Zoning, Permits, and Politics: Why Illinois Housing Costs Keep Rising With Joshua Bandoch – RFP 73 Transcript
Gordon Lamphere (00:05): Hi, I’m Gordon Lamphere, and welcome to The Real Finds Podcast, where we have real conversations with key entrepreneurs, activists, and researchers shaping the real estate industry and, as a result, our world. On today’s podcast, we’ll be speaking with Joshua Bandoch. Joshua is head of policy at the Illinois Policy Institute. He joins me for an in-depth conversation about the housing crisis in Illinois and the broader Midwest. We break down the lay of the land: where the state has succeeded, where it has stumbled, and how our neighbors are setting an example worth studying. We also dig into the ways politicians have tried, and often failed, to create lasting housing solutions. Most importantly, Joshua explains why the conversation about housing abundance doesn’t belong to one political side. It’s an issue with bipartisan urgency, and the real innovations are happening in towns and cities across America. If you’re interested in real steps to solve Illinois’s and America’s housing crisis, today’s podcast is well worth a listen. Josh, thank you so much for hopping on the podcast today.
Joshua Bandoch (01:29): It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much.
Why Housing Matters
Gordon Lamphere (01:32): What got you into the world of real estate and real estate policy?
Joshua Bandoch (01:37): Housing. Housing is one of the most important things every family and every community faces. From a purely financial standpoint, it’s the biggest line item in every family’s budget, and we know a lot of families are struggling with housing costs right now. It’s something that can make a community, a city, or a state either really attractive or unattractive. It’s where your kids live and where they go to school. It’s one of the most important things every individual deals with.
The North Star: Housing Abundance
Gordon Lamphere (02:13): So how do we make housing more affordable, or more accessible?
Joshua Bandoch (02:21): Our North Star for housing policy at the Illinois Policy Institute is housing abundance, meaning more housing of all shapes and sizes to meet diverse needs. Some people might need a huge home, and some might need a tiny home, and we want more housing to fit those needs. A lot of good research shows that the best way to make housing more affordable is to increase supply. Everywhere that’s been tried, it’s worked, and everywhere you see low supply, prices typically go up. That’s Econ 101, and all the research supports it. So the big picture is: build more and have more housing options. I’m happy to talk about lots of ways we can do that.
Illinois’s Permitting Problem
Gordon Lamphere (03:12): How do you build more housing? Whether you look at CNBC or the Wall Street Journal, or you’re just someone on the ground like me, it’s increasingly difficult to build housing in a lot of states. How do we tackle the challenge of creating housing abundance?
Joshua Bandoch (03:32): Totally. It’s good to acknowledge up front that there’s only so much policy can do. In the policy world, we don’t control interest rates, and neither do politicians, and interest rates are one cost of housing. My wife and I bought a home in 2021 with an interest rate under 3 percent. Right now we’d get about 6.5 percent. Things like that are outside the policy process.
So what can policy do, and what are some of the biggest barriers to building more housing, particularly in Illinois? I think one of the biggest pain points is the permitting process. Every year, the Census Bureau publishes the number of new privately owned housing units authorized per 100,000 people. The national average is 435 units per 100,000 people. North Carolina authorizes 862, about double the national average. Florida and Texas are in the 700s. Illinois is at 160, about one-third of the national average and about five times less than North Carolina. What does that mean? It means it’s way too hard, and takes way too long, to get new housing authorized in Illinois.
Developers know this. They just want it to be easier to build. One challenging reality is that many of them say, “It’s really tough to build in Illinois. We can invest our money in North Carolina, Texas, or Florida instead.” So one of the biggest things we’d recommend is making the permitting process easier and more streamlined. That means online permitting that can move a lot faster. In Chicago, it’s extremely slow to get things permitted. That’s one of the big-picture issues. I’m happy to talk about others, but I’ll pause there for a minute.
Overregulation and Building Codes
Gordon Lamphere (05:39): Why do you think that is? Why has it become increasingly difficult to build housing in Illinois over the years? It seems to me there might be structural reasons, or major players involved. What are you seeing?
Joshua Bandoch (06:00): Unfortunately, I think Illinois, and Chicago in particular, are overregulated. The impulse behind regulation is understandable. We want safety regulations in place. We want to make sure things are done properly and that communities maintain their character, so we don’t want too much building in some neighborhoods. But the result, unfortunately, is that Illinois as a whole is vastly overregulated. There’s a think tank that measures the number of regulations in each state’s legal code, and Illinois has more than double the national average. It’s one of the five most regulated states. Idaho is the least regulated, and Illinois is about eight or nine times more regulated than Idaho, and Idaho hasn’t fallen apart.
So there’s an impulse to regulate in an effort to make things better, which makes it really hard to do things in every area, including housing. Here’s an example: in Chicago, the building code is actually stricter in many cases than international standards, so developers have to do more in Chicago than in almost any other city. And we don’t hear about buildings collapsing in Paris or London. We don’t need extraordinarily rigorous standards to maintain safety.
What Other States and Cities Are Doing
Gordon Lamphere (07:33): When we talk about these standards, which states apply lighter standards? What do they look like, and are they effective at creating housing abundance?
Joshua Bandoch (07:49): The three states I mentioned earlier, North Carolina, Florida, and Texas, are good examples. And for comparison, it isn’t just the Sun Belt. New York City, the city, not the state, authorizes about twice as many units as Chicago, and LA authorizes about three times as many. What’s happened in LA, and in California as a whole, is that they recognized they have a housing affordability crisis and that low supply is a primary driver. California has actually taken some good strides to make it easier to build, to good effect. We don’t read stories about homes collapsing in LA or New York, to say nothing of Florida and Texas. Their standards are still rigorous, but Chicago’s in particular are tighter than necessary for safety.
Gordon Lamphere (08:52): So in your opinion, it’s particularly an Illinois problem, not a Southeast problem or a red-state, blue-state problem? Are there blue states besides New York and California doing this well? I hear in development circles, from people across the political spectrum, that Illinois is particularly difficult to get things done in, and these are developers who work in New York, California, and all over. Is that what you’re seeing?
Joshua Bandoch (09:23): It is, and we’ll get to this later: there are some reasons to be optimistic, and I’m happy to flag those, because I don’t want to be all doom and gloom. The first step is admitting you have a problem, and I think Illinois is getting there. I’ll plant that seed now. But yes, broadly speaking, Illinois is just harder. What has made it easier in California, at least easier than five or ten years ago, is the recognition, and a bipartisan consensus, that it’s a big problem.
Are there other blue states, or blue cities, doing well? One really good example is Minneapolis. In 2018 or 2019, they instituted a number of reforms to make it easier to build. We’ve done research on this, and rents in Minneapolis have been rising much less sharply than in Chicago, while housing supply has been increasing more. That’s only about seven or eight hours up the road, another cold city. We all think Chicago is cold, but Minneapolis is colder. It’s a good example of a city that said, “We have a problem, and the way to address it is to make it easier to build and expand.”
Breaking Down the Barriers: Parking Minimums and ADUs
Gordon Lamphere (10:44): What barriers can we knock down? If you were the alderman, the mayor, or Governor Pritzker, what barriers would you break down to create housing abundance?
Joshua Bandoch (10:58): The biggest barrier is recognizing that we have a problem. The happy reality is that Governor Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson are realizing it. Mayors of other Illinois cities I’ve talked to also recognize that we have a unique problem, and that it’s worse here than elsewhere. About a year and a half ago, Mayor Johnson issued a report called Cut the Tape, recognizing that the enormous number of regulations in Chicago is a problem. Last fall, Governor Pritzker released a report about the missing middle, discussing how middle-income families in particular are feeling the pinch. So the biggest barrier is starting to break down. There’s bipartisan recognition of the cause, low supply, driven by lots of regulation, and of the solution, more housing. That’s the biggest barrier, because if you don’t recognize there’s a problem, there’s really no conversation to be had.
As for specific recommendations where we see some appetite: happily, one reform Minneapolis adopted, which we’ve been pushing for a while, was approved by the Chicago City Council two months ago, in July. It reduces parking minimums near public transit. I think it applies within 0.75 miles of public transit, though I’d have to double-check the ordinance, and there are no parking minimums for large developments there. That makes sense. I live about a five-minute walk from a Red Line stop, which makes things easy. I don’t need a car. People in my neighborhood may not have cars, because cars are expensive and parking is scarce, so they pay more specifically to live within walking distance of transit. Plus, we have a good bus system here. So that’s one reform Chicago has adopted, and we’d love to see it expand beyond areas close to transit. If people decide they don’t need a car, great. Let developers make that decision. If they build a 50- or 100-unit building without parking, they’ve done the market analysis and concluded that 50 or 100 individuals or families want to live there, so they won’t lose money.
Joshua Bandoch (13:26): Those residents just don’t need parking. And a lot of cities across the state have parking minimums, sometimes two spaces per unit. A lot of people don’t have, and certainly don’t need, two cars. So reduce those minimums. I think Chicago took a really good step there.
We’d also like to see other kinds of housing allowed, like accessory dwelling units: coach houses, granny flats, English basements, and so on. A lot of Illinois localities don’t allow them. In Chicago, it’s really hard to build an ADU. There are only five small pilot areas in the city, and the pilot has a lot of problems, so when we did our research last year, fewer than a hundred units had been built, though we can double-check that number. We’ve published a lot advocating for more ADUs, because they’re a great way to build wealth, particularly for minority families. You can add an English basement, a granny flat, or a coach house. It’s a great way to care for loved ones, particularly aging family members, and a great way to maintain the character of a community, because a granny flat or English basement uses the same structure, and if you put something in your backyard, you’ll want it to look like your house.
The positive news is that in July, the zoning committee passed an ordinance to make it much easier to build ADUs, and it’s now awaiting a full City Council vote on September 25. We’d love to see City Council authorize that, and we’d love to see more Illinois localities make it easier to build these units. Families can build wealth, and you give people a place to live, along with access to better schools. If you can get an ADU for your family in Lincoln Park or Lakeview, you’ll have access to better schools than in a neighborhood that might not be so nice.
Gordon Lamphere (15:43): Where’s the pushback against ADUs coming from? There’s a lot of societal pushback against various housing options, but ADUs seem like they’d get less pushback than most.
Joshua Bandoch (15:59): We know ADUs are really successful. Los Angeles allows them pretty much by right, meaning people can build them easily. When we did our research last year, about 17,000 ADUs had been built in LA from roughly 2018 through 2024. So we know there’s demand in other cities.
What’s the pushback? A couple of things. People are concerned about parking. I live in a three-flat, and a coach house would actually fit in our backyard. If it doesn’t have a parking spot, that means the person living there has decided they don’t need one. People are concerned about parking, and I get it.
Gordon Lamphere (16:50): Yeah.
Joshua Bandoch (16:55): Part of the question we have to ask is how best to maintain the character of our communities and make them welcoming to families, and I think we do that by having more housing options rather than fewer. That’s some of the pushback. Another challenging reality of working in cities like Chicago is that some people, not just politicians but people in the community, like to have control over things. They like things to look a certain way and be a certain way, and they’re reluctant to change. That’s part of the pushback too. People are also concerned about infrastructure and things like that, and I think that’s fairly easy to address.
Adaptive Reuse and Commercial Conversions
Gordon Lamphere (17:37): If you’ve read the Wall Street Journal over the last five years, you’d think we’re seeing a massive wave of adaptive reuse, and that it’s an easy fix for some of the dysfunction in our commercial real estate markets. What are you seeing with adaptive reuse projects in Chicago? Have they been generally successful, and where might they be falling short?
Joshua Bandoch (18:09): This is another area for optimism, and I think Chicago is in the early stages of testing some good ideas. I think it was in April that City Council passed an ordinance allowing ground-floor commercial units to be converted to housing. That’s only been in place a few months, but it’s the kind of option that lets you start converting some commercial property into homes. I think Chicago’s commercial vacancy rate is in the mid- to high-20 percent range, which is really high. So it’s an area where I’d like to see more experimentation. Three months in, we don’t have enough data to know whether the commercial conversion policy has worked. You’d probably need two or three years, and you’d also need to know whether conversions are actually happening now that they’re allowed.
I do think it’s the right barrier to address, though. Walk around downtown, and a lot of buildings are struggling to find commercial tenants. Let residential tenants live there. Try it out. I don’t think Chicago has done a ton on that front yet, but people are realizing it’s ripe. I work in the Loop, and there are lots of buildings people would love to live in if they could. But the reality is that only 21 percent of Chicago is zoned for multifamily housing, and a lot of the city is zoned commercial, which means you can’t build new residential there.
Zoning: The Elephant in the Room
Gordon Lamphere (19:34): Have we seen serious zoning reform at the Chicago or Illinois state level? And is that probably the biggest path forward to an abundant housing society?
Joshua Bandoch (19:56): I think that’s the biggest elephant in the room, and you don’t address an elephant by ignoring it. So let’s talk zoning. You also don’t eat an elephant in one sitting. All things being equal, we’d love to see an extremely permissive zoning code, but I think that has to happen in steps.
What does zoning look like in Illinois? Illinois has the second-strictest land use regulation in the Midwest. The Midwest comparison is really helpful, because nationally, developers can invest in Florida or Texas instead. But if you look at Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Indiana, and so on, you can ask whether these land use regulations have anything to do with geography. Illinois was the second most regulated, and in that data, which is maybe two years old, I think Minnesota was the worst. With the reforms I mentioned, Illinois might be the worst when this research institution releases new data. So it’s not weather, and it’s not geography. It’s a choice policymakers make to make it hard to build, and a lot of that comes down to zoning and other land use regulations.
Illinois is highly restrictive, and Chicago in particular is restrictive. About 41 percent of Chicago is zoned single-family only. Do we necessarily want forty-story high-rises going up in small neighborhoods? No. So what’s a good way to maintain a community’s character? Allow two-, three-, or four-flats by right, so instead of a single-family home, you could build a three-unit building. I live in a three-flat in Wrigleyville, and it still maintains the character of the community. Or it could be a huge six- or eight-bedroom home. So zoning is a big issue. Localities control it, but states have the option to get involved. We’d rather see it handled at the local level.
Joshua Bandoch (22:15): If things are still this way in a couple of years, then there’s a conversation to be had about whether elected officials in Springfield want to be more involved, because when housing is unaffordable, people leave those communities, and sometimes the state. There are never simple fixes in the public policy process. You have to assess which problem is bigger, and for us, the breakdown of communities and housing unaffordability are enormous issues.
The Two Biggest Levers: Zoning and Permitting
Gordon Lamphere (22:43): I know there’s probably no magic bullet, but if there were one that did substantial damage to some of these problems, what would it be?
Joshua Bandoch (22:58): The two biggest things that make it hard to build are strict zoning regulations and an extremely slow permitting process. You address strict zoning in steps. You don’t go from single-family to by-right everything across 100 percent of the city. That would be too much for everybody. You find reasonable reforms, build some buy-in, and then build a little more. Maybe you go from single-family to allowing up to three- or four-flats by right. Try that and see how it does. All the developers I’ve talked to are hungry to build in Chicago, because it’s a great big city, and that’s true across Illinois. They want to build, and if they can make money, they will. Things just don’t pencil out in a lot of cases.
The second is to streamline the permitting process, and there are a couple of ways to do that. One is to put more of the process online. Another is to look at regulations like the building code, and if they’re notably stricter than international standards, recognize they might be too onerous and make building too expensive. Extremely safe is safe enough. It doesn’t have to be even stricter than international standards.
Another forcing function is to say that after a certain number of days, projects are automatically approved. It’s probably 60 days, since 30 is probably too short. That works particularly well with self-certification, where an architect certifies that a project is safe, putting their reputation and certification on the line. If something has been certified, streamline the permitting and don’t let things languish for months and months. For a developer, that’s money tied up and homes not being built, and when that happens across many projects over many years, the state ends up tens of thousands of housing units short.
Reasons for Optimism in Illinois
Gordon Lamphere (25:02): There’s been a lot of doom and gloom on the podcast already, but not everything in Illinois is doom and gloom. Some things look like they’re getting better. Where do you see bright spots, at the state level and within regions and municipalities?
Joshua Bandoch (25:22): That’s why I wanted to plant a seed of optimism, because it would be easy to stop here and say, “Man, this is a mess.” I’m actually really optimistic that in the next three to five years, we’ll see lots of really good, positive reforms at the local and state levels. At the local level, I’ve met with elected officials in a number of places. I won’t say where, but these are some of the larger cities in Illinois, and there’s real appetite to make this better. I already mentioned Mayor Johnson’s Cut the Tape report from spring 2024 and Governor Pritzker’s report from last year. There’s recognition across the aisle that we have a problem and that the solution is more housing. There are lots of great housing advocates in Springfield. One who comes to mind in particular is Kam Buckner, who has been a powerful voice for more housing, and there are a lot of people like him.
So my optimism starts with people really recognizing the problem, and with the fact that you can look at red states that did a great job addressing it using the same formula. Montana, of all places, has done a great job of making it much easier to build, because it was facing a housing crunch in its larger cities, and it adopted the same kinds of reforms we recommend. There’s a growing consensus, and that makes me optimistic.
The flip side of Illinois having a problem, with some people saying the state is too unaffordable, is that elected officials are seeing that and saying, “We need to address it, because we want to keep our communities together and actually make Illinois a magnet for people.” There’s so much going for Chicago, the broader area, and Illinois. We have phenomenal universities, including two of the best in the world, the University of Chicago and Northwestern, plus lots of other good universities. There’s so much human capital here and heavy investment in future technology. There’s even a quantum facility going up. There are lots of things that draw people to Chicago and Illinois, including great transportation
Joshua Bandoch (27:45): and two major airports, which a lot of areas just don’t have. When a family is deciding where to live, or a company or business is deciding where to invest, Chicago has so much going for it. It is a magnet, and one of the things holding it back is housing. And for a lot of the reforms we recommend, I could point you to left-of-center and right-of-center research and policy organizations, and if I covered up the top of each report and just showed you the recommendation paragraph, you wouldn’t know who wrote what, or whether it came from the left or the right. That’s because the recommendations really are quite simple.
Gordon Lamphere (28:25): You see a podcast with Ezra Klein talking to Jon Stewart, or one with a Fox News host, and they’re generally saying the same things. I don’t think this is a partisan issue. Speaking of nonpartisan issues, how has Brandon Johnson’s Cut the Tape initiative worked in Chicago? Do you see a bright future there, or have we not done enough? What’s going on within Chicago itself?
Joshua Bandoch (29:02): I think it was a little slow to get going initially, but I’m optimistic that we’ve seen some good reforms in 2025 and slowly growing momentum. I mentioned the ground-floor commercial conversion, which happened this year. Parking minimums were eliminated near transit, which is really big, because you can put up a fifty- or hundred-unit building without worrying about fifty or a hundred parking spots. Governor Johnson, sorry, Mayor Johnson, my apologies, has also advocated for significantly expanding accessory dwelling units. I testified for that ordinance at the zoning committee in July, and he was one of its sponsors. If it gets pushed through, that’s big. I said LA saw 17,000 new units in six years. If Chicago saw 5,000 over a similar period, roughly adjusting for the size of the cities, that would be huge. Those are good steps, and if they get pushed through and more follows, there will be a lot of momentum. So 2024 was a little slow, 2025 is better, and if 2026 builds on 2025’s momentum, that would be great.
Why Inclusionary Zoning and Rent Control Backfire
Gordon Lamphere (30:27): Before we get into our final four, which is always a fun wrap-up, I want to ask one more question. What haven’t we covered yet that’s the most important thing for a developer or policymaker listening to this podcast to be talking about regarding housing abundance?
Joshua Bandoch (30:56): The challenge is that people see housing is unaffordable and expensive. That hurts low-income people the most, and middle-income families struggle too, which is why a lot of them have to leave the city even though they love it. The resulting impulse is, “We need to do something. We need to regulate. We need to implement policies meant to make housing more affordable.” Chicago and a couple of other Illinois cities have what’s called inclusionary zoning, which imposes affordability requirements on buildings of ten units or more. The impulse is to require developers to make housing affordable. It’s the same impulse behind rent control.
I totally get it. People say, “This is the best way to help those who can least shoulder high housing costs.” The challenging reality is that those policies don’t work. We have a report coming out in a week or two on this, and broadly speaking, while I understand the impulse, the regulations don’t work. One challenging reality of the housing market, or any market, is that if you let it function, developers look for opportunities, people move where they want to live, and things eventually sort themselves out. That doesn’t mean there’s a perfect solution. It means it’s the least bad one, and the best pathway to housing abundance is letting developers, renters, homeowners, and tenants figure out where the needs are and meet them. It’s hard, though, because the impulse is to make sure certain things happen,
Joshua Bandoch (32:47): and the sad consequence is less housing, harder building, and a problem that compounds over time.
The Final Four: A Growing Movement for Abundance
Gordon Lamphere (32:57): Speaking of compounding over time, we’ll talk a bit about time in our final four. It’s a nice wrap-up and a way to learn more about you and about housing. One of my favorite questions is: ten years from now, what do you think will have changed most about how we see housing, particularly in Illinois?
Joshua Bandoch (33:26): I think we’re at the start of a movement where people embrace housing abundance. You’re seeing it across the state, with elected officials and a wide coalition of organizations. We work with folks on the left, in the middle, and on the right on this issue, and people really are seeing the same things and recommending many of the same solutions. I’m optimistic that as we see early successes, they’ll grow, and as they do, people will become less uncomfortable, and eventually comfortable, with some of the bigger policy shifts we talked about today. So in ten years, partly out of necessity and partly out of growing comfort, I think people will recognize that, as challenging as it is to let developers, tenants, and the market figure things out, it has worked in other places. “We tried it a little in Chicago and a little across Illinois, and it worked. Let’s try a little more, and a little more, and a little more.”
Advice for Young Professionals: Fail Better
Gordon Lamphere (34:32): We always like to go forward, and we also like to go back. A lot of our listeners are under thirty and involved in real estate at various levels. If you could give advice to young Joshua, what would it be?
Joshua Bandoch (34:51): That’s a question. Do you mean in the housing space or just in general?
Gordon Lamphere (34:56): Just in general.
Joshua Bandoch (34:58): Let me think for a second. Something I’ve come to embrace comes from Samuel Beckett’s Worstward Ho, to cite it properly. There are six short lines in it I find extremely powerful: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” It’s through purposeful failure that we human beings learn to succeed. If you’re in real estate and the first property you buy is a disaster, figure out the next one. You’ll find the right contractors and the right people to fix things. It’s the same in your professional life. If you’re not pushing yourself to your limits and a little beyond, you’re not growing, and you’re stuck in the same spot while other people improve. So don’t be afraid to fail better, as long as the failure isn’t catastrophic. Don’t climb Mount Everest without the proper clothes. You don’t want to freeze up there. But don’t be afraid to fail.
Recommendation: Cal Newport’s Deep Work
Gordon Lamphere (36:00): What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger in this business, that’s for sure. One way we like to get stronger is through books, podcasts, or anything we can learn from, because so often we spend our days grinding in real estate and don’t always get to expand our minds and how we see the world. Is there any media you’d recommend to our listeners?
Joshua Bandoch (36:32): Like a podcast that’s been really helpful to me?
Gordon Lamphere (36:35): Yes, or a book you picked up. Just something our listeners should pick up.
Joshua Bandoch (36:42): In the real estate business, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by whatever craziness a given day brings. If you’re a realtor, you have to respond immediately, and it’s probably easy to lose sight of the really big picture. An author and podcaster who’s been really helpful for me is Cal Newport. The book that really put him on the map is Deep Work, and he has a podcast I believe is called Deep Questions with Cal Newport. He really preaches doing the most important things, and I think that applies in real estate just as it does in my professional life. What are the most important things, and how do you prioritize them? He’s very good at systematizing that, because in his other life he’s a computer scientist. Figure out what the big things are, systematize them, and make sure they get done. If some of the other things don’t happen, or don’t happen right away, that’s okay. Consistently doing those big things really well over five, ten, or twenty years compounds so powerfully that you’ll look back and think, “I did that.” That’s been true for me. I’m publishing a book on persuasion next year, and it’s almost a decade of work that compounded
Joshua Bandoch (38:10): into a product I’m really happy with. It was simply one of the most important things I did, systematically, for nearly a decade.
Who Should Be Our Next Guest?
Gordon Lamphere (38:15): I think that’s terrific advice. So much of what we do in life isn’t deep work and isn’t important, so finding those crucial points is critical. The whole point of this podcast is reaching out to great voices and getting great recommendations, so I’ll wrap up with the final question we always love to ask: who’s the next person influencing the world of real estate that we should have on the podcast?
Joshua Bandoch (38:48): Let me think for a second. Who’s really good in this space? If you want to talk to a really powerful advocate in the city, Bennett Lawson is a great alderman. I mentioned Kam Buckner, who’s also a real leader on the issue. Those are two elected officials who come to mind. And Mike Glasser, who runs the Neighborhood Building Owners Alliance, is also a really powerful voice. They’re all great advocates for more housing. They do a really good job with advocacy, they talk to people all across the aisle, and I really respect them. So those are three people who come to mind.
How to Reach Joshua Bandoch
Gordon Lamphere (39:25): We’d love to reach out to them. If somebody wants to reach out to you, what’s the best way to get in contact?
Joshua Bandoch (39:31): You can find the Illinois Policy Institute at illinoispolicy.org, and you can find me there, including my email, along with LinkedIn. I’m happy to connect with anybody. And if you just Google my name, you’ll see I’m publishing a book on persuasion next year called How to Get What You Want, which would be extremely useful to real estate folks looking to get what they want. So I’ll plug my book for a second. Check out Illinois Policy, check me out there, and be in touch, please.
Gordon Lamphere (40:02): We’d love to continue the conversation with you in the future. I think a lot of our listeners would want that. Thank you so much, Josh, for hopping on the podcast today.
Joshua Bandoch (40:13): Thank you so much.
Gordon Lamphere (40:14): Thanks again to Joshua. We appreciate his insights. If you enjoyed the podcast, please give us a like, a five-star rating, and a review. Your comments, interactions, and subscriptions truly matter and help us continue to bring on quality guests. You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Gordon Lamphere with The Real Finds Podcast. Thank you for watching.
Van Vlissingen and Co. has been the Midwest’s oldest commercial real estate brokerage, development, and management firm since 1879, and today is independently ranked the #1 commercial real estate agency in Chicagoland, home to the #1 independently ranked agent, Gordon Lamphere, and the region’s #1 ranked commercial property management team. If you own, manage, or invest in energy-adjacent, mixed-use, or transit-oriented property across Lake County, the North Shore, the Northwest and O’Hare corridors, DuPage and the I-88 corridor, Will County, or southern Wisconsin’s Pleasant Prairie, Kenosha, and Racine markets, contact Van Vlissingen and Co. at 📞 847-634-2300 or 🌐 vvco.com. For a market-wide view of where these dynamics sit today, see our State of the Chicagoland Commercial Real Estate Market for Q3 2026.