Peoria Mayor Rita Ali says she supports the idea of streamlining the process for approving housing projects, but proposed statewide zoning regulations would go too far.
State lawmakers failed to pass Gov. JB Pritzker’s BUILD Illinois Act during the recently concluded spring legislative session. The initiative aims to address a growing need for affordable and “missing middle” housing throughout Illinois.
With backing from the Peoria City Council, Ali was among a coalition of mayors that joined the Illinois Municipal League’s opposition to the proposal.
“I think that it preempted local authority, for one, and that’s what most cities around Illinois were concerned about,” Ali said in an interview with WCBU. “It took away our authority to make local decisions in housing and zoning, and those are very important to us.
“We don’t want a one-size-fits-all mandate coming down from the state. We want to be involved in those decisions.”
Ali served on a task force with the governor’s office to develop recommendations for making it easier to fill the housing gaps.
“We definitely are supporting streamlining processes, [but] we were opposed to a third party coming in and making decisions that we had to live by,” she said. “Some of the timelines for a two-day turnaround [for permit approval] were pretty restrictive, and we thought perhaps not even realistic.”
Ali also noted that some of the possible zoning changes might work in areas around Chicago, but would not be appropriate in Peoria. As examples, she said the bill would allow multi-unit developments in any neighborhood and reduce the required number of parking spaces per unit.
“You may have two working families or two-car families, and then it pushes the vehicles to the streets,” she said. “It’s good for the developer to save some money and not have to build larger parking areas. But what it does, it impacts neighborhoods and causes a lot of chaos when you push all those cars to the street.”
She also opposed allowance for accessible dwelling units, often referred to as granny flats, to be added to any part of a residential lot.
“If you want to add another private area to your house, I’m supportive of that and the city is supportive of that — but not to put them anywhere in on your property, like the front of the house, the side of the house,” she said. “We would support putting them in the back of the house, just to make it more appealing to the neighborhood.”
Ali said she does support the concept of creating more residential opportunities to increase population density, and the pursuit of affordable housing remains a top priority for Peoria.
“We need more housing. We have a housing crisis right here; there’s a shortage, and we are doing everything that we can,” Ali said, noting the city has more than 1,000 residentially zoned properties in its land bank.
“We’re willing to give these properties away to people that are willing to develop them, and we’re getting some response from that [from] individuals that want the property, who will put up a duplex or a single-family home. Some of it is fill-in property, but some of it’s contiguous, where you can do something big with those properties.”
Ali said she’s eager to see development proposals for the former Exposition Gardens site the city purchased last year in hopes of developing a new residential neighborhood. But she adamantly opposes city council member John Kelly’s call for an urban decay designation for the area that would result in property tax abatement.
“The urban decay regulation or policy is related to a decayed area, a blighted area, and this is not that,” said Ali. “That’s one reason that I’m opposed to it. Another reason is that we sat down with the school district [Peoria Public Schools], and this is really the only area in Peoria that you can actually put a big development on, and it can bring tax money to the school district that needs it so desperately.
“When we put homes there, that means more students are likely to attend Northmoor [Elementary] and Richwoods [High School]. They’re going to need some tax revenue for that for those schools, so we don’t want to have a situation where we’re going to have no property taxes paid for a long period of time.”
The city is projecting up to 200 residential units at the Expo Gardens location. Ali said the homes would likely be priced in the $250,000-$300,000 range. She added the possibility exists to include some rental apartments, but it would likely be “a very small number.”
