Chicago's New Zoning Chair Vows to Clear Backlog Fast

Gilbert Villegas took the gavel of Chicago’s Committee on Zoning, Landmarks and Building Standards with more than 100 zoning changes already piled up and waiting. He’s not interested in letting them sit.

The 36th Ward alderman stepped into the chair after months without permanent leadership at the committee, a stretch that left developers and neighborhood groups in limbo while projects stalled for want of a council vote. Bennett Lawson, the 44th Ward alderman who’d been running the committee on an interim basis and had wanted the permanent job, yielded the chair.

Villegas scheduled the committee’s first session under his watch for May 6. That meeting, he said, would chew through the bulk of a backlog that’s grown to more than 100 items.

“We’ll hear about 85 to 90% of those projects,” Villegas told WTTW News.

That still leaves some business undone. “Then on May 19, we’ll have another meeting where we’ll deal with some of those rollover projects as well as some tax amendments on ordinances that need to be moved,” he said.

Chicago’s zoning code is notoriously restrictive among large American cities, with a disproportionate share of residential land locked into single-family designations. It’s a framework that makes density difficult, keeps some housing projects in limbo for years, and sends developers hunting for relief through exactly the committee Villegas now chairs. The Chicago Department of Planning and Development administers the broader regulatory structure, but the aldermanic committee is the real chokepoint before anything reaches a full City Council floor vote.

Villegas didn’t mince words about what he wants out of the chair. His priority is to help developers “get things built quickly so we can realize the much-needed property tax revenue in order to fund government services.” That’s a framing that bridges the ideological divides on the council. Whether you’re a fiscal hawk or an affordable housing advocate, Chicago’s budget pressure is real, and zoning is one of the few levers city government actually controls on a project-by-project basis.

At last Wednesday’s council session, Villegas publicly acknowledged Lawson, describing him as “a wealth of knowledge” and signaling he wants a working relationship rather than a cold rivalry. The gesture matters. Lawson, now vice chair, knows the committee’s docket cold, and Villegas has a backlog to move. That’s a practical alliance, whatever the tension over who got the top job.

The politics that produced the appointment weren’t simple. City Council’s Black Caucus threw its support behind Villegas, and the arrangement had a second benefit built in: Villegas vacating his prior perch as chair of the Committee on Economic, Capital and Technological Development opened that seat for Ald. Derrick Curtis of the 18th Ward, a Black Caucus member in his third term. The caucus got a chair at the economic committee table without having to fight head-to-head over zoning.

Villegas was frank about the reasoning. “What we didn’t want to do was set precedence around allowing freshmen the ability to have a powerful committee like zoning,” he said.

That calculation tracks. Zoning isn’t a ceremonial assignment. It’s one of the most consequential standing committees in the City Council, touching everything from multifamily housing developments to large commercial projects in every ward. Handing that to someone newer to the council would have been a break from the institutional logic that still governs how committee chairs get divvied up in Chicago.

Coming into 2026, the committee’s backlog reflects a period of real governance friction. More than 100 pending items don’t accumulate by accident. They pile up when leadership is uncertain and members don’t know who to lobby or when votes will come. Villegas is walking into that, and he’s set an aggressive two-meeting timetable to prove the committee can function at pace.

Whether he can keep that pace beyond May 19 is the open question. The zoning pipeline doesn’t empty permanently. New projects file every month, community groups contest changes, and megaprojects add complexity that can’t always be resolved in a single session. What Villegas is signaling now is that the backlog won’t be an excuse, and the committee won’t be a bottleneck.

The first test is May 6. Show up or don’t.