Opponents of Mayor Brandon Johnson’s nomination of progressive firebrand Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez as chair of the City Council’s powerful Zoning Committee are backing an alternative chairman and say they have the votes to win.
Backed by business interests and powerful trade unions, Ald. Felix Cardona, 31st, is vying for the post. So it appears, unless Johnson relents, we’re headed for a highly unusual showdown in the City Council — one that could mark yet another embarrassing setback for a mayor who’s endured his share in his 16 months in office.
We think the opponents and Cardona ought to stick to their guns no matter how many times Sigcho-Lopez tries to compare them to the 1980s-era opposition bloc to Mayor Harold Washington, as remembered rightfully as racially motivated and indicative of Chicago’s long legacy of discrimination. And the mayor, once he’s confirmed he can’t win, ought to recognize political reality and give up his fight to confirm Sigcho-Lopez, which has gone on for months now.
Embarrassingly, the City Council hasn’t had a permanent Zoning Committee chair for nearly a year. It was early November when another mayoral ally, 35th Ward Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, stepped down from the post under pressure after employing egregious arm-twisting tactics on Johnson’s behalf.
This isn’t 40 years ago, and these mayoral opponents are motivated far more by worries over the city’s business climate and stability than by personal animus. Sigcho-Lopez did himself no favors within the council when he spoke at a protest earlier this year in front of a burned American flag, but much of the concern about the 25th Ward alderman leading the Zoning Committee pertains more to long-simmering battles over residential zoning in Chicago.
More than 40% of the city is zoned for single-family housing, a situation that affordable-housing proponents have said with some justification is impeding the increasingly urgent need to build more housing, particularly multifamily buildings. Johnson and fellow progressives also want to liberalize rules around adding so-called accessory dwelling units — granny flats, coach houses and the like — to single-family homes.
Bungalow-belt aldermen like Marty Quinn, 13th, have opposed those efforts, saying they would open the door to outside investors buying small homes and adding units to rent in their backyards, changing the character of quiet areas like the Southwest Side neighborhood Quinn represents. They fear Sigcho-Lopez would jam through changes in law without addressing their concerns.
This page is on record supporting more ADUs as part of a solution to the housing shortage, but there surely is room for common sense and compromise when it comes to the practicalities of building up the city’s housing stock.
Larger concerns are at work in a City Council dispute that might otherwise look like inside baseball.
One is the political standing of the mayor. Sigcho-Lopez argues that Johnson isn’t being given the same leeway to appoint his own leadership team that previous mayors have enjoyed.
The alderman is right, but there is good reason for the resistance Johnson is getting. The mayor continues to pursue a hard-left agenda that is failing to win public support. Just like mayors, aldermen have to be accountable to voters, so giving the benefit of the doubt to a mayor with a deeply underwater approval rating — especially over the opposition of influential unions like Local 150 of the Operating Engineers — becomes a political risk not worth taking.
Chicago benefits when its mayor — whoever that may be — is effective, so Johnson’s struggles to date aren’t something to celebrate. But propping up a mayor simply for the sake of expediency isn’t appropriate either.
So the question then becomes, is this fight over the Zoning Committee worth waging? We think so for a number of reasons.
First is that Johnson has paid little heed to the practical critiques of his policies from business people who after all provide most of the jobs in Chicago and generally aren’t particularly ideological, at least when it comes to how the city functions. Most want only to be able to operate profitably. In this administration, the only way, it seems, for business to secure a real seat at the negotiating table is to demonstrate to the mayor that it has significant support.
Backing Cardona and winning his confirmation would do just that.
Secondly, Cardona promises to be a fair arbiter between development interests, representatives of the bungalow belt and housing advocates. “I’m not agenda-driven,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times. Can the divisive Sigcho-Lopez make such a claim? Would he even try? No, and probably not.
If Cardona and his backers win this fight, though, it will have been for nothing if the need for more housing isn’t met. A victory should not be seen, for example, as a sign that NIMBYism has prevailed and there should be no change to Chicago’s residential neighborhoods. All 77 of Chicago’s neighborhoods should be working toward solving our housing shortage, within their own different contexts.
Presuming again this battle is settled in favor of Cardona, we’d like to see the alderman (and Johnson, too, hopefully) convene a housing summit in which representatives of all those interests meet and hash out principles for how — not whether — to increase Chicago’s housing stock. There should be goals settled on — number of net new units annually, for example. And there should be policy parameters established that give residents real say in the future of their neighborhoods but under guidelines that won’t accept continuation of a status quo making Chicago increasingly unaffordable for residents of modest means.
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