A Historic Preservation ReportBy Ken Weiss & Dalton Sturm, This House · Updated September 25, 2026 · Every factual claim in this report carries a numbered source you can open
Oak Park’s historic preservation is not as strong as the Village claims.
The short version
Every protection on a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Oak Park, except a recorded preservation easement, runs through one Village Board. That Board can amend the preservation ordinance, redraw or remove a historic district, and overrule its own preservation commission by simple majority, and in September 2025 it did, 6–1, against its own staff’s written advice; the commission’s chair resigned. On July 28, 2026 it shrank the commission and cut the number of experts it must include, on the consent agenda, with “no community input.” Even the new size is muddled: the wording it adopted does not match the village’s own description of the change (Part 3). Every commissioner now seated was appointed by the same Village President, with the trustees’ consent; nine of the ten seats come up for appointment before the April 2029 election, the four most senior members must leave under the village’s term limits, and the Board can remove a commissioner by majority vote, for causes listed in a rulebook it writes itself. Three trustees have spoken on the record about the districts: one that the districts are “way too big” and “we are not that special,” another that “how much of Oak Park we are protecting in the historic districts” belongs in the rezoning discussion, and a third, one of the two who asked for a study of the districts, that like any policy tool they “can be dialed too much in one direction or another.” The one protection the Board cannot undo is a recorded preservation easement, and a Wright house without one is protected only as long as the Board keeps its rules. And the rezoning now before the Plan Commission, up to six units on qualifying lots, would raise what a qualifying lot could be worth without the house on it. That is the case, in one paragraph. The documents are below.
It started with a video. On September 11 I published one warning that the “Shape Oak Park” rezoning puts the village’s Wright houses at risk. Three trustees and a homeowner answered it in public by calling it “false,” “misinformation,” “propaganda” and “a blatant lie,” and the homeowner reported it to YouTube. The trustees are not outside observers. They sit on the board that passed the ordinance at the center of this, on its own consent agenda, and the ordinance, the staff report attached to it and the roll call that recorded it sat in the village’s own meeting file for weeks before any of them called it a lie. So I answered with the record: the village’s minutes, passed agendas, ordinances, roll calls and staff reports, the newspaper reporting that covered them, and the officials’ own public statements, with a link at every factual claim. Check me rather than trust me.
About the quotes. All direct quotes featured in this report come directly from primary sources. They may contain spelling and/or grammatical errors. In the pursuit of transparency, we have neither corrected nor altered any direct quotes. Two conventions apply to the village’s meeting transcript, which is typed in all capital letters: we show it in normal capitalization, and where it garbled a word, our reading is marked in [brackets]. An ellipsis (…) marks words left out.
Thank you. We have received a great many emails from Oak Parkers sending us minutes, agendas and other documents. They have asked to remain anonymous, but we thank every one of them for their help.
6of 7
board members voted on July 28, 2026 to shrink the Historic Preservation Commission and lower its expert requirement, on the consent agenda, with “no community input.”
9of 10
commission seats come up for appointment before the April 2029 election, and the four most senior members must leave by rule under the village’s term limits.
2in 5 weeks
certificates of economic hardship the commission granted in early 2024, each clearing a contributing house in a historic district for demolition.
What this page claims
The protections on Oak Park’s Wright houses are weaker than most residents assume, and all of them except a recorded preservation easement run through one Village Board.
That Board has already overruled its own preservation commission and its own staff on housing grounds.
It shrank the commission and lowered its expert requirement on a consent vote.
A Wright house without a preservation easement has no protection the Board cannot undo.
The rezoning requires zero affordable units, and the trustees know it.
What this page does not claim
I am not claiming that the Village Board as a whole intends to dismantle Oak Park’s historic protections, and I am not claiming that any particular Wright house is on a demolition schedule. My argument is about what the rules allow, not about what anyone has planned.
That any specific Wright house is slated for demolition. The village never said so, and neither does this page. The video’s opening line is a hook; at 1:40 the video itself says no one at Village Hall is proposing to tear down a Wright house (Part 1).
That rezoning rewrites the preservation ordinance. It does not; a Wright house still needs a certificate to be demolished whether its lot is zoned for one unit or six.
That the current commissioners would ever approve tearing down a Wright house. My concern is the structure, and who fills those seats in 2029.
“I think that our historic districts are way too big and we are not that historic and we are not that special.”
Trustee Cory Wesley, September 16, 2025, the night the Board overrode the preservation commission on the Arcade tower, at 1 hour, 57 minutes, 40 seconds into the village’s own recording of the meeting. He continued: “And what makes Oak Park great is not the buildings, but the people and we need places for them to live.” The village’s typed transcript has “district” where the recording has “districts.” The official minutes record the motion and the 6–1 vote on this item, not what the trustees said, so the recording is the record of his words.
Watch it: Trustee Wesley, from the village’s own recording of the September 16, 2025 meeting, at 1 hour, 57 minutes, 40 seconds. The full recording and the transcript are on the village’s Legistar page for the meeting.
Contents
Thirteen parts. Read them in order, or go straight to one.
Every part has its own link and a Share button, so you can send someone just the part that matters to them, or put it on your own website.
What the video actually said, and what the critics quoted
The critics led with the opening line. Here it is exactly as YouTube’s captions show it, followed by what the same video says at 1:40.
The opening, as published Sept. 11, 2026
“This Frank Lloyd Wright house will be demolished soon to make way for affordable apartments. And no, this isn’t clickbait. This one will also be demolished. So will this one. And this one, as well.”
“Now, nobody at Village Hall is standing up and saying let’s tear down a Wright house. What they are saying is let’s change what every residential lot in Oak Park is allowed to become. And once you do that, demolition stops being something the Village orders and becomes something the market delivers.”
Both passages are from the video’s transcript on YouTube, the version viewers saw.
One sentence, so we can move on
The opening line is a hook, written as hyperbole: at 1:40 the same video says no one at Village Hall is proposing to tear down a Wright house, and the rest of it explains why the risk is real. Nothing in it is withdrawn: the opening predicts where the rezoning leads; it does not report that any house is scheduled to come down.
Where the critics are right
Rezoning does not amend Chapter 7, Article 9, the historic preservation ordinance. A Wright house needs a certificate of appropriateness to be demolished whether its lot is zoned for one unit or six. I say so plainly.
But the certificate is a vote, not a wall. The commission can grant it (it approved two historic-garage demolitions in July 2025), the Board can reverse a denial by simple majority, and an owner can get around a denial with a hardship finding. Each of those three things has happened in Oak Park within the last three years. Rezoning changes the math that gets an applicant to that vote.
The Wednesday Journal misattributes what we said
What the Wednesday Journal printed
“Frank Lloyd Wright homes in Oak Park are going to be demolished.
This is the opening claim of a video by Ken Weiss and Dalton Sturm released on the YouTube channel This House and shared across Facebook last weekend.”
What the video opens with
“This Frank Lloyd Wright house will be demolished soon to make way for affordable apartments.”
Those are not the same sentence. Are going to be demolished reads as a plan already in motion, something someone has decided to do. Will be demolished soon is a prediction about what the rezoning makes likely, which is what the rest of the video sets out to show. The article put its own wording in the lead and called it “the opening claim” of the video.
If those exact words mattered enough to build a rebuttal on, they mattered enough to quote. The sentence that has been called false, misinformation and a lie is a sentence the video never says.
And I do not think the wording is what drew the response. Had the video said these Frank Lloyd Wright houses could be demolished, I do not believe a single trustee would have answered it differently. The objection, as I read it, was never to the verb. It was to the subject being raised at all.
The same article goes on to say the rest of the video made “the original definitive statement more conditional,” and that “many additional concerns” I raised, “such as ensuring affordability and a lack of space to expand,” were “echoed by attendees.”
Why this matters to me
The argument is about zoning. My concern is preservation.
Beyond the wording, and beyond who said what about a video, what I care about is what Oak Park has. The village’s own architectural review guidelines describe it as holding “the largest concentration of Prairie School architecture in the world, including 25 designs by Wright,” and describe its first historic district — roughly 2,000 buildings, about 1,700 of them contributing — as offering “excellent examples” of the Queen Anne, Shingle, Tudor Revival and Craftsman work that grew up beside the Prairie School houses. That is not a collection a village gets back once it has been thinned.
Wright did not design houses to be looked at one at a time. He worked with sight lines, and with the built environment a house sits in: what stands next door, across the street and behind it belongs to the composition as surely as the house does. That is my reading of his Oak Park work, and it is why what may be built on the lots around these houses is a preservation question and not only a zoning one.
And it was never only the Wright district. The three historic districts hold roughly a third of the village’s housing; outside them, a house that is not an individual landmark gets no historic-district review at all. The video said so: “this is not only about the famous houses,” and “Oak Park is filled with thousands of Arts & Crafts bungalows that were built a century ago for ordinary working families, and those homes are as much a part of our story as anything Wright ever drew.”
So my position has two parts. The historic districts should be left out of the rezoning conversation entirely. And the bungalow blocks deserve the same regard as the Wright district: my concern is not that one set of streets is worth more than another. Leaving the districts out is not a way of shielding the most expensive streets, either; the village’s own 2026 study found the Ridgeland–Oak Park district to be the most affordable and diverse part of Oak Park. If the goal is more housing, the video’s answer still stands: “put it where the parking lots are, not where the porches are,” on the corridors, the same streets where Part 9 shows Oak Park’s affordable housing actually gets built.
Part 2 · The rulebook
How a protected house can legally come down in Oak Park
Five routes, all written into the village code, three of them already used here, and one tool against neglect that, as far as the public record shows, has never been used. Section numbers are from the current code.
Route 1: the commission grants a certificate of appropriateness
Demolishing a landmark, or a contributing building in a historic district, requires a certificate of appropriateness; the village “shall not issue a building permit” without one. The commission decides at first instance, applying the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards and the village’s Architectural Review Guidelines.
Two things people do not know. First, an applicant may reapply without limit; when Commissioner Roman raised this on July 24, 2025, the village planner said “nothing is mentioned in the Ordinance,” and the chair called it “a good point.” Second, a building classified as noncontributing “is not subject to the requirements of this Article,” apart from advisory review (7-9-11(D)); classification follows the National Register nomination form. Wright houses are contributing or individually landmarked, so this exemption applies to the noncontributing buildings around them, not to them.
Nine of the village’s individually listed landmarks are Wright’s: the Home and Studio (two addresses, 428 Forest and 951 Chicago), Unity Temple, the Harry S. Adams, Rollin Furbeck, Hills-DeCaro, Thomas Gale, George Furbeck and Robert Parker houses, and the Charles Roberts Stable (listed as “attributed”). Most of his other Oak Park houses are protected as contributing buildings in the historic districts, chiefly the Frank Lloyd Wright–Prairie School of Architecture Historic District, which carries the same certificate requirement.
Who decides
A commission of a chair plus nine members, every one appointed by the Village President with Board consent, on three-year terms. Every seated member today was appointed by the same Village President.
Has it happened?
Not to a Wright house. The commission has blocked the recent big cases, at least at first: the Arcade tower, denied by resolution on August 28, 2025 after a 9–0 denial that July, and 125 S. Lombard, where in November 2023 it took no action on the demolition certificate, effectively a denial. The question is who sits in those chairs in 2029: eight of the nine seated members’ terms end before the April 2029 village election. The roster and the term limits are in Part 5.
Route 2: the Village Board reverses the commission, by simple majority
Within 15 days of a denial the applicant may appeal to the Village Board, which reviews the record and “shall affirm, reverse or modify the decision of the Commission” within 45 days. No supermajority is required; if the Board does nothing, the denial stands. On appeal the Board is bound to the same standards the commission applied. The only check outside Village Hall is a lawsuit under the Administrative Review Law.
It has happened, and recently. On September 16, 2025 the Board voted 6–1 to reverse the commission’s unanimous denial of a ten-story addition behind the landmark Boulevard Arcade Building, against the written recommendation of its own planning staff, on housing grounds. The chair of the commission announced his resignation three weeks later. Full story in Part 6.
Who decides
Four of seven votes on the Village Board. The 2025 reversal passed 6–1.
Legal basis the village cites
Both draft Arcade ordinances ground the Board’s power to affirm, reverse or modify a denial in home rule and in Division 48.2 of the Illinois Municipal Code, 65 ILCS 5/11-48.2.
Route 3: a certificate of economic hardship
After a denial, an owner may seek a certificate of economic hardship by showing the property “cannot be put to any reasonably beneficial use or that the owner/applicant will suffer a substantial economic loss,” and that the owner is “not responsible in any way for the hardship.”
Why rezoning matters here. Among the factors the commission must weigh are “a substantial decrease in the fair market value of the property as a result of the denial” and a decrease in the return to its owners (7-9-13(C)(1)–(2)). Upzoning a lot from one unit to “up to six units on qualifying lots” raises what the lot is worth without the house, and so raises the loss a denial imposes, on qualifying lots where a teardown would pay, starting, by the numbers in the village’s own feasibility study, with older, cheaper houses (Part 9). Trustee Wesley’s own Facebook math conceded that a new house on one of these large lots “could easily double the asking price of an existing home there”; he computed the deterrent under the zoning Shape Oak Park exists to replace.
It has happened. On March 14, 2024 the commission granted a hardship certificate 7–1 for 125 S. Lombard, a contributing house in the Ridgeland–Oak Park district, after one commissioner said “It’s twice the value to fix it.” It did so although another commissioner quoted the rule that a buyer who purchases without first getting commission approval “is responsible for their own hardship,” and the chair, who cast the only no vote, said “He knew what he was buying.” Five weeks earlier, on February 8, 2024, it had granted one unanimously for 430 S. Taylor, a fire-damaged contributing house in the same district. Details on Lombard in Part 7.
The safeguard on paper. Section 7-9-13(C)(6) says a purchase made after the ordinance “without making said purchase contingent upon… necessary Board and/or Commission approvals” is “conclusive evidence” that the buyer caused his own hardship. The clause was raised at the 125 S. Lombard hearing; the village attorney advised that the listed factors “shall include but not limited to,” and the commission granted the certificate 7–1.
Who decides
The commission; then the Board on appeal.
The number that moves
“Substantial economic loss” compares the restricted use to the unrestricted one. Six units versus one is the whole difference.
Route 4: a Village Board resolution, with no commission finding
Section 7-9-8(A)(2) says that for “demolition or removal of an eligible or designated historic landmark” or “any site, building, structure or improvement within a designated historic district,” the demolition permit “shall be issued upon the authorization of such a permit by formal resolution of the Village Board as being necessary to protect the public health, safety or welfare.” The certificate route in 7-9-8(A)(3) applies to district demolitions “for which demolition has not been authorized under subsection 7-9-8A2.”
Read together, the article contains a second path to a demolition permit that runs through a Board resolution and the word “welfare.” A separate section, 7-9-17(C), says an owner “shall not be authorized to demolish” without a certificate except on an official finding of imminent threat, so the scope of the resolution route is unclear on the face of the text. I present both sections and say the scope is unclear. I do not claim this route has been used on a house.
Who decides
The Village Board, by resolution.
Status
Documented textScope unclear
Route 5: change the rules themselves
Everything above is ordinance in a home-rule village, which means the Board can amend it by simple vote. On July 28, 2026 it did exactly that to the commission’s membership rules, on the consent agenda. The other levers are already in the text:
Un-landmark a house. “Designations may be amended or rescinded by the same procedure and according to the same criteria set forth in this Article for an original designation” (7-9-7(E)). Rescission needs a commission recommendation and a Board vote.
Redraw or remove a district. “Historic districts shall be designated, amended and removed only upon by an ordinance adopted by the Village Board” (7-9-3(A)). On September 16, 2025, the night the Board overrode the commission, the owner of a Wright house asked the trustees from the public-comment podium “to revisit the guidelines for the HPC, the boundaries of our current historic districts and our current zoning restrictions”; she did not say in which direction. A year later the Journal quoted her calling the video propaganda (Part 11). What sitting trustees have said about the districts is in the box below.
Refuse to landmark. “It shall be within the discretion of the Village Board to deny designation of any historic landmark, irrespective of whether or not the proposed landmark satisfies one or more of the above listed criteria” (7-9-4(E)); an owner’s objection raises the vote to unanimous (7-9-7(B)).
Reshape the commission. Done July 28, 2026: eleven seats and at least eight experts became ten seats (the village meant nine) and at least six.
The only outside hook is the village’s Certified Local Government status, whose federal rule asks only that commissions include qualified professionals “to the extent that such individuals are available in the community.” The commission has no vote on zoning at all: on zoning amendments affecting landmarks or districts it may only “review,” “present evidence,” and “make recommendations” (2-23-2(F), 7-9-9). Shape Oak Park is decided by the Plan Commission and the Board; the preservation commission can at most comment.
Penalties, if someone just does it
Demolishing a landmark without a permit is a misdemeanor, up to six months in county jail. Any violation of the article carries a fine of up to $500 a day, and the village can go to court to force restoration and, for unpermitted work on a landmark, seek a one-year license revocation (7-9-19). The jail term applies only to landmarks; against the land value of a Wright lot, the fine alone is not a deterrent.
The Chicago precedent
On November 1, 2012 the Commission on Chicago Landmarks voted that Prentice Women’s Hospital met the landmark criteria, then rescinded 8–1 two hours and twenty-one minutes later at the request of the city’s economic development department. Same commissioners, same meeting. It did not take new commissioners to change the answer, only a request from City Hall.
Not only a future Board
A future Board could redraw the district boundaries by ordinance. Members of the present Board have already raised it, on the record.
Trustee Cory Wesley, September 16, 2025, the night the Board overrode the commission: “I think that our historic districts are way too big and we are not that historic and we are not that special.” Six months later he and Trustee Derek Eder sponsored the motion for a study of the districts.
Trustee Brian Straw, July 23, 2024, at the Board’s study session on single-family zoning: the minutes record that he “said he thinks we need to talk about parking minimums and include questions around historic preservation in this discussion and how much of Oak Park we are protecting in the historic districts.”
Trustee Derek Eder, on the study he sponsored: he is “not against historic districts or historic preservation,” but “just like any policy tool, they can be dialed too much in one direction or another. I want to use as much data as we can to understand how these districts have been impacting our village.”
That is three of the Board’s seven members, not a majority, and they are not saying the same thing. Only one has said the districts are too big; during a discussion on rezoning, one wants the historic districts’ extent discussed; the third says he is not against them and wants data. None of it is a proposal to redraw a district, and the one formal step, the study, found that the districts add about a day to a permit. But this is not a hypothetical about some future Board. Sitting trustees have raised it at the Board table, in their own words.
The tool with no record of use: demolition by neglect
The entire text of 7-9-16 is one permissive sentence: “The Commission, on its own initiative, may file a petition with the Development Customer Services Department requesting that the Department require correction of defects or repairs” to protected buildings. No standard, no timeline, no penalty, no enforcement language.
When a commissioner asked whether there was a demolition ordinance during the 125 S. Lombard case on November 30, 2023, the minutes record the planner saying “there is a section in the Historic Preservation Ordinance regarding demolition by neglect and staff will review.” The minutes that follow record no neglect petition; three and a half months later the house got its hardship certificate.
Why it matters
Neglect is how a contributing house becomes a hardship case. The ordinance’s only neglect provision has no teeth, and in the one documented case the record shows no use of it.
Where the protection is
The village’s own map of the three historic districts and 73 landmarks (2025 edition)
Blue is the Frank Lloyd Wright Historic District, where most of Wright’s Oak Park houses stand as contributing structures; pink is Ridgeland–Oak Park, the district the village’s own 2026 study found to be its most affordable and diverse area; green is Gunderson. The numbered house symbols mark the individual landmarks, nine of them Wright’s. Everything outside the colored areas has no historic-district review at all. Village of Oak Park, Development Customer Services, 2025 file.
Tap the map for the full-size PDF on the village website.
Part 3 · July 28, 2026
Three trustees called the video false. All three had voted to shrink the preservation commission.
When the video came out in September, three trustees answered it in public. Each called it false, and each said Oak Park’s historic preservation protections were intact. About seven weeks earlier, on July 28, 2026, all three had voted for Ordinance 26-151. It left those protections as they were and changed the commission that applies them: fewer seats, and fewer members who must have expertise. What each of them said is below, beside the roll call.
What they said
Crain’s · Sept. 15, 2026
Trustee Jenna Leving Jacobson
“The premise is false,” Leving Jacobson said. “There are no changes to historic preservation on the table, and nothing we could potentially change in zoning will impact the protections of landmark structures” that are sacrosanct in Oak Park, the hub of Wright’s work, she said.
AyeHer vote on Ordinance 26-151, July 28, 2026. She also moved the consent agenda, the single motion that adopted it along with many other items.
Facebook · Sept. 2026
Trustee Cory Wesley
“This is false. It’s ridiculous on its face. It’s misinformation designed to create fear in the community and weaponize it against zoning reform.”
Later in the same comment:
“Landmarks and contributing structures in Historic Districts are protected by our historic preservation ordinance before the zoning code even comes into the conversation.”
AyeHis vote on Ordinance 26-151, July 28, 2026. He also seconded that motion.
Campaign page · Sept. 2026
Trustee Brian Straw
“There is a video circulating saying that Oak Park is going to demolish Frank Lloyd Wright houses and put up apartment blocks.”
“Let me state this clearly: this is a blatant lie.”
In the next paragraph:
“Oak Park is not doing away with the historic preservation code which prevents the demolition of both these landmarks, but also contributing structures nearby.”
The roll call that adopted Ordinance 26-151. It was item I on the consent agenda, which the Board approves with one motion and one roll call; this one covered many items, and no one pulled the ordinance for separate discussion.
From the official minutes, exactly as printed: “It was moved by Village Trustee Leving Jacobson and seconded by Village Trustee Wesley to approve the items under the Consent Agenda. The motion was approved. The roll call on the vote was as follows:”
AYES:
6 - Village President Scaman, Village Trustee Eder, Village Trustee Leving Jacobson, Village Trustee Straw, Village Trustee Taglia, and Village Trustee Wesley
NAYS:
0
By Phone:
1 - Village Trustee Enyia
ABSENT:
0
The Clerk records remote participation on its own line, not as an aye or a nay; later that night, on the hemp and kratom ordinance, one member is logged “NAYS” and the remote member again “By Phone.”
What they voted for, in the ordinance’s own strike-and-underline
The ordinance did not touch Chapter 7, Article 9, the historic preservation ordinance itself, or the protections in it. It amended the section of the Village Code that decides who sits on the commission that applies them: how many members, and how many must be experts.
B. The Commission shall consist of a chairperson and eleven (11) nine (9) members, to be appointed by the Village President with the consent of the Board of Trustees. Appointments shall be on a staggered basis for terms of three (3) years, with the chairperson and three (3) members appointed during one year and no more than four (4) members and no fewer than three (3) members appointed in each of the two (2) succeeding years.
C. At least eight (8) six (6) members of the Commission shall have demonstrated expertise in the discipline of history, architectural history, art history, architecture, engineering, planning, law, real estate, historic preservation or related field. One member of the Commission shall be a homeowner or business owner or representative located in a designated Oak Park Historic District. Citizens without such demonstrated expertise or residence shall have a priority with regard to the appointment of members to the two (2) remaining slots on the Commission, except that all commissioners shall have a demonstrated interest, competence or knowledge in historic preservation.
Source: the ordinance as filed, ORD 26-151; highlights mine. “Real estate,” “law,” “planning,” and “engineering” all count as expertise, so a broker or a developer’s zoning attorney could fill an “expert” seat. Nothing in the article requires the expertise to be verified; the public roster lists an occupation for two of nine members.
Read the “or”
The list of disciplines is joined by “or,” not “and.” Any one field qualifies, so the ordinance is satisfied if all six expert seats go to real estate agents, with no historian, architect or preservationist among them. The rest of the section does not close the gap: the historic-district seat needs only a home or business in a district, which an agent can have; the two remaining seats carry a “priority” for non-experts, not a requirement; and the one rule that binds every commissioner, “a demonstrated interest, competence or knowledge in historic preservation,” is another “or,” met by interest alone. On the text, every seat on the commission could be held by a real estate agent.
The same list was in the code before July; the ordinance left it unchanged. The Board amended this exact sentence, lowered the floor from eight experts to six, and left the “or” alone. Nothing says a Village President would appoint that commission; nothing in the ordinance’s qualification rules stops one, and the only check is the Board’s consent to each appointment.
A drafting problem the Board adopted on consent
The staff report describes the commission before the vote as “a chairperson and ten (10) members for a total of eleven (11) seats,” and recommends reducing it “from eleven (11) to nine (9).” The ordinance does not quite do that. Its markup strikes the word “eleven,” which, by the staff report’s own description and the village’s older compilation of the 1999 text, the code it was amending did not contain (both say “ten”), and writes in “nine,” so the village code now reads “a chairperson and nine (9) members.” Counted the way the staff report counts, that is ten seats, not nine, and the appointment schedule adopted with it, the chair and three members in one year and then three members in each of the next two, adds up to ten as well. The village’s boards website lists nine. And Article 9 was never conformed: the definition of “Architectural Review Committee” in 7-9-2 still refers to “at least eight (8) members of the full Commission,” and the village’s own boards portal still lists “at least eight members” as the qualification. The code now says eight in one chapter and six in another.
Before July 28, 2026
A chair plus ten members, eleven seats. At least eight with demonstrated expertise; two lay-priority seats.
After
A chair plus nine members: ten seats as the text reads, nine as the village counts them (see the red box above). At least six must have expertise, down from eight. Three-year terms and the two-term limit did not change; the stagger was rewritten to exactly three appointments in each of the two later years.
chair (no field requirement on a plain reading) must be an “expert” lay-priority seat removed
The staff report, verbatim where it matters
The commission was “a large citizen-appointed commission consisting of a chairperson and ten (10) members for a total of eleven (11) seats.”
It “has had difficulty consistently filling all eleven (11) seats, which leads to cancelling meetings due to the lack of a quorum. Currently, there are three vacancies on this commission.”
Rationale: “Reducing the membership to nine (9) will bring the membership number more in line with other citizen-appointed commissions, such as the Plan Commission.” Advantages: “Coordinating schedules for 9 commissioners is easier than 11, which will help minimize meeting cancellations,” and “This action lowers the threshold needed for a quorum.”
Disadvantages: “fewer open spaces for residents to join the HPC” and “Losing two seats potentially narrows the range of backgrounds and professional expertise.”
If the Board rejected the ordinance and kept eleven seats: “This action would not solve the issue with vacancies and absent members.”
Community Input: “There has been no community input given in relation to this item.”
I have no reason to doubt the quorum problem was real.
The report describes the change only as a headcount reduction. The drop from at least eight experts to at least six appears nowhere in its text, only in the strike-and-underline of the ordinance attached to it.
The seats, by date
Oct. 9, 2025The commission’s minutes record that Chair Lou Garapolo would resign “in light of the appeals process at the Village Board.”
Feb. 17, 2026Sitting commissioner Asha Andriana is appointed chair (MOT 26-123), filling the chair seat and opening her own.
Apr. 2, 2026The Journal reports that “two former members of the HPC recently resigned after the village board overruled the commission’s decisions” on the Arcade.
July 10, 2026Ordinance 26-151 is filed. Its staff report says: “Currently, there are three vacancies on this commission.”
July 14, 2026Kelly Mitchell is appointed to one of those seats (MOT 26-195).
July 28, 2026The Board adopts the ordinance with the other two seats still empty.
My opinion
What I take from it
This box is my opinion, not part of the record. It rests on the record above.
A smaller body is easier for any appointing administration to shape.
One of the empty seats was filled on July 14, two weeks before the vote, so the seats could be filled. The other two never were; the commission was made smaller instead. If quorum was the trouble, filling those seats would have solved it without shrinking the commission.
Also on the July 28 agenda
Same night, item AB: the rezoning
The consultant team presented a framework “allowing up to six units on qualifying lots,” 30-to-35-foot heights in neighborhood districts, larger increases on corridors, removal of parking minimums village-wide, and renamed “single-family” districts; single-unit homes “would remain allowed everywhere they exist today.” Staff and the consultants reported about 519 nonconforming parcels, about 80 percent of which (roughly 1,000 units) the changes would bring into conformity. About 28 residents spoke. The Board reached consensus to send it to the Plan Commission; “no formal roll call vote was taken.” A final Board vote was anticipated “as early as October.”
One trustee “asked to see financial feasibility analysis before deciding whether to allow six units by right versus as a bonus tied to affordability,” two years after the Village Manager told the Board that “staff are going to do some deep feasibility analysis and create a work product to bring back to the Board to review,” and noted only two of the roughly 28 speakers identified as renters. Another repeated his preference for a referendum; the Board had voted 5–1 against one a week earlier.
Same roll call, item E: real affordable housing
The 6104 Roosevelt Road planned development, 28 affordable apartments by The Community Builders, was adopted on the same consent roll call as the vote that shrank the commission. I got the flyer for that project and did not oppose it. It is the kind of affordable housing Oak Park actually builds: on a corridor, through the planned-development process, with eight zoning allowances (including doubling the permitted units from 14 to 28) and public subsidy. More in Part 9.
Part 4 · The 2026 sequence
In 2026 the village studied its historic districts, shrank the commission and sent the rezoning to the Plan Commission
Every entry cites the document behind it. Green dots are the votes. It starts with a prologue from 2024, because that is where the historic districts entered the zoning conversation.
Jul 23, 2024Prologue. At a Board study session on single-family zoning, one trustee puts “how much of Oak Park we are protecting in the historic districts” on the table.
Item ID 24-298, “A Presentation and Discussion on Residential Single Family Zoning and Missing Middle Housing.” From the official minutes: Trustee Straw “said he thinks we need to talk about parking minimums and include questions around historic preservation in this discussion and how much of Oak Park we are protecting in the historic districts.” Trustee Wesley “said he thinks we can be more aggressive. He said he would love to see an Option 5 to throw all zoning away.” Village President Scaman “said she is hearing unanimous direction of working toward getting rid of single-family zoning.” And the Village Manager, twice: “a feasibility analysis will address a lot of the questions being raised,” and “staff are going to do some deep feasibility analysis and create a work product to bring back to the Board to review.”
Two years before anyone said “there are no changes to historic preservation on the table,” the extent of the districts was raised at the Board table as part of this very discussion, by a trustee who now calls the video a lie.
Mar 10, 2026The Board receives a presentation on the history of historic preservation in Oak Park (ID 26-202), and the 167-page Shape Oak Park status memo (ID 26-213), a staff memo with the consultants’ slides attached.
A study session, not a vote. Two weeks later the Board asked for numbers.
The memo reports what the consultants heard in their stakeholder meetings. Developers “called for streamlining approval processes with by-right development, reducing parking requirements for flexible solutions, and implementing tax incentives and density bonuses to close the economic viability gap.” Nonprofit housing developers and neighborhood leaders “expressed concern that missing middle housing likely will not serve residents at 60% AMI and below.” Under “Design and Preservation Tensions,” the memo says: “Balancing historic preservation requirements with housing flexibility can create tension, as overly restrictive regulations prevent needed housing while trying to protect community identity and architectural character.” Compare the framework the Board received on July 28: up to six units on qualifying lots (whether by right or as an affordability bonus is still undecided) and no parking minimums village-wide.
Mar 24, 2026MOT 26-137: staff to perform “a Comparative Analysis of Building Permits within and outside of our Historic Districts.”
One of the two trustees who brought the motion said he is “not against historic districts or historic preservation,” but “just like any policy tool, they can be dialed too much in one direction or another.” The same report notes that “95% of projects are approved by village staff without commission involvement, according to village documents.” A homeowner’s letter to the Journal three weeks later welcomed the study and hoped it would find “areas of flexibility within the Historic Preservation code.”
May 12, 2026The results: permits in the districts take about one day longer; diversity is comparable; the Ridgeland district is the most affordable and diverse part of Oak Park.
The village’s own study found the historic districts were not an obstacle to permits and made no significant difference to diversity, and it called the Ridgeland historic district the most affordable and diverse part of Oak Park.
Jul 10, 2026ORD 26-151 filed in the village’s legislative system.
Title: “An Ordinance Amending Chapter 2 (‘Administration’), Article 23 (‘Historic Preservation Commission’) of the Oak Park Village Code Related to Membership of the Historic Preservation Commission.”
Jul 14, 2026Kelly Mitchell appointed to the commission (MOT 26-195), four days after the ordinance was filed.
The staff report presented July 28 still said “Currently, there are three vacancies on this commission.”
Jul 21, 2026The Board votes 5–1 against an advisory referendum on the rezoning, one member absent.
Reported by the Wednesday Journal, July 23. One trustee said she is “committed to doing this with any zoning changes alongside an inclusionary housing ordinance.” A week later the absent member said for the record she would have voted with the majority.
Jul 28, 2026ORD 26-151 adopted on consent; missing-middle recommendations referred to the Plan Commission by consensus; 6104 Roosevelt adopted on the same consent roll call.
The meeting ran past 1 a.m. Everything about it is in Part 3.
Aug 18, 2026A former trustee’s open letter to Trustees Straw and Wesley: “What does success look like?”
Robert Milstein asks what measurable outcome the rezoning is meant to produce and what evidence supports it, and lists “historic preservation” among the effects to be weighed against the anticipated benefits. “These questions are not arguments against change. They are questions about responsibility.”
Sep 11, 2026The “This House” video is published.
Title: “These Frank Lloyd Wright Houses Will Be Demolished | How ‘Shape Oak Park’ Will Destroy the Village.” The opening line is quoted in full in Part 1.
Sep 14, 2026The first of the September Shape Oak Park information sessions: “easily over 100” attendees, overflow into the lobby.
The Journal: “The room that was used for the meeting could not hold the people who showed up, easily over 100, and spilled into the lobby where the crowd was still tight.” When the presenter said single-family homes would not be eliminated, “shouts rose from the audience calling it a lie or ‘disingenuous at best.’”
Sep 15, 2026The Wednesday Journal names the video; Crain’s runs trustee criticism with my replies; the Journal also prints a letter making the diversity point from the village’s own study.
The Journal piece is generous in places: it reports that “Weiss expanded on his claim in the over 12-minute-long video” and that “many additional concerns” I raised “were echoed by attendees.” The letter: “Its 2026 study found no significant difference in diversity between Oak Park’s three historic districts… and the non-historic districts in Oak Park.” In Crain’s the same day, Trustee Jenna Leving Jacobson said “there are no changes to historic preservation on the table,” seven weeks after the Board’s 6–0 vote to shrink the commission (Part 3). Her other quotes, with the record beside each, are in Part 11.
Sep 16, 2026Thomas Ptacek publishes “Four Myths About Preservation and Zoning” on Yes Oak Park.
It does not name the video, and it engages none of: the consent-agenda vote, the six-of-nine rule, the chair’s resignation, or what an easement protects that the code does not; it discusses Board overrides, but not the simple-majority standard that allows them. More in Part 10.
Sep 17, 2026The Yes Oak Park page, under its post promoting the essay: “People should be openly hostile to large government enforced preservation districts.”
Also: “Large historic districts exist to prevent new multi-family housing. Yes Oak Park supports new multi-family housing.” Full quotes and screenshots in Part 10.
Sep 23, 2026The Board receives the village’s financial feasibility study: the proposed zoning changes are “unlikely to result in substantial land use change in the near term.”
Prepared by SB Friedman and dated September 18, it came with a cover memo from the Development Services Director and goes to the Plan Commission with the recommendations on October 8. What it found is in Part 9.
Oct 2026Plan Commission public hearings; the first is October 8. The Board “could have a final vote by the end of the month.”
Per the Journal, Sept. 15, and the July 28 minutes, which anticipated a possible return to the Board “as early as October 20.”
Part 5 · One Village President, every seat
The commission that would decide is not the commission that exists today
I do not assume the current commissioners would ever approve tearing down a Wright house. My point is about the chairs, not the people in them. Drag the slider.
Move to a date
September 2026
seated, current termterm ends: up to the Village President, with Board consent, to reappointmust leave by rule (term limits)
Sep 2026Apr 2027Apr 2028Apr 2029 electionAug 2029
Terms from the village’s public roster; term limits from the Village Code, 2-1-10. First-term members can be reappointed once, by the Village President, with Board consent. Nothing in the code or the manual protects a member from simply not being reappointed.
The roster, as published
Member
Term
Dates
Note
Ron Roman
1st
Jan 16, 2024 – Jan 16, 2027
Eligible for one more term
Jessica Paul
1st
Mar 12, 2024 – Mar 12, 2027
Eligible for one more term
Paul E. Ribera
1st
Jul 9, 2024 – Jul 9, 2027
Eligible for one more term
Rachel Michelin
1st
Jul 30, 2024 – Jul 30, 2027
Eligible for one more term
Scot Mazur
2nd
Oct 4, 2025 – Oct 4, 2028
Term-limited; leaves 2028
Dave Bates
2nd
Feb 10, 2026 – Feb 10, 2029
Term-limited; leaves 2029
Asha Andriana
3rd (1st as chair)
Feb 17, 2026 – Feb 17, 2029
Term-limited; leaves 2029
Amy Peterson
2nd
Mar 21, 2026 – Mar 21, 2029
Term-limited; leaves 2029
Kelly Mitchell
1st
Jul 14, 2026 – Jul 14, 2029
Eligible for one more term
Nine seated. Under the amended code (a chair plus nine members) a tenth seat is open, though the village’s portal still lists the size as nine with no vacancy. Four terms expire between January and July 2027. Eight of the nine seated members’ terms end before the April 2029 village election; only Mitchell’s runs past it. With the open seat, that is nine of ten seats to fill before the election. Three-year terms inside a four-year Village Presidency mean the stagger cannot stop one Village President from filling every seat at least once; it only prevents a one-year sweep. One note on how to read the portal: its term counter restarts when a member’s position changes, so the chair’s “1st Term” is her first term as chair, not her first on the commission. She was already sitting as a commissioner in September 2022, which makes the chair term her third consecutive one, and the code caps a chair at three.
The rules that protect commissioners, and the ones that do not
Term limits are in the Village Code (2-1-10, adopted December 2013); the removal rules are in the Boards and Commissions Procedure Manual, which is Board policy, not ordinance. The Board can change either.
Term limits. “Members shall be limited to two (2) consecutive terms”; “Chairs shall be limited to three (3) consecutive terms, either two (2) as a member and one as a chair, or one as a member and two (2) as a chair.” A twelve-month wait to return to the same commission; the Village President, with Board approval, may extend a final term up to twelve months for a special project or a required professional qualification.
Removal for listed causes. Attendance, ethics violations, a disqualifying conflict, disruptive conduct, moving away, “making false statements of fact to the commission or making false statements of fact about the work of the commission to the public,” or repeated refusal to follow the rules; “a member may only be removed from office by majority vote of the Village Board.”
Opinion is protected. “Commission members are not subject to removal based on their opinion on any matter coming before the commission.”
Reappointment is not. Nothing protects a first-term member from non-reappointment, and the ground of “making false statements of fact about the work of the commission to the public” is elastic in the hands of a future board hostile to preservation.
State law may go further. The Illinois Municipal Code lets a mayor or village president “remove any officer appointed by the mayor or president under this Code, on any written charge, whenever the mayor or president is of the opinion that the interests of the municipality demand removal,” and restores the officer only if two-thirds of the Board disapproves. The village’s own compilation of its enabling language lists Historic Preservation Commission members among those “designated as officers of the Village.” Whether that power reaches commissioners has not been tested here; a lawyer should confirm it, but on its face it would not need a Board majority.
Part 6 · The precedent
The Arcade: the Board overruled its commission and its staff, and the chair quit
1035 South Boulevard. A ten-story, 24-unit luxury addition proposed behind the landmark Boulevard Arcade Building, designed in 1906 by Eben E. Roberts, who ran the largest architecture practice in Oak Park and designed over 200 houses here.
zoning max 60 ft
35 ftThe landmark (1906, E.E. Roberts)
60 ftWhat the block’s zoning allows
115 ftThe proposed addition “91% taller than the zoning max”
Figures from the commission’s written assessment after the hearing. The project also needed zoning relief on height, parking and density, which the Plan Commission never ruled on before the developer withdrew; the Board overrode the preservation commission before that question was reached. The property owner and appellant was Sachem Building LLC, 1031 South Boulevard; the appeal was signed by its manager, John Trent Stoner, on August 29, 2025.
What the village’s own staff told the Board
Recommendation: “Support the Historic Preservation Commission’s decision.” The addition “thwarts the Historic Preservation Ordinance’s purpose.” The Board on appeal is bound to the same standards as the commission. And: “over one hundred (100) similar proposals to construct rear additions to contributing structures in the historic districts have been processed” through the certificate process in the last decade.
What the Board did instead
It took staff’s “Alternative 1” and reversed, 6–1. Trustee Eder: “Housing is something we definitely need in this village. The need for housing is there, and this is an opportunity to build more.” Trustee Wesley, as the Journal quoted him: “We can’t have people waiting a year before they know if they can actually build something.” And Wesley, per the village’s own transcript of the meeting, with the bracketed word as the recording has it: “My decision may be different if this was inside of a historic district and I think that our historic district[s] are way too big and we are not that historic and we are not that special. And our landmarks are great, but we have an entire historic district dedicated to stucco… And what makes Oak Park great is not the buildings, but the people and we need places for them to live.” The dissent noted the project was one unit short of triggering the affordable-housing contribution: “It seems like developers come underneath that all the time.” Housing need is not among the standards the Board was bound to apply, and the size of the historic districts was not the question before it.
The full sequence
Dec 12, 2024HPC preliminary review: does not meet the guidelines.
From the staff report to the Board.
Jan 9, 2025HPC denies the certificate; 14 oral and 7 written comments opposed, 1 oral and 5 written in favor.
Counts from the staff report to the Board.
May 22, 2025HPC denies again; 5 oral and 1 written comments opposed.
Counts from the staff report. The developer did not appeal within the 15-day deadline and had to start over; in the Journal’s words, “back to square one for Sachem Building LLC and Schiess.”
Jul 24, 2025HPC denies 9–0. Commissioner Bates objects to being told the review was “laying the groundwork to ask the Village Board where presumably you think they are better disposed toward the developer.”
Andriana notes the ZIP code is listed as the most expensive rental area in the village. Roman raises unlimited resubmission; the planner says “nothing is mentioned in the Ordinance,” and the chair calls it “a good point.”
Aug 28, 2025Public hearing; HPC adopts a resolution denying, 7–0. No one but the applicant testified in support.
The resolution found the addition failed five of the Architectural Review Guidelines and “would set a negative precedent for addition projects affecting other contributing resources and designated landmarks.” The written objections filed with the commission are hosted with the other documents.
Aug 29, 2025The owner appeals to the Village Board.
One-page letter from Sachem Building LLC.
Sep 16, 2025Public comment: a Wright-house owner asks the Board to grant the certificate and to “revisit… the boundaries of our current historic districts.”
During public comment, Carollina Song — a village commissioner, as she noted at the podium — told the Board she lives in a Frank Lloyd Wright house and that she and her husband had won the village’s preservation award for its clay tile roof; said “I do not believe that historic preservation should be used as a [cudgel] to throttle all change” (the transcript has “cultural”); asked the trustees to “grant a certificate of appropriateness for the proposed 10 story addition,” which she said would not be visible from the street; and asked them “to revisit the guidelines for the HPC, the boundaries of our current historic districts and our current zoning restrictions.” On the item itself, her husband, Alec Harris, said his company is the largest tenant of the Arcade’s office space: “we need more housing in Oak Park.” A year later the Journal quoted her calling my video propaganda; her comment is quoted at length in Part 11.
Sep 16, 2025Staff report (ORD 25-164) recommends upholding the commission. The Board reverses 6–1.
At the meeting, a resident read into the record a letter from Landmarks Illinois: “It goes against preservation standards in almost every way,” as the Journal quoted it. Two draft ordinances were attached to the agenda item, one to deny the appeal and one to reverse. The “Ordinance – Reverse” draft is a search-and-replace of the other, and it shows: its recitals state the commission “determined, by 7-0 vote… that the proposal does meet the Architectural Review Guidelines and that the application… be approved,” and that the commission adopted a resolution “Denying a Certificate of Appropriateness… approving the COA Application.” The commission voted 7–0 the other way. Whether the signed ordinance was corrected is not public; no signed copy is posted. The meeting’s Legistar page says its minutes are not finalized; the minutes posted there record the motion to “Grant the Appeal and Overturn the Historic Preservation Commission” and the 6–1 roll call.
Oct 7, 2025Yes Oak Park co-founder Josh Vanderberg, in a Journal column: “Preservation isn’t progress, in fact, it’s the opposite.”
The column praises the reversal (“The village board rightly ignored the advice of the HPC”), describes the districts as “a massive ring fence of historic preservation district boundaries,” and argues “we need to come to grips with the outsized power that the preservationist movement wields over the future of our village.” The byline describes him as “a passionate urbanist and entrepreneur”; it does not mention that he co-founded Yes Oak Park.
Oct 9, 2025Chair Lou Garapolo announces his resignation on the record.
From the minutes: he “would be resigning from the HPC in light of the appeals process at the Village Board,” the discussion “should have been focused on the HPC’s guidelines but instead the conversation was discussed as a housing issue,” and “the concept of the appeal process was lost.”
Oct 28, 2025A resident’s letter to the Journal puts Wesley’s “we are not that special” remark on the record, with the spot in the meeting video.
Apr 2026The developer withdraws. The precedent stands.
Reported April 28, 2026. The Board’s 6–1 reversal against staff’s written recommendation remains the most recent word on how an appeal goes in Oak Park.
Part 7 · The other failure mode
125 S. Lombard: neglect, then hardship, then demolition
A contributing house in the Ridgeland–Oak Park Historic District. The prior owner was evicted by the bank at the end of 2019. Someone bought it at public auction and gutted it without a permit, then put the project on hold when caught; the electric and gas lines were gone. The minutes describe someone squatting in it for four years, holes in the roof and floor, a falling chimney and animals living inside; a police officer was injured falling through the floor.
A neighbor bought it to end the blight; over 50 neighbors signed a petition calling the house a nuisance. On November 30, 2023 the commission took no action on the demolition certificate, effectively a denial, and the minutes record the planner saying the neglect section exists “and staff will review.” The minutes that follow record no neglect petition. On March 14, 2024 the commission granted a certificate of economic hardship 7–1. One commissioner said “It’s twice the value to fix it.” Another quoted the rule that a buyer who purchases without first getting commission approval “is responsible for their own hardship”; the village attorney advised that the listed factors “shall include but not limited to”; and the chair, who cast the only no vote, said “He knew what he was buying.” The minutes also record: “It was noted that it’s only contributing because of the year.” The lot is now listed as vacant land.
Note: The buyer was a neighbor removing a blight, not a developer. The point is that the route exists, has been used, and there is no record the neglect tool was.
Why these two cases matter together
The Arcade shows the Board overruling a unanimous commission and its own staff on a project argued as housing. Lombard shows a contributing house reaching demolition through the hardship route after years of neglect, with no record that the one anti-neglect tool was used. Shape Oak Park raises the value of the unrestricted use on qualifying lots where a teardown would pay, starting, by the numbers in the village’s own feasibility study, with older, cheaper houses (Part 9). That value is the number the hardship route weighs, and the pressure behind appeals like the Arcade’s.
And Chicago’s Prentice case shows how fast a commission’s answer can change: a landmarks commission that reversed its own finding two hours later when the mayor wanted a demolition. The Wright parallel that holds is Wright’s own Darwin D. Martin House in Buffalo: abandoned in 1937, foreclosed for taxes in 1946, its carriage house, conservatory and pergola demolished and “a pair of apartment buildings constructed in the 1960s,” the main house cut into three apartments, and $50 million spent decades later to undo it.
It has happened to a Wright house here. The Arthur Heurtley House, now a National Historic Landmark, was turned into a duplex by Wright’s own sister and her husband, and was “allowed to deteriorate” until new owners bought it in 1997 and restored it, returning the interior to its original condition, work Landmarks Illinois honored with a 1999 preservation award. So no one can say it cannot happen again. History has a funny way of repeating itself.
Part 8 · The missing layer
A Wright house with an easement is protected from the Board. One without is not.
A recorded preservation easement runs with the deed and is enforced in court by an outside holder. It is the one layer that does not share the Board’s failure mode. A house without one has only the village’s rules, and the Board can change those.
What is known
Landmarks Illinois holds nearly 550 easements statewide and publishes no property list.
Unity Temple has a Landmarks Illinois easement, acquired in the early 1980s. The Home and Studio is protected by nonprofit ownership: it was bought in 1974 by the National Trust and the local foundation that became the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust; the National Trust held title until 2012, and the Trust since.
The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy held easements on 25 Wright buildings nationally as of 2023; the Illinois ones it has announced are the Glasner House in Glencoe (2021) and the Henderson House in Elmhurst (2019).
A March 2005 Journal story reported that “in Oak Park, 48 homeowners have taken advantage” of the federal façade-easement deduction, according to the head of Landmarks Illinois’ easement program; the addresses were not published.
Not every instrument is permanent. The Illinois SHPO list shows a covenant on the Mrs. Thomas Gale House at 6 Elizabeth Court and a letter of agreement on the Harry S. Adams House at 710 Augusta, both marked expired.
What an owner can do
For the owners of historic homes: an easement is the one thing you can do that no future Board can undo. Landmarks Illinois explains how its program works, and an older brochure is on the village’s own website.
Part 9 · Affordability
Four towers near the train stations added 1,068 homes. The rezoning would add them a few at a time.
This argument is about scale. A house here and there converting to a four-flat cannot produce the volume that moves rents. The roughly one thousand apartments the Board approved near the rail lines are what change supply at a scale that matters. And separately, the affordability framing does not hold.
+3
homes added when one house becomes a four-flat.
1,068
apartments in four downtown towers the Village Board approved near the Green Line and Metra stations. They opened between 2016 and 2019.
356
houses that would each have to become a four-flat to add as many homes as those four towers.
The four towers
The four are Vantage (270 apartments), The Emerson (270), Eleven33 (263) and Albion (265), built, in the Journal’s words, “in the area bounded by Harlem and Forest and Lake and South Boulevard”: the blocks around the Harlem/Lake Green Line terminal and Oak Park’s Metra station. Each went through the Village Board: Vantage, approved 7–0 in 2012; The Emerson, on the village-owned Colt site at Lake and Westgate, whose terms the Board approved in 2013; Eleven33, approved in 2016; and Albion, approved 6–1 in 2017.
How the village describes the rezoning
The village’s project page calls the proposal “gentle, incremental changes,” notes that “There is not a lot of vacant land in Oak Park,” and says the update “will primarily support incremental development that happens over several generations.” The framework the consultants presented to the Board on July 28 is recorded in the minutes as “allowing up to six units on qualifying lots.”
And separately, the affordability framing does not hold
I am not opposed to purpose-built affordable housing. My point is narrower. The village says zoning “directly shapes who can afford to live in Oak Park,” but nothing in Shape Oak Park requires an affordable unit in an ordinary two-, three- or four-unit building, and a trustee has said as much at the Board table: zoning changes “do not guarantee affordability.” And the affordable housing Oak Park actually builds does not go through the historic districts.
The rule that does not apply
The Inclusionary Housing Ordinance starts at 25 units
It requires 10 percent of units to be affordable at 60 percent of area median income, or a $100,000-per-unit fee instead. Since adoption in 2019, many developers have chosen to pay the fee rather than build the affordable units. Two-to-six-unit buildings never touch it.
The Arcade tower: 24 luxury units, one short of the threshold, as several trustees pointed out at the appeal.
The village’s February 2026 project memo, summarizing the consultants’ stakeholder meetings, records nonprofit housing developers’ concern that missing middle housing “likely will not serve residents at 60% AMI and below,” which is the income level the Inclusionary Housing Ordinance is written for.
In their own words
“Zoning changes in and of itself do not guarantee affordability, nor maintain or retrieve some of our lost diversity, so that’s why I’ve been very loud and probably annoying about some of those things, particularly the inclusionary housing ordinance.”
Trustee Jenna Leving Jacobson, July 28, 2026, reported by the Wednesday Journal. The trustee who called my video untrue made its affordability point at the Board table. Another trustee “asked to see financial feasibility analysis before deciding whether to allow six units by right versus as a bonus tied to affordability,” so a financial feasibility analysis had not yet been put in front of the Board as of July 28, 2026, two years after the Village Manager said at the July 23, 2024 study session that “staff are going to do some deep feasibility analysis.” A financial feasibility study reached the Board on September 23, 2026; what it found is below. The village’s own Shape Oak Park page says middle housing “is not a guarantee of affordability” and “typically reaches 80% to 120% Area Median Income”; the consultants’ slides say it is “typically more attainable to households earning between 80% and 120% of AMI.”
Where affordable housing actually gets built
On the corridors, without the rezoning
6104 Roosevelt Road: The Community Builders, 28 affordable units (3 studios, 17 one-bedrooms including 2 live/work, 8 two-bedrooms) for households at 30 to 80 percent of AMI, four stories, over $19 million, with $700,000 from the village housing trust fund approved January 2025. The Plan Commission recommended it 6–1 on June 4, 2026; the dissenter wanted more units; two members of the public spoke in favor, one of them a neighbor, and no opposition is recorded.
Keystone Apartments at 1106 Madison (36 units) and Grove Apartments at 812 Madison, both by Interfaith Housing Development Corporation, and The 801 at 801 Van Buren, by The Community Builders, are the other affordable buildings the village’s January 2025 funding story lists. Every one of them moved forward without Shape Oak Park.
The village’s own feasibility study: “unlikely to result in substantial land use change in the near term”
Two years after the Village Manager told the Board that staff would do “deep feasibility analysis,” a financial feasibility study reached the Board on September 23, 2026, eight weeks after the Board sent the recommendations to the Plan Commission. It is a 43-page study by SB Friedman Development Advisors, dated September 18, commissioned in June through an amendment to the village’s contract with its Shape Oak Park consultant, Opticos Design. The Development Services Director’s cover memo says it goes to the Plan Commission with the recommendations on October 8. The study tests four kinds of project under the proposed rules, at 2026 costs and market-rate rents, and it “does not account for any historic district or other location-specific considerations.” Its conclusion: “Financial feasibility appears challenging for each type of development.” The challenges “suggest that the proposed zoning changes are unlikely to result in substantial land use change in the near term. Achieving these development types will likely require incentives or a reduction in development costs.”
For three of the four it measures a “financial gap”: “the additional funds or reduction in costs required for the project to be feasible.”
A two-, four- or six-flat on a neighborhood lot
$110K–$220K
short per building, when an older house is bought at the low end of the market and torn down to make room. At the price a typical Oak Park house sells for, the gap grows to $460,000–$570,000, and the study calls the project “unlikely.”
A coach house on the same lot, rented out
$90K
short, though the study notes an owner “might add an ADU for a variety of reasons beyond financial returns.”
Converting a house into flats
Unlikely
judged so early in the testing: complicated, costly, and not worth much more afterward. The more likely scenario, the study says, runs the other way: two-flats and three-flats turned into single-family homes.
24 apartments on a commercial corridor
$3.5M short
A denser, 35-unit version near transit does a little better on return, the study says, but comes up $5.8 million short, since it costs nearly twice as much to build.
Who could afford them
The study puts the rents within reach of households earning about 80 to 150 percent of the area median. The new duplex’s $4,200 a month takes an income of about $166,000; the sixplex’s $2,700, about $108,000. Built as condos, new units would sell for about $550,000 to $700,000, for households earning $180,000 to $225,000.
It assumes market-rate rents throughout, and it does not test the option a trustee raised on July 28: allowing six units only as a bonus tied to affordability.
Which houses it models
“Oak Park is largely built out,” the study says, so its neighborhood buildings assume “the acquisition and demolition of an existing, older single-family home purchased at the lower end of Oak Park’s single-family price range, likely in need of substantial renovation.”
That is the house this page is about: an older house in need of work, the kind that reached demolition through the hardship route at 125 S. Lombard (Part 7). The study leaves the historic districts out of its numbers and mentions them among the approval steps that add cost: “Projects in historic districts may face extra steps.”
What would change the math
Rents, for one: to close the gap on the neighborhood buildings, they would have to rise by $1,400 to $2,900 a month. Oak Park’s fees are already low, with “likely little room to reduce fees further.”
Village help, for another: “Incentives, technical support and capacity-building will be critical to jumpstart small-scale residential development,” and if the village wants “a greater variety of residential units at a range of price points,” then “a combination of financial incentives, marketing and project facilitation efforts are likely needed.” The study’s own fine print says actual results “will necessarily vary from those described in our report, and the variations may be material.”
What I take from it. By the village’s own numbers, tearing down a house to build a six-flat does not pay in 2026, even when the house is bought at the low end of the market, and the rezoning is unlikely to change much soon. That is this Part’s point about scale, made by the village’s own study. It is also the case against the rezoning: every qualifying lot rezoned, for housing the study says is unlikely to come in any quantity in the near term without incentives or lower costs, at rents for households earning about 80 to 150 percent of the area median. The rezoning would stay on the books after 2026 prices change, and when the math does start to work, the study’s own model already assumes where: an older house, bought cheap, torn down.
Part 10 · The studies the trustees cite
Yes Oak Park says it lobbies Village Hall. In its own words.
Its studies are written by its two co-founders, both of whom sat on a village commission as of September 2025. Advocacy groups publishing their own analysis is ordinary; the point is provenance, and who points residents to it.
Verbatim, from the site
“We will lobby at the local level for legislative modifications to zoning code that allow increased density.”
Our Plan page.
“…advocating for specific legislative zoning changes with Village Hall.”
About page. The About page calls the site “the sole effort of Oak Park residents Josh Vanderberg and Thomas Ptacek.” No legal form, funding, or membership count is disclosed on the site. No registered entity was found, which is not proof there is none.
A fairness note
I do not call them unregistered lobbyists. The Illinois Lobbyist Registration Act covers lobbying of village trustees but exempts people who receive no compensation other than up to $500 a year in expense reimbursement, unless they make reportable expenditures; two unpaid residents almost certainly have no registration duty.
What they publish, and who wrote it
“How Oak Park Makes Housing Affordable” (July 2026), authored by Vanderberg; no outside author, reviewer, or funder named. Inputs are public (ACS 2024 five-year, IHDA lists, the village’s 2024 housing vision); the conclusions are the group’s. Its own count: 1,751 multifamily units built since 2012.
“Do apartments hurt home values? Oak Park already ran the experiment” (shared by Trustee Wesley Aug. 19, 2026; apartments.yesoakpark.org), also by Vanderberg, built on the 2026 assessment of every property.
“Oak Park Housing Myths,” “Market Failures,” a May 2025 “Zoning Reform Survey,” the rezoning lookup tool at rezoning.yesoakpark.com, and “The shady history of zoning in Oak Park,” published at the slug “so-you-still-dont-think-zoning-is-racist.”
Vanderberg’s Journal column “Preservation isn’t progress” (Oct. 7, 2025), three weeks after the Arcade reversal: “Aided by a massive ring fence of historic preservation district boundaries, the HPC protects large portions of Oak Park from new development”; “The village board rightly ignored the advice of the HPC”; “we need to come to grips with the outsized power that the preservationist movement wields over the future of our village”; “Preservation isn’t progress, in fact, it’s the opposite. It’s appropriate in small doses, in targeted areas.” The byline calls him “a passionate urbanist and entrepreneur” and does not mention Yes Oak Park.
Ptacek’s “The HPC Isn’t Oak Park’s HOA” (Oct. 21, 2025) and “Four Myths About Preservation and Zoning” (Sept. 16, 2026). The Four Myths post calls it a myth that “the Village Board is revising the preservation ordinance” (true as to Article 9; awkward beside the July 28 amendment to the commission) and that the Board “routinely” overrules the HPC; his own count is six overrides since 2014.
The village ties
As of the commission’s September 18, 2025 minutes, both founders sat on the village’s Civic Information Systems Commission, a Village President appointment, and the same minutes list Trustee Wesley with the commission’s staff and liaisons. The CISC has nothing to do with zoning; this is an overlap of people, not authority.
Vanderberg ran for trustee in April 2025, told the Journal’s questionnaire he runs Yes Oak Park, and lost.
Trustee Eder’s July 20, 2026 blog post, the basis of his July 28 op-ed, lists under “More resources” the village’s Shape Oak Park page and, beside it, the group’s rezoning lookup tool (“What could change on your block?”); the village’s own comparison map was still being built and, the Journal reported July 29, “could go live as early as next week.” The Journal also linked the group’s tool. The group’s site describes Trustees Wesley’s and Straw’s comments approvingly from the July 23, 2024 study session.
Trustee Wesley’s trustee Facebook page has shared two of the group’s reports. July 25, 2026: “Yes Oak Park shared a great explainer on how market rate housing creates affordable housing. Give it a click! It’s worth it if you’re still wondering why something that sounds counterproductive, works so well.” August 19, 2026: “Josh Vanderberg uses Oak Park’s own data to answer the question definitively. In short - the answer is NO.” Both posts are shown below.
When trustees point residents to an advocacy group’s reports and tools, it is the trustees who are blurring the line, not the group.
Trustee Wesley’s trustee page, July 25, 2026, sharing “How Oak Park Makes Housing Affordable.” Screenshot.The same page, August 19, 2026, sharing “Do apartments hurt home values?” Screenshot.
What the group says about the historic districts, in its own words
“People should be openly hostile to large government enforced preservation districts.”
That sentence is the Yes Oak Park page itself, replying to a commenter under its Facebook post promoting the “Four Myths” essay on September 17, 2026. The reply continues: “It’s an open affront to property rights. It makes their renovations more expensive and it allows their neighbors to impose their aesthetic judgements on them. For regular old houses (nothing historic or special about them), there’s literally no reason to do this, unless your goal is to keep out multi-family housing.”
To another commenter: “Large historic districts exist to prevent new multi-family housing. Yes Oak Park supports new multi-family housing.” And: “nobody comes here to stroll through a block of contributing structures half a mile away from the FLW study.”
Why this matters for the Wright houses. Only nine of Oak Park’s individual landmarks are Wright’s. Most of his other Oak Park houses are protected as contributing structures in a historic district, the exact layer the group calls “an open affront to property rights.” The group says “We are all in on preserving historic landmarks”; the district, which is what stands between most of Wright’s Oak Park houses and a demolition permit, is the layer it tells people to be hostile to. In fairness, the same replies insist the districts “aren’t under any threat” and “will remain intact.” The record in Part 2 and Part 3 is why I do not take that on faith.
The Yes Oak Park page’s reply, September 17, 2026 (excerpt; commenters’ names blurred).
Part 11 · The critics, on the record
Each claim, set beside a document
Three board members and one homeowner attacked the video publicly. Under each quote is the record.
Crain’s, Sep 15Trustee Jenna Leving Jacobson: “The premise is false.”
What Crain’s printed, in full
“The premise is false,” Leving Jacobson said. “There are no changes to historic preservation on the table, and nothing we could potentially change in zoning will impact the protections of landmark structures” that are sacrosanct in Oak Park, the hub of Wright’s work, she said.
The record: seven weeks earlier the Board had adopted ORD 26-151 on a 6–0 consent vote, changing how many sit on the preservation commission and how many experts it must have, while leaving the text of Article 9 untouched. Both halves are true; I say both.
“Nothing we could potentially change in zoning will impact the protections of landmark structures.” True of the text, and conceded. The protection is a vote, not a wall: 7-9-14 lets the Board reverse a denial by simple majority, and it did in September 2025 against staff’s recommendation. Upzoning changes the math that gets an applicant to that vote, and the hardship factors weigh the drop in a property’s value “as a result of the denial.”
“It’s not true” that zoning changes could lead to the worst outcome. A promise about future boards she cannot deliver. The structural facts (one appointing authority, term limits removing the senior members by 2029, a lowered expert bar, the Board as appeals court, and, for any house without an easement, nothing the Board cannot undo) are what decide it.
“Saying things that are untrue is an effective political strategy” and “nobody believes his fear-mongering.” The same week, the village’s own September 14 meeting overflowed its room. Warning that a protected house can come down is not fear-mongering here; it is reading the village’s own file. 125 S. Lombard, a contributing house in the Ridgeland–Oak Park Historic District, went from neglect to a hardship certificate to demolition, and the lot is listed as vacant land today (Part 7). A year before this video, the Board overruled a unanimous commission and its own staff to let a ten-story addition go up behind a landmark (Part 6). And it has already happened to a Wright house on these streets: the Heurtley was cut into a duplex and left to deteriorate until new owners bought it in 1997 and restored it. A prediction can be checked; every document behind this one is on this page. Turnout is not belief, so I will not overclaim; “nobody” is a word the record does not support.
Quotes from Crain’s Chicago Business, Sept. 15, 2026.
Facebook, SepTrustee Cory Wesley: “This is false. It’s ridiculous on its face. It’s misinformation designed to create fear in the community and weaponize it against zoning reform.”
His own words, one year earlier. September 16, 2025, the night the Board overrode the preservation commission, from the village’s transcript, with the bracketed word as the recording has it: “My decision may be different if this was inside of a historic district and I think that our historic district[s] are way too big and we are not that historic and we are not that special. And our landmarks are great, but we have an entire historic district dedicated to stucco… And what makes Oak Park great is not the buildings, but the people and we need places for them to live.” That is one trustee’s view; the districts can be redrawn by ordinance, by simple majority (Part 2, route 5).
He compared the video to “They’re eating the cats and dogs” and said its maker “should be ashamed,” then posted eight numbered points. Against the record:
The ordinance “has accounted for demolition by neglect and addresses it” in 7-9-16, and hardship requires that the owner be “not responsible in any way.” The section is one permissive sentence with no standard or penalty, and at 125 S. Lombard the minutes record no neglect petition. As for “not responsible”: the commission granted that house a hardship certificate 7–1 after a commissioner quoted the rule that a buyer who purchases without first getting commission approval “is responsible for their own hardship.”
“The Village Board already has the final say on any appeal of the HPC’s decisions.” Agreed. That is the vulnerability: September 2025, 6–1, against commission and staff.
“Zoning change doesn’t impact historic preservation ordinances.” True of the text; but the hardship factors weigh the drop in a property’s value “as a result of the denial,” and upzoning enlarges that drop on qualifying lots where a teardown would pay, starting, by the numbers in the village’s own feasibility study, with older, cheaper houses (Part 9).
Whitemarsh Hall. His own chronology puts the 1977 rezoning before the 1980 demolition.
Rose Terrace. He called it “basically a carbon copy of Whitemarsh” and wrote that neither estate was “demo’d to make way for apartments.” That was never my point, and I told him so. Rose Terrace was designated a Michigan State Historic Site on June 19, 1971 and listed on the National Register the same year; it was demolished anyway in 1976 and removed from the Register on November 30, 1977. I never said it was replaced by apartments. I said designation did not stop the bulldozer.
“I would use every tool available… including acquisition.” I will hold him to it. The precedent is already on the books: $1 million in the FY2025 budget toward preserving the Percy Julian home at 515 N. East (how it would be used was not yet decided), a change he said “creates, if not a real barrier, at least a mental barrier to undo this.”
A modern house on one of these lots “could easily double the asking price,” but only after “a decade or more of paying roughly $50k/yr in property taxes which would completely kill the profit margin.” He conceded the incentive, and his math assumes the replacement is one house, under the zoning he wants to replace; Shape Oak Park exists to make the replacement several units. His hypothetical replacement is “unencumbered by preservation rules,” which assumes the demolition is approved.
The video says the homes “will be demolished soon to make way for affordable apartments. And no, this isn’t clickbait.” It does, in its first line, which is a hook (Part 1). At 1:40 the same video says “nobody at Village Hall is standing up and saying let’s tear down a Wright house,” and makes the argument this page documents.
Screenshots of the full thread, with my replies, are posted with the other documents.
Campaign page, SepTrustee Brian Straw: “Let me state this clearly: this is a blatant lie.”
“Oak Park is not doing away with the historic preservation code which prevents the demolition of both these landmarks, but also contributing structures nearby.”
The record, as the official minutes summarize him, July 23, 2024: at a Board study session on single-family zoning, the official minutes record that Straw “said he thinks we need to talk about parking minimums and include questions around historic preservation in this discussion and how much of Oak Park we are protecting in the historic districts.” The size of the districts was put on the table by him, two years ago, as part of this discussion.
The record on the code: the code does not prevent; it requires a certificate that the commission, the Board on appeal, or a hardship finding can grant, and each has happened in Oak Park within three years. “I would support pursuing every legal avenue” is one of seven votes, and neither his seat nor the current commission’s makeup is guaranteed in 2029. His term expires in April 2027; the Journal reported on September 10 that he is running again, quoting him: “This topic of housing affordability and how we can sort of preserve the historic character of Oak Park … for a long time, it was difficult to get people to engage and come out and attend.”
Journal, Sep 15Carollina Song, homeowner and village commissioner: “misleading, misinformation, propaganda.”
Her house was one of the homes shown in the video’s opening. She is also a sitting member of a village body: the roster for Oak Park’s Citizen Involvement Commission lists her as a commissioner, in a second term running to September 2028. She told the Journal she is “maniacally in love” with it and, in the Journal’s words, has absolutely no plans to sell to a developer, and that she supports the rezoning: “I think that the racist underpinnings of the single-family zoning is enough.”
On Facebook that week she shared the Crain’s article in at least two Oak Park groups, with the same message: “I spent yesterday reassuring reporters that no, my house is NOT about to be demolished. That video is propagandistic misinformation which I reported to YouTube.” Under one of the posts she added: “And given that the whole video is propagandistic misinformation, what does it say about the quality of their arguments against Shape Oak Park?” In the same thread, one commenter wrote “I reported it as well,” and another, “I will report as well.” In a thread on her own page she wrote: “At this point, I will talk to anybody (at great length 😬) about why I support the rezoning initiative.” The video is still up.
Words the video does not contain. In a Facebook group thread on September 24 she went further, calling the video “propagandistic misinformation from start (‘imminent demolition’) to finish (‘demolition by neglect’),” and adding that she had reported it to YouTube. She put both phrases in quotation marks and attributed them to the video, one to its start and one to its finish. The video says neither. The word “imminent” appears nowhere in it; its opening line says “will be demolished soon,” a hook written as hyperbole (Part 1), and at 1:40 the same video says “nobody at Village Hall is standing up and saying let’s tear down a Wright house.” The phrase “demolition by neglect” is not in it either. It does not end on that subject: its closing asks viewers to write to the Village President and trustees and to show up at the Plan Commission hearing before the vote. What the video argues is that rezoning changes what a house is worth to a developer: “Rezone it, and every single-family lot in Oak Park becomes a potential apartment building, and the value of your house to that developer is no longer the house at all. It is the dirt underneath it.”
Carollina Song’s comment in a Facebook group thread, September 24, 2026 (the name of the commenter she was answering is blurred).
Both of her phrases could have come without watching past the opening: “imminent demolition” from the first few seconds alone, “demolition by neglect” from arguments made later in comment threads. I can’t know how much of the video she has watched, but I don’t think anyone who watched it to the end would describe it this way.
“Mansplaining.” The commenter she was answering had argued, as a third commenter summed it up, that “this zoning change would allow people to demolish derelict buildings.” She told him: “that is absolutely incorrect. But hey, don’t just take my word for it (because why should the mansplaining stop now?).” And later: “it’s just that you are literally the 3rd or 4th random guy on the internet to earnestly assure me that you know more about…checks notes…MY OWN HOUSE than I do.” The argument is not about her house. It is about what the rules allow for every protected house in Oak Park (Part 2).
The email she quoted, checked against the code. In the same reply she quoted an email from a village preservation staffer: “demolition by neglect is illegal regardless of zoning. In the historic preservation ordinances (7-9-16, 7-9-19) Demolition by neglect is a punishable offense and still illegal regardless of zoning as historic preservation has its own ordinances.” As quoted, that is not what those two sections say. Section 7-9-16 is titled “Prevention of Demolition by Neglect,” but its whole text is one sentence saying the commission “may file a petition” asking the village’s Development Customer Services Department to require repairs; it prohibits nothing and sets no penalty (Part 2). Section 7-9-19 makes it unlawful to alter, move or demolish a landmark or a building in a historic district “without complying with the provisions of this Article,” with fines of up to $500 a day for violating the article; nothing in the article requires an owner to keep a building in repair, and 7-9-19 does not mention neglect. What is true is that tearing down a protected building without the required approval is punishable, whatever the zoning, and that a hardship certificate requires the commission to find the owner “not responsible in any way for the hardship.” But a neglected house can still come down legally, with a hardship certificate or as an immediate hazard (7-9-13, 7-9-17). The house at 125 S. Lombard came down through the hardship route, and the minutes record no neglect petition (Part 7). Neglect of any building, protected or not, can be cited under the village’s separate Property Maintenance Code, with fines of $20 to $750 a day.
Her own words, one year earlier. On September 16, 2025, the night the Board overrode the preservation commission on the Arcade, she spoke during public comment, and the village’s own transcript records what she said. She opened with her credentials: she lives in a Frank Lloyd Wright house, and she and her husband “were privileged to win the historic preservation award” for putting a “historically appropriate clay tile roof” on it, adding: “We have thought deeply and devoted a lot of time and money to historic preservation.” That checks out. The village’s 2023 awards, announced in January 2024, list Alexander Harris and Carollina Song, for “removal of asphalt and restoration of the original clay tile roof with historic copper detailing on the gable ends.” She has done more for a Wright house than most people ever will. Then, in the order she said them, here are the passages in that comment where she argued against preservation as Oak Park practices it:
“However, I do not believe that historic preservation should be used as a [cudgel] to throttle all change.” The transcript has “cultural.”
“Frank Lloyd Wright’s work was a substantial departure from the Victorian architecture of the time and if our Historic Preservation Commission existed back then I wonder if Wright himself would be able to get his plans approved.”
“I ask that you grant a certificate of appropriateness for the proposed 10 story addition for the Boulevard Arcade Building which would not be visible from the front of the streets.” That is a request to overturn the commission’s 7–0 denial against the village staff’s written recommendation, which the Board did later that night (Part 6).
“Houses and communities are living things. Needs evolve over time and sometimes buildings become obsolete.”
“I also believe that this case and the case a few years back [where] the owners of the house severely damaged by fire [had] to bring an appeal of a HPC denial to the Village Trustee[s] point [to] the need to recalibrate.” Brackets mark words the transcript garbled.
“I myself sit on a village commission and I am certain that the Historic Preservation Commission has acted in good faith. However, I do not think this is a good outcome.” The commission is Oak Park’s Citizen Involvement Commission; the village’s roster lists her as a commissioner there, in a second term.
“I asked Village Trustees to revisit the guidelines for the HPC, the boundaries of our current historic districts and our current zoning restrictions.”
“There is a lot of data showing that throttling development of housing whether entry-level or luxury only serves to make housing more scarce and more expensive… And the onerous processes that we have make it harder to get any housing built and diminish the economic viability of our village.”
Watch it: her request that the trustees “revisit the guidelines for the HPC, the boundaries of our current historic districts and our current zoning restrictions,” from the village’s own recording of the September 16, 2025 meeting, at 4 minutes, 45 seconds.
Her husband, Alec Harris, spoke on the Arcade item itself later that night, saying his company is the largest tenant of the building’s office space: “you heard my wife earlier”; his team was “very unconcerned about the impact on the existing Arcade and the ability to maintain its historic nature”; and “we need more housing in Oak Park.”
Her words on September 24, beside her request a year earlier. She wrote: “as someone deeply committed to historic preservation, I really dislike the way that people in this community have allowed the concept of historic preservation to be misappropriated by NIMBYs as a political tactic in an attempt to derail this discussion. The proposed zoning change will not touch the Historical Preservation Commission, the boundaries of Oak Park’s historic districts, or the commitment to historic preservation.” And of her own house: “THE VILLAGE OF OAK PARK WOULD NEVER IN A THOUSAND YEARS PERMIT SUCH A THING.” She is right that the rezoning’s text does not redraw the districts. But the person who stood at the podium a year earlier and asked the trustees to “revisit the guidelines for the HPC, the boundaries of our current historic districts and our current zoning restrictions” was her, and the same night she asked them to grant the Arcade certificate, they did, overruling their own preservation commission 6–1 (Part 6).
Worth a note: Hers is one of many, many houses in the video. As far as I know, she is the only owner of one of them who has spoken out against it, to reporters or on social media, and some owners of historic houses in Oak Park have reached out to me to say they liked the video. Public pushback has mostly come from three trustees who back the rezoning (above), from lobbyists that support Shape Oak Park (Part 10), and from Song, who has been very public about her support for Shape Oak Park and who, speaking at a Board meeting in September 2025, asked the trustees to revisit the HPC guidelines.
Why this belongs here. Overruling the commission on appeal is route 2 in Part 2; redrawing the district boundaries and rewriting the rules the commission applies are route 5. The homeowner the Journal chose to quote calling the video propaganda, herself a sitting village commissioner, had asked the Board, on the record and a year earlier, to overrule the commission and to revisit both the district boundaries and the guidelines the commission applies. She is entitled to that view, and she was open about it at the podium; a reader of the Journal’s article would not know she held it. None of it questions what she said about her own house, and she is not a trustee or a lobbying group. I take her at her word that she has no plans to sell it to a developer, and nothing on this page says it is slated for demolition.
One suggestion for the critics
Carollina Song says her Wright house is not about to be demolished, and the three trustees quoted here call the video false. If they are sure Oak Park’s Frank Lloyd Wright houses will not be demolished, there is a simple way to settle it: leave those lots, and the historic districts, out of the rezoning. Each of the six Wright lots below would move to a district that permits four units by right and six as a special use. Permission for more units does nothing to keep a house standing; what it changes is what the land under the house is worth (Part 9).
Check your own address
Before you weigh their claims or mine, look up your own property. The village’s Shape Oak Park lookup tool lets you enter any Oak Park address or property number and see its current and proposed zoning side by side. Open the village’s address lookup ↗
Frank Lloyd Wright, address by address
Six Wright houses, run through the village’s lookup
I entered six of Oak Park’s Frank Lloyd Wright houses in the village’s lookup. Listing a house here is about its zoning, not about any plan to demolish it. Below is what it returns for each, with a link to the village’s page for that address and a screenshot of the result. Every Wright house in Oak Park that is zoned single-family today would be subject to the same changes. The village’s own Shape Oak Park slides say the only home allowed in R-1, R-2, R-3-35, R-3-50 and R-4 is “a Single-Family Detached House + ADU,” and the proposed use table moves every one of those districts into N-1 or N-2, where the unit rules below apply.
Units allowed
Up to six. The village’s proposed use table allows single-unit and two-unit homes, triplexes and fourplexes in N-1 and N-2 as permitted uses (P), and fiveplexes and sixplexes as special uses (S). The lookup’s text for these six lots adds the details: four units per lot “as permitted uses,” with any ADU counted toward the four, and six “as a Special Use” through two bonuses it lists as “under consideration,” each on lots of 5,000 square feet or more: one within a quarter mile’s walk of a major transit stop, the other when at least two of the units are affordable.
The village’s proposed use table, from the Shape Oak Park lookup. P: permitted. S: special use. All six houses below move into N-1 or N-2.
Every result also carries the village’s own line: “The proposed changes to the zoning standards will have no impact on historic designations and regulations.” That is true of the text, and I do not dispute it. What the text protects is a process, and Part 2 shows how a designated house can still legally come down. The tool also notes that the proposals remain “subject to modification through the Plan Commission public hearing process and the Village Board’s review and consideration.”
Property numbers (PINs) are as the lookup gives them.
Part 12 · The board
Who they are, and what the record shows
The commission cut passed 6–0 with one member by phone; the advisory referendum failed 5–1; the Arcade reversal passed 6–1.
VS
Vicki Scaman
Village President since 2021; re-elected April 2025; term to April 2029. Village Clerk 2017–2021.
Appointed every seated commissioner and the current chair.
On the record
2025 endorsements
Documented Oak Park Area Association of Realtors, alongside IAFF Local 95 and the Sierra Club; individual endorsers include two Realtors and the sitting chairs of the Plan Commission, Zoning Board of Appeals and Building Codes Advisory Commission.
JLJ
Jenna Leving Jacobson
Trustee, elected April 2025; term to April 2029.
Crain’s: “The premise is false,” “nobody believes his fear-mongering.” July 28: “Zoning changes in and of itself do not guarantee affordability.”
On the record
Organizations
Documented Lead of the Oak Park–Austin Area Moms Demand Action group.
CW
Cory Wesley
Trustee, appointed October 2022, elected April 2023; term to April 2027. Ran and lost in 2019 by 52 votes.
On the Facebook post: “This is false… misinformation… should be ashamed.”
September 16, 2025, on the village’s recording of the meeting, at 1 hour, 57 minutes, 40 seconds: “our historic districts are way too big and we are not that historic and we are not that special.” July 23, 2024, per the minutes: “he would love to see an Option 5 to throw all zoning away.” May 20, 2025: “Ultimately this is me refusing to vote for a zoning map that is racist.” The September 2025 minutes of the Civic Information Systems Commission, on which both Yes Oak Park founders sat, list him with the commission’s staff and liaisons. His trustee Facebook page shared two Yes Oak Park reports, on July 25 and August 19, 2026 (“Give it a click!”). On the Percy Julian funding, a change that “creates, if not a real barrier, at least a mental barrier to undo this.”
On the record
Development-adjacent role
Documented Chaired the Oak Park Economic Development Corporation board, then funded by the village, whose About page lists its mission as including “Expanding the property tax base” and which says it has “assisted developers, property owners, and businesses in the purchase, sale, leasing, development and rehabilitation of commercial property.”
DE
Derek Eder
Trustee, appointed by Scaman June 17, 2025 to fill Susan Buchanan’s seat, approved unanimously; term to April 2027; running in 2027.
On the historic-district study he co-sponsored in March 2026: he is “not against historic districts or historic preservation,” but “just like any policy tool, they can be dialed too much in one direction or another.” On the Arcade appeal: “Housing is something we definitely need in this village.”
His July 20, 2026 blog post lists Yes Oak Park’s rezoning lookup tool alongside the village’s Shape Oak Park page; the village’s own comparison map was still being built. With Trustee Enyia, brought the motion for a village-sponsored panel on the history of zoning; no date had been set as of Sept. 3, 2026.
On the record
His firm’s clients in housing finance and land
Documented DataMade, the data consultancy he co-founded and still runs as a partner while serving, lists among its clients the Community Investment Corporation (a lender for affordable rental housing; “Lending Impact Map,” Sept. 2025); the Preservation Compact and DePaul’s Institute for Housing Studies (a tool on preserving affordable rentals, Nov. 2024); City of Chicago’s Chi Block Builder (buying city-owned vacant lots); LISC Chicago; Metropolitan Planning Council; and Second City Zoning, an interactive Chicago zoning map. His Budget Oak Park site is listed on the same page.
Village roles
Documented Building Codes Advisory Commission, May 2024–June 2025; Oak Park Climate Action Network member.
BS
Brian Straw
Trustee, elected April 2023; term to April 2027; running for re-election, the Journal reported Sept. 10, 2026.
Campaign page calls the video “a blatant lie.”
On the record
Village roles
Documented Member of the village’s Transportation Commission before his 2023 election; former board member, Northern Illinois Justice for Our Neighbors.
JT
James Taglia
Trustee: appointed March 2017, elected 2019, lost 2023, elected April 2025; term to April 2029. An opposing voice on the rezoning, in the Journal’s words.
The Journal: “has remained an opposing voice on the board, pushing for a referendum in the previous weeks and continuing to advocate for ‘voters to have a voice.’”
On his own vote at the meeting that sent the rezoning to the Plan Commission, in the Journal’s account: “My yes vote tonight should not be interpreted as an endorsement of the proposal itself, nor does it change my belief that a decision of this magnitude deserves an advisory referendum.”
On the record
Positions
Documented Says he “proudly supported Oak Park’s historic Inclusionary Zoning Ordinance in 2019”; said in 2019 that the Board had opposed a proposed 28-story tower at 835 Lake as out of scale. Previously the Treasurer of the Historical Society of Oak Park and River Forest.
CE
Chibuike Enyia
Trustee, elected 2021 and April 2025; term to April 2029.
At the Arcade appeal, pointed out that the tower was one unit short of the affordable-housing threshold: “It seems like developers come underneath that all the time.”
Has proposed raising the affordable set-aside from 10 percent to 20–25 percent with higher penalties for developers who avoid it.
On the record
Village roles
Documented Board liaison to the Citizen Police Oversight Committee and the Community Relations Commission, as of March 2025.
The documented ties, in one place
Wesley chaired the Oak Park Economic Development Corporation, then funded by the village, which says it has assisted developers and property owners,. Eder’s firm counts affordable-housing lenders, housing-policy researchers and the City of Chicago’s vacant-lot sales program among its clients. Scaman’s 2025 campaign was endorsed by the Oak Park Area Association of Realtors. Each is a public record; none is an accusation.
Part 13 · I checked my own script too
The video’s claims, checked against the record
A page that promises a source at every factual claim has to audit its own author. Here are the video’s factual claims, each checked against the documents in this file.
What the video says
Status
Source, or what I would fix
“This Frank Lloyd Wright house will be demolished soon to make way for affordable apartments. And no, this isn’t clickbait.”
Hyperbole
The opening hook. At 1:40 the same video says no one at Village Hall is proposing a demolition, and the rest of it explains why the risk is real. My own view, offered as opinion: under the proposed zoning changes, the loss of a Wright house becomes a real possibility. Quoted in full in Part 1.
“It affects more than a dozen of them.”
Supported
Nine of the village’s individual landmarks are Wright’s, and most of his other Oak Park houses stand as contributing buildings in the historic districts.
“By right… It means no public hearing, no vote of the trustees, no chance for the neighbors to weigh in.”
Supported, clarified
True of each by-right project once the rezoning is adopted: a by-right permit gets no hearing and no trustee vote. Whether six units would be allowed by right or only as an affordability bonus is still undecided. The rezoning itself still needs a Board vote after the Plan Commission’s hearing, and inside a district, demolition still needs a certificate and new construction gets advisory review.
“The proposal contains no affordability requirement. Not one unit.”
Supported
The consultants’ framework has none; the Inclusionary Housing Ordinance starts at 25 units; Trustee Jenna Leving Jacobson and Trustee Derek Eder on July 28.
“A lot that size could hold six units.”
Supported as “up to six units on qualifying lots”
July 28 minutes: “up to six units on qualifying lots.” Which lots qualify has not been published yet.
“Only about a third of Oak Park sits inside a historic district.”
Supported
See the village’s own map of the three historic districts in Part 2. The Wednesday Journal has reported that the homes in the historic districts “make up roughly one third of village housing stock.”
“New construction inside a historic district gets only advisory review.”
Supported
7-9-8(B), 7-9-15; the village’s own Shape Oak Park FAQ. In February 2024 the commission’s chair reminded the owners of a fire-damaged house that plans for its replacement would be reviewed “on an advisory basis.”
“Certificate of economic hardship… which it has already done several times.”
Supported
430 S. Taylor, a fire-damaged contributing house in the Ridgeland–Oak Park district, granted unanimously on Feb. 8, 2024; and 125 S. Lombard, granted 7–1 on March 14, 2024.
“The Village Board has the final say and can overrule the preservationists whenever it chooses.”
Supported
7-9-14: on an applicant’s appeal, by simple majority, reviewing the record. It did so on Sept. 16, 2025, against staff’s recommendation.
Village FAQ: “significant opportunities along the key corridors and in underused parking areas.”
Supported
The FAQ’s own words, typos included: “there is significant opportunities along several key corridors, in undertulized parking areas, and as commercial or residential buildings age or get replaced over time.” The same sentence expects residential buildings to be replaced over time.
Consultants: “not a guarantee of affordability,” aimed at 80 to 120 percent of AMI; recommended studying an affordability requirement; “that study hasn’t happened.”
Mostly supported
“Not a guarantee of affordability” and “typically reaches 80% to 120% Area Median Income” are on the village’s own Shape Oak Park page; the consultants’ slides say middle housing is “typically more attainable to households earning between 80% and 120% of AMI.” The request to study it is on record from a trustee rather than the consultants: on July 28, 2026 he asked to see a financial feasibility analysis before deciding whether six units should be allowed by right or only as a bonus tied to affordability, so as of that date it had not been done. A financial feasibility study reached the Board on September 23, 2026; it assumes market-rate rents throughout and does not test six units as a bonus tied to affordability (Part 9).
4.7 square miles; roughly 11,600 people per square mile.
Supported
54,583 (2020 Census) ÷ 4.70 square miles = about 11,613 per square mile.
Population above 61,000 from 1930 to 1970, peak above 66,000 in 1940, about 54,000 today.
“Trustees voted five to one in July against letting residents decide this in a referendum.”
Supported
July 21, 2026: 5–1 against an advisory referendum.
“The Commission takes them up in October, and after that they come back to the trustees.”
Supported
Plan Commission hearings start Oct. 8; the Journal reports the Board could have a final vote by the end of October.
NOTE: the first line says the houses would come down “to make way for affordable apartments,” while the body argues the new apartments would be luxury, because the plan requires no affordable units. Both describe the same plan: affordability is what it promises, and nothing in it requires. The full transcript is with the other documents.
Appendix
Methods
Every factual claim on this page carries a numbered source. Village documents are linked to their original location on oak-park.us, Legistar, or the village code, and, where available, to a copy hosted here so the link survives if the original moves. Newspaper articles are linked to the publication’s own page; those are not copied here. Nothing on this page comes from memory.
Where it came from: the research behind the video I published on September 11, 2026; the documents, links and tips people sent me after it went up; and the weeks of digging since. Historic preservation is not only my work. It is what I care about, and it is why this page exists.
Sources
Every document, numbered in the order it first appears
“Original” opens the source where it lives; “our copy” opens the file hosted here. Legistar’s data feeds open as plain text.
