committee members voted narrowly to defeat an embattled proposal to build a new apartment building with 30 units of affordable housing near O’Hare airport. In a vote of seven to five, the committee sided with 41st Ward alderman Anthony Napolitano, who’s been trying to derail the project for the last year. Though it’s a loss for affordable housing advocates and the developer, the decision leaves opens the possibility of a federal court banning Chicago’s age-old practice of “aldermanic prerogative.”
After 18 people spoke for GlenStar’s proposal and seven spoke against it in the public testimony portion, Napolitano and other aldermen made impassioned arguments for and against the building. Napolitano talked at length about school overcrowding, and claimed there was already sufficient rental housing in the area around GlenStar’s land. “I’ve provided each one of you with a document that shows my calculation of the total number of units within 15 square blocks of this proposed [building],” he said, waving a packet of papers. “I have 6,503 apartments, a bulk of them are open with vacancies for rentals, a bulk of them that are being rented at below-market rates, a bulk of them that are dying for people to come in and rent these apartments. The units are there.” He added that his constituents’ opposition to the proposal “has nothing to do with fear of change.”
