How far do a community’s legitimate interests extend when it comes to private property? Most people who live in urban areas accept the concept of zoning; but how far should that concept be taken? An ordinance has been proposed in Oak Park that would grant the Historic Preservation Commission of Oak Park the right to “binding review” over all exterior changes visible from the street in buildings in its two historic districts. That ordinance has caused a dustup over individual rights in a town not noted for its adherence to libertarian principles.
“It’s a question of individuals’ rights versus community responsibility,” says Meg Klinkow, until recently the chairman of the Historic Preservation Commission and herself the owner of a Frank Lloyd Wright house in the Wright district. “Individuals tend to be quite selfish. They just want the benefits of living in the historic district–like the tax-assessment freeze.” Home owners can make improvements to their homes and don’t have to pay higher property taxes for eight years; after that, the taxes are gradually raised over the next four years. “But they don’t want the responsibilities. It’s so sad that this has become an issue, when all it’s really intended to do is save neighborhoods.”
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Klinkow declines to discuss specific cases, but she’s clearly not keen on things like vinyl siding, rooftop windows, or anything else that jars with the house’s original architectural style. “When vinyl siding is put on, most of the ornamental work is removed. Things can decay underneath. And we want things to go with the styles of the houses around them. Tourism is an important economic fact in Oak Park, and if you build an anachronism, it jolts the neighborhood. Students of architecture don’t just study Frank Lloyd Wright; they study the context in which he built.”
Klinkow, who’s been on the Historic Preservation Commission for five years and was its chairman for the last two, says she’s surprised by the public uproar. In the first place, scores of cities–including Charleston, South Carolina; Savannah, Georgia; New Orleans; and 37 places in Illinois–have ordinances like this. Second, this is Oak Park, home of a handgun ban and of laws stating exactly how many house cats one can legally own. “This community is so regulated,” she says. “You can’t leave your garage door open, you can’t use sparklers, you can’t have a ‘for sale’ sign in front of your house. This is the kind of ordinance that’s supposed to keep bad things from happening. It’s a very modest proposal.”
“This idea that one’s home is the government’s resource makes me feel that I’m living in Peking–it’s so overwhelmingly control-heavy. I don’t know anyone around here, besides my neighbor, who supports this. We have a lot of attorneys in the neighborhood, and their response has been, ‘Good, I can’t wait to take it to court.’ I think that’s a given. And the taxpayers will pay the legal costs.”
The bearded, intense McSheehy unrolls a poster-sized map of Oak Park’s zoning areas and begins pointing out blocks that are currently mostly single-family houses but are zoned for multifamily use. He raises the specter of demolition and town-house development run rampant. (McSheehy, who’s a broker with Oak Park’s Historic Homes Realty, which does a considerable amount of town-house marketing, emphasizes that he is not opposed to new town houses per se, but only to the indiscriminate ripping down of existing housing to erect them.)
In what is called the “clearinghouse process,” copies of the proposed ordinance have been submitted to a variety of community groups and concerned individuals, and their comments solicited. “The crux of the ordinance, and the crux of people’s comments about this ordinance, is in the binding review,” says Zinke. He sent me a thick packet of comments from interested parties; two of the more telling remarks were “I find the ordinance cavalier and condescending” and “The law rests on a fundamentally paternalistic rationale: that a committee of nine unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats has superior judgement to the homeowner about the aesthetics and ‘correct’ appearance of his or her home, even though the homeowner owns the home, lives in it, and has invested his or her life savings in it.” There are quotes from Louis Brandeis and Brendan Gill. Five respondents fully supported the ordinance; nine fully opposed it; and fifteen were somewhere in between.
