PRO vs. FAIR: What Chicago Owners and Renters Should Know

Updated July 28, 2026. This is a developing story at City Hall; I’ll revise this post as it moves.

An update, and a second ordinance nobody expected

A few weeks ago I talked about the Protecting Renters Ordinance — PRO — the Mayor’s proposal to overhaul the rules that govern renting in Chicago. Since then, the story has changed in a way worth an update.

On June 29, Mayor Johnson formally introduced PRO into the City Council’s Committee on Housing and Real Estate. It would be the first major rewrite of the Residential Landlord and Tenant Ordinance since 1986 — the RLTO turns forty this year, and almost everyone at City Hall agrees it is due for a renovation.

Then, on July 15, a bloc of alderpersons introduced a competing measure: the Fair and Accountable Illinois Rental Ordinance, or FAIR. It is spearheaded by Ald. Gilbert Villegas of the 36th Ward and backed by roughly two dozen council members. Tenant organizations were not consulted before it was introduced, which is part of why the reaction has been sharp.

Here is the part that surprises people: both camps agree that about 98% of the two ordinances are the same. Security deposit caps, repair-and-deduct rights, disclosure of algorithmic rent pricing, bans on retaliation and illegal lockouts — those are in both. The entire fight lives in the remaining 2%.

Neither has passed. Both are still in committee. If you own a two-flat in Bucktown or rent a garden unit in Lakeview, nothing has changed for you yet.

Before the details: where I’m standing

I am a REALTOR®, and my professional association has taken a position opposing PRO. You should know that before you read another word from me.

I am also someone who has spent thirty years watching what actually happens to Chicago’s small buildings and the people who live in them — and I have clients on both sides of this. So my goal here is not to tell you how to feel. It is to tell you what each ordinance actually says, what each side actually argues, and where the honest uncertainty is. You can take it from there.

What PRO would do

PRO is the more expansive of the two. Alongside the provisions both bills share, it would:

• Establish a Tenant Bill of Rights, spelling out the right to organize a tenants union, to repair and deduct, and to withhold rent in certain circumstances
• Create a Bureau of Rental Housing Services inside the Department of Housing to handle complaints, investigate violations, and coordinate enforcement — funded by an annual rental registry fee of $20 to $60 per unit, with exemptions for CHA-subsidized units, nonprofit-owned rentals, and owner-occupied buildings of six units or fewer
• Build a citywide rental registry that captures who actually stands behind an LLC or trust on title, plus each building’s code violation history
• Cap application fees at $20 and ban move-in fees
• Make the city’s eviction Right to Counsel pilot a permanent budget line
• Require just cause for eviction or nonrenewal, with relocation assistance owed to tenants displaced through no fault of their own

It also adds a few things owners have asked for: a 14-day window to cure a violation, and an end to the requirement that security deposits sit in interest-bearing accounts.

What FAIR would do differently

FAIR keeps most of that architecture and removes the pieces its sponsors consider costly or coercive. Specifically, it strips out just cause, relocation assistance, the Tenant Bill of Rights, the new housing bureau, and the funded right-to-counsel program.

It adds two things PRO does not have. First, incentives for owners of vacant or out-of-code buildings to rehab them and come into compliance. Second, a three-tier landlord classification that treats a small owner differently from a national operator.

That second piece deserves attention, because it is doing more work than it appears to. Today, a building is largely exempt from Chicago’s rental laws only if the owner lives in it and it has six units or fewer. PRO keeps that standard. FAIR would define a small landlord as anyone owning up to twelve units citywide, with no requirement that they live in any of them.

Ald. Villegas frames the intent as helping mom-and-pop owners grow a little — distinguishing, as he put it, the large institutional funds from the couple who live on the block. Housing advocates read the same language and see thousands of renters in non-owner-occupied buildings losing protections they have today, including 48-hour notice before a landlord enters and the ban on retaliation for reporting code violations. One advocate has argued that this makes FAIR worse for tenants than doing nothing at all.

Both readings are fair readings of the same sentence. That is genuinely what is at stake in that provision.

The comparison chart

The relocation numbers, stated accurately

This is where I want to be careful, because the figure circulating in owner circles is a real number that is being applied to the wrong situation.

Under PRO as introduced, if a landlord declines to renew and the tenant is not at fault:

Three things follow from that table.

The $10,000 or ten months’ figure is a ceiling for a residual catch-all category, not the ordinary case. Reporting on the introduced text puts the expected payment for most landlords in the $3,000 to $5,000 range.

An owner would not necessarily write a check at all. PRO allows a landlord to substitute a comparable unit, or a rent concession or credit of equivalent value, instead of a cash payment.

And a figure you may have seen on a widely shared flyer — roughly $40,000 in Lincoln Park — is calculated as the total for an entire average three-flat, using five months of HUD Small Area Fair Market Rent across three two-bedroom units. It is not a per-unit number. I have seen it repeated as per-unit, including in something I said myself, and it is worth correcting.

One more correction. Earlier drafts of PRO included language letting tenants challenge an “unconscionable” rent increase. That language was removed before introduction, specifically so Chicago would not run afoul of Illinois’ Rent Control Preemption Act. If you read about that provision this spring, it is no longer in the bill.

Where the honest disagreement lives

Everything above is text you can check. What follows is forecasting, and both sides are doing it.

Owners argue that Chicago’s small buildings are already carrying rising property taxes, insurance, and operating costs, and that new compliance obligations and litigation exposure land hardest on exactly the two-to-four-unit stock — about a quarter of Chicago’s housing — that provides the city’s naturally affordable rentals. The argument is structural rather than mean-spirited: you cannot make housing cheaper by making it more expensive to provide. When those margins fail, small owners sell, and institutional buyers are the ones with capital ready.

Renters and advocates argue that displacement is already happening at scale — the Housing Commissioner has cited roughly 10,000 no-fault displacements a year — and that a family uprooted with sixty days’ notice in this market absorbs a cost that simply does not appear on anyone’s balance sheet. Just cause does not prevent an owner from reclaiming a unit. It requires a stated reason and a contribution toward the disruption.

Both of those are coherent. Neither is a straw man.

The empirical claim gets cited hardest in both directions, so treat it carefully. Owner-side advocates point to San Francisco, where similar protections coincided with rising rents. Tenant-side advocates point to Los Angeles and San Diego, where rents fell and development continued despite just-cause rules in place. Both sets of facts are real. They differ because those cities differed in how much housing they were building at the time — which suggests the honest conclusion is that just cause is not, by itself, the variable that determines rents. Supply is doing most of the work in every one of those examples.

Which brings up the thing both sides quietly agree on: neither ordinance builds a single unit of housing. PRO and FAIR are both about how existing rentals are governed. Chicago’s underlying problem is that there are not enough of them. Whatever passes, that problem is still sitting there in the morning.

What to do now

If you own rental property in Chicago, this is a good moment to get your paperwork current rather than to make decisions. Confirm how your ownership entity is recorded, since any registry that passes will ask. Review your lease renewal and notice practices against the current RLTO, because both proposals build on it rather than replace it. And note that a separate state law signed this summer already limits application fees and bans a list of junk fees starting in January, regardless of what the Council does — municipalities were given room to be stricter, not more lenient.

If you rent in Chicago, your rights today are the ones in the current RLTO, and they have not changed. If you are weighing a move or a purchase, the thing to watch is not which acronym wins. It is whether either version makes it out of committee at all before campaign season swallows the calendar.

And if you are a two-flat owner wondering whether to hold, sell, or convert — that is a real conversation, and it does not have a generic answer. It depends on your building, your timeline, and whether the numbers still work for you personally. I’m happy to walk through yours.

There is a compromise track here. Ald. Villegas has said revising his ordinance is a matter of continuing dialogue, and the housing committee chair has suggested some of PRO’s content could be eased. Whether that happens in a City Council this divided, before the 2027 election season, is the open question.

I’ll update this post as it moves.

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Maureen Moran is a REALTOR® with @properties Christie’s International Real Estate, licensed in Illinois and Wisconsin since 1995. This post is general information, not legal advice; for questions about a specific building or lease, consult a real estate attorney.

Sources

• City of Chicago, Department of Housing — Protecting Renters Ordinance
• Chicago City Clerk — ordinance record O2026-0026554
• The Daily Line, June 30, 2026 — housing committee hearing coverage
• WBEZ / Chicago Sun-Times, July 27, 2026 — dueling proposals explainer
• Block Club Chicago and Axios Chicago — FAIR ordinance coverage
• Illinois REALTORS® / Chicago Association of REALTORS® — opposition materials (advocacy)