This month, Chicago celebrates the 40th anniversary of its Residential Landlord and Tenant Ordinance, or RLTO. As the 49th Ward alderman at the time, I was the ordinance’s chief sponsor. In the coming weeks, the City Council will consider the first substantial update to the RLTO since its passage, Mayor Brandon Johnson’s Protecting Renters Ordinance , or PRO.
When I was first elected to the City Council in 1979, Chicago was overrun with unaccountable landlords. Predatory lease provisions, theft of security deposits and major disrepair were far too common. Few laws existed to support tenants.
With the help of lawyers from the Law Center for Better Housing and community activists who later formed the Metropolitan Tenants Organization, I got to work on a legislative solution. The fight took years, but it ended with passage of the RLTO. The rights it enshrined are now taken for granted.
But 40 years later, the housing market has changed. Gentrification is now rampant, and corporate ownership of rental units is rapidly increasing. The law needs to change to counteract these new forces. That’s why I welcome the push, led by the same organizations that passed the RLTO in 1986, to enact PRO, which addresses emerging issues facing Chicago’s tenants in 2026.
First, it creates a citywide rental registry. In 1986, limited liability companies didn’t exist in Illinois. Today, they own a significant share of Chicago’s rental housing. And when a derelict landlord owns dozens of buildings, each of them under a different LLC, it becomes very difficult for the city to identify bad actors and enforce the law. PRO’s registry would end the corporate anonymity and restore transparency.
Second, PRO gives the city the resources and ability to enforce existing law. Under the RLTO, tenants rely on self-help remedies such as rent withholding to enforce their rights. Unfortunately, exercising these remedies often requires technical and legal expertise that many tenants lack, and even if they do everything right, they still face possible landlord retaliation. PRO creates a Bureau of Rental Housing Services, which allows the city to work with tenants to enforce the RLTO. And it’s fully paid for by modest per-unit fees from the rental registry.
Third, PRO cracks down on junk fees. From move-in and move-out fees to pet fees and opaque utility billing formulas, tenants incur hundreds of dollars in costs in addition to their rent. Often, these fees are not disclosed when the unit is advertised, and landlords rarely present evidence of actual costs. Junk fees were not prevalent 40 years ago, but they are now. PRO presents an elegant solution: It lists permissible fees and presumptively prohibits all others. It requires the disclosure of actual costs. This is a basic consumer protection, and it’s the right thing to do.
Finally, PRO codifies the city’s existing eviction defense counsel pilot program. Nationwide, roughly 90% of landlords have lawyers in eviction court, Legal Aid Chicago reports. Only 10% of tenants do. The city’s Right to Counsel pilot program provides qualifying tenants with strong defenses with a free legal aid attorney. The program has been a great success. PRO makes sure it will continue permanently.
The real estate industry would have you believe that PRO will cause major disruptions to the housing market, scare away investment, and harm both tenants and landlords. I’ll close with a piece of advice: Don’t put much stock in their fearmongering. These claims are nearly identical to those the industry made about the RLTO in 1986. None of their predictions came true. In fact, the Realtors, who unsuccessfully sued to prevent the RLTO from going into effect, now say that it is “a balance between the rights and responsibilities of both landlords and tenants.”
If PRO passes, I wouldn’t be surprised if they are praising it, too, in a few decades.
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David Orr is a former alderman of the 49th Ward, a former Cook County clerk and founder of Good Government Illinois.
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