In June, New York City’s rent board set the allowed increase at zero for one- and two-year renewal leases starting between October 2026 and September 2027 for the roughly one million apartments covered by its rent-stabilization law. Chicago could not enact rent control like that if it wanted to: under a 1997 Illinois law, no local government in the state may control rents on private property. What Chicago does publish is a subsidy inventory — and the city’s published list of city-supported affordable rentals counts 598 developments and 29,550 listed units.
598 developments counted and classified · list last updated December 30, 2024 · statute and rent order read in fullNew York’s version of rent regulation works through a board. Under the city’s Rent Stabilization Law, a Rent Guidelines Board sets the allowed increase each year for about one million covered apartments — and on June 25, 2026, its Order #58, read in full for this piece, set that adjustment at 0 percent for both one-year and two-year renewal leases beginning October 2026 through September 2027. Illinois goes the opposite direction. The Rent Control Preemption Act — four sections long, whose source notes date it effective August 1, 1997 — says no unit of local government may enact an ordinance “controlling the amount of rent charged for leasing private residential or commercial property,” and it expressly denies the same power to home-rule units — cities like Chicago with broad self-governing authority under the Illinois Constitution. Unless the state changes that law, Chicago cannot enact or enforce rent control on private property.
One lever Chicago does hold is subsidy, and the city publishes an inventory of one slice of it: the Affordable Rental Housing Developments list, a directory of rental buildings whose affordability is supported by City of Chicago programs. We counted and classified all of it. One thing this comparison is not: an equivalence. New York’s million stabilized units are privately owned apartments under a rent formula; Chicago’s list is subsidized buildings, and it is a fraction of the city’s rental market. The two numbers describe two different tools — which is the point.
A third of the listed units are senior housing
Of the 29,550 listed units, 10,759 — 36 percent — are in developments typed as senior housing. General-population multifamily buildings account for 13,127 units across 264 developments, and supportive housing — developments serving veterans, people with disabilities, people exiting homelessness and other specific groups — adds 3,299. Three single-room-occupancy buildings — SRO on the chart, buildings of small individual rooms — hold 445. The 156 ARO entries average about 11 listed units apiece, the smallest average of any group.
Sixty-six of the 77 community areas have at least one listed development
Chicago’s statistics divide the city into 77 official community areas, and the list touches 66 of them. The most listed units sit in Grand Boulevard (2,406 units in 30 developments), the Near West Side (1,958), the Near South Side (1,473), Uptown (1,432) and the Near North Side (1,312). Humboldt Park has the most individual developments, 48. Eleven community areas have no listed development at all: Archer Heights, Beverly, Burnside, Clearing, East Side, Forest Glen, Hermosa, McKinley Park, Morgan Park, Mount Greenwood, O’Hare. The list records where city-supported buildings are; it does not say why they are there and not elsewhere, and neither will we.
How we counted
- What this list is — and is not: the city’s Affordable Rental Housing Developments dataset (s6ha-ppgi), retrieved July 28, 2026. By its own description it is a courtesy list of developments supported by City programs: it does not include every city-assisted affordable unit, and it excludes the “hundreds of thousands” of naturally occurring affordable units that rent cheaply without any subsidy. Nothing here is a count of Chicago’s affordable housing stock — it is a count of the city’s published inventory.
- Freshness: the dataset’s own metadata dates its last row update to December 30, 2024 — about 19 months before this piece, so changes since then, whether new completions or removals, may not be reflected. The dataset’s own description says projects leave the list when their compliance periods expire, “typically after 30 years.”
- Listed units: the units column is not documented on the data portal, so we report the figures as listed units and make no claim about whether a listed figure is the building’s full unit count or its affordable share.
- Cleaning: the type and area columns are free text with typos, which we normalized before counting: “Mutifamily” and “Multfamily” to Multifamily, “Seniors” to Senior, “Hunboldt Paek” to Humboldt Park, and a double-spaced “Near South Side” to Near South Side. The six type families in the chart group thirty raw labels; the main grouping choices are that senior developments of every sub-label count as Senior, and that veteran, disability, HIV/AIDS, youth, kinship-family and women’s developments count as supportive and special-population.
- The New York side: the Rent Guidelines Board’s 2026 Apartment & Loft Order #58 (adopted June 25, 2026) and its site’s description of the board’s mandate, both read in full. The Illinois side: the Rent Control Preemption Act, 50 ILCS 825, read in full — all four sections. The ARO description comes from the city’s own Affordable Requirements Ordinance pages.
- What this is not: a measure of rents, affordability, or need — and not a policy argument for either city’s tool. It is a count of what sits on one public list.
Computed by KCM Desk from the City of Chicago’s affordable rental housing inventory; published July 28, 2026. If you spot an error, corrections come first.