What is Mike Quigley talking about?
Congressman Mike Quigley has some not-so-original ideas about housing.
Before you read further, tell your alder to support the Protecting Renters Ordinance.
Congressman and mayoral candidate Mike Quigley, in a recent Substack post sent to his 61 thousand followers (who are these people?), has blasted Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s proposed Protecting Renters Ordinance as “nothing more than election season antics,” which “would almost definitely raise rents.” He assures us that he’s “actually been doing years of homework” on how to lower rents, which is what qualifies him to lambast the mayor’s plan.
The P.R.O. is a five-part law which would update the 1986 Residential Landlord and Tenant Ordinance (RLTO), implement Just Cause for eviction (explained below), establish an enforcement body within the City’s Department of Housing, permanently fund the City’s Eviction Counsel Program (currently a pilot program which is essentially a public defender for people facing eviction), and establish a rental registry where landlords would register their rental units in a centralized city database. It is a good and sensible law.
Members of BSTA—one of a handful of Chicago-based tenant unions and an organization composed exclusively of tenants—recently voted unanimously to support the P.R.O. As of this writing, the ordinance is in the City Council Committee on Housing and Real Estate and faces a tough battle to passage. The real estate industry will be working overtime this summer to stop the ordinance, and many members of City Council, afraid of their homeowner and landlord constituencies, will need a lot of encouragement from their tenant constituencies to vote in favor. Chicago is a 54% renter city, so there is no numerical reason that this ordinance should not pass. The fact that it faces such a tough battle is reflective of Chicago’s massive power imbalance between tenants and property owners.
In his post, Congressman Quigley assures us that he’s “not ignorant of the reality of bad landlords. They exist and they’ve existed for a long time.” The bad-landlord-good-landlord dichotomy is a common rhetorical tactic used to deflect attention away from tenant rights. It is reminiscent of the “few bad apples” response to any criticism leveled at the cops, i.e., while there may be some bad landlords, the system itself is good and fair overall – good and fair for tenants, specifically. According to tenant rights opponents, the real victims of the system are landlords, who only want to provide housing but are hamstrung by onerous regulations, property taxes, and outrageous fees.
In this framing, the good landlords are almost always mom-and-pop landlords, that is, owners who usually live in their rental property and/or own a property of six units or less. In Quigley’s formulation, “most housing providers aren’t massive corporations. They’re Chicagoans. They’re people who are already struggling to maintain older buildings, families trying to build generational wealth, and folks providing homes in their own neighborhoods - to their own neighbors.”
Quigley has a point here. Many landlords are indeed small owners playing the real estate game. Many of them are immigrants. Many of them bought property in the 1980s and 1990s when it was much cheaper. Many of them are gathering wealth to pass down to their children. Many of them are relying on their properties as their retirement plan. Many of them are renting out a unit in order to hold onto their family home. But the fact of the matter is that this entire system is based on transferring money from tenants to landlords. This economic reality cannot be avoided, and sentimental appeals to the mom-and-pop landlord don’t change it. Mom-and-pop landlords also break the law, abuse their tenants, and charge outrageous rents for substandard conditions every single day. But all of that aside, even mom-and-pop landlords who follow the rules, who treat tenants decently, and who take care of their properties are still taking tenants’ money and putting it into their own pockets.
If we are to have any hope of pulling ourselves out of the death spiral that is the American housing sector, we must accept this cold truth and move away from the warm, nostalgic glow of the mom-and-pop image toward something equitable. The fact that there may be some good landlords does not change the fact that the entire landlording industry, which is built on the twin pillars of wealth transfer and power imbalance, is itself bad. The fact that we live in a post-welfare-state where unions have been decimated and pensions have been gutted, leaving real estate as one of the only realistic retirement plans, is bad. And the fact that we refuse to tax billionaires fairly and must rely instead on property taxes to fund city services, meaning that property values must increase in order to keep those services functional, is bad.
BSTA recently posted a financial analysis of one of our member’s buildings. This building was purchased in the 1990s for $200 thousand by a mom-and-pop landlord. The mortgage was paid off in the mid-2010s. Now the building is selling for over one million dollars. The BSTA member who lives in this building has lived there for ten years and has paid an estimated $100 thousand in rent. What this means is that, while she paid for half of the building’s original value, she will see no profit, no equity, and not a dime of the million dollars that her landlord is about to make from the sale. Not only that, but the new landlord will almost certainly make her move out, which will cost her thousands of dollars.
This is not fair. The P.R.O., in its Just Cause section, would provide some relief for this tenant, in the form of moving assistance should the new landlord force her to move (which he will). The P.R.O. says that, if a landlord wants to put this burden onto a tenant, he should help her pay for it, especially because she has been paying him rent for so many years.
Of the Just Cause requirements, Mike Quigley warns us that “the proposal would also require relocation payments in some situations when leases are not renewed or when buildings are renovated, converted, or removed from the rental market. In some cases, those payments could run into the thousands of dollars. That may sound like tenant protection. But in practice, it risks making it harder to improve housing that desperately needs improvement.” Most of this post is meandering and never makes an actual point, but what Quigley seems to be saying here is that landlords won’t be able to take care of their buildings under the P.R.O. because they will be spending that money on relocating their tenants.
This doesn’t make sense for a few reasons. First of all, except in certain cases, the landlord wouldn’t have to pay anything if they just left their tenants alone and renewed their leases. The P.R.O. doesn’t seek to extort landlords; it seeks to disincentivize displacement of tenants. It is very easy for landlords to avoid the relocation requirements of the P.R.O. if they simply don’t make their tenants relocate. And if they absolutely must make their tenants relocate, they should understand the burden this creates, and help their tenants carry the load. Second, many landlords are currently not taking care of their properties. This will continue to be a problem with or without the P.R.O., and the suggestion that the ordinance would trigger a sudden decline in property conditions is just fearmongering. It also misleads readers into believing that most landlords are currently taking good care of their properties, which they aren’t.
Quigley claims that “when those independent owners decide [regulations are] no longer worth the risk, they rarely sell to another mom-and-pop landlord. They sell to the highest bidder, one that has the resources to navigate the legal complexity and absorb the costs.” This weird assertion seems to be saying: small landlords want to sell to other small landlords at a potentially lower price, but they simply can’t because there is too much regulation. They therefore have no choice but to sell to a large corporate landlord.
What is he talking about? The whole history of gentrification, stretching back decades, is of small landlords selling to richer, often corporate landlords with deep pockets. This has nothing to do with the P.R.O. BSTA formed in 2024 because of this exact situation. There was no P.R.O. then, only an investor waving a huge wad of cash at our mom-and-pop, small-time landlord. Our landlord took the money because he wanted a large sum of money. The wellbeing of the neighborhood and his tenants did not trump the value of that money. He got rich, we got screwed. This is America.
Quigley, a Democrat, flashes a Reaganite economic position in this passage, which places him in good company with many left-of-centers when it comes to the subject of housing. While many progressives, Democrats, and leftists profess that housing is a human right out of one side of their mouth, they simultaneously claim that markets must be deregulated out of the other.
In this trickle-down vein, Quigley touches on the subject of YIMBY-ism, or supply-side housing theory, in his post when he says that “rent freezes without significant increases in housing supply will increase rent, not decrease it. Austin has seen rents decline, not because they froze rent, but because they built a ton of new homes quickly. That’s real, good housing policy.” Here he invokes the YIMBY North Star: Austin, Texas. According to YIMBYs, cities should emulate Austin because of its rapid housing construction policies which followed the pandemic, policies which have resulted in an astonishing slowdown in rent increases.
Quigley and YIMBYs are correct that A) Austin built a ton of housing following the pandemic, B) there is a surplus of housing in Austin, and C) this has resulted in a decline in housing costs. But they never want to acknowledge the motivations at work in Austin. Austin didn’t build housing in order to lower rent. Austin developers built housing because they believed they would profit wildly off of it. During the pandemic, a lot of tech workers were moving to the city, and developers saw an opportunity to make money off of their rent. Per KUOW:
“ Builders were looking around saying, 'There's a lot of money to be made,'” [KUOW reporter Audrey] McGlinchey said. “ So they start getting projects in place. They started the long process often of building tens of thousands of new apartments in the city.”
Projects that began during the pandemic started opening in the years that followed. By then, the picture had changed. Population growth slowed. Fewer people were moving to Austin. But the new apartments kept coming [1].
The Austin miracle, in other words, was an accident. Developers saw a boom in rich tech workers moving to the city, and they built to capitalize on these people’s potential rent money. They did not expect (or want) the boom to slow down. When it did, they made less money. The resulting decline in housing costs was therefore completely unintended under the original plan. Developers are motivated by profit. They have no interest in intentionally over-saturating a market, but YIMBYs swear that, for some reason, they do. Any smart developer would take care to avoid the Austin outcome, not encourage it.
Basically, Mike Quigley’s complaints about the P.R.O. are the same tired, free-market talking points that the real estate industry has been pushing for decades. They amount to the position that landlords have the right to charge whatever they want for rent, and should bear no cost for the huge disruption of pushing tenants out of their homes; property rights must prevail over human rights. Mike Quigley is wrong, but he is only one voice in an ocean of laissez-faire mediocrity. These people have more money and more organization than the tenant movement, and they will throw millions of dollars this summer at attempting to defeat the P.R.O. Only if tenants are able to stand together, demand that our alders vote for the law, and demonstrate that there will be political consequences if they don’t will the ordinance have any hope of passing. And it absolutely should pass.
To tell your alderperson to vote for the P.R.O., follow this link. Send your alders emails, call them, drop into their offices, bug them to do the right thing. And while you’re at it, join BSTA.
Notes
(1) McNichols, Joshua, “Austin built a lot of housing fast. Rents fell. What could Seattle learn?” KUOW, January 7, 2026, accessed July 4, 2026, https://www.kuow.org/stories/austin-built-a-lot-of-housing-fast-rents-fell-what-could-seattle-learn.
