On a drizzly day in early February, state representative Will Guzzardi stood in front of a group of housing activists and community organizers in Bronzeville to announce his new bill, which is just seven words long: “The Rent Control Preemption Act is repealed.” The act, he said, was passed in 1997 by state legislators in fear of “the bogeyman of rent control.” Days after the announcement, it became clear that the bogeyman is alive and well, as Guzzardi was inundated with a flood of protest e-mails and calls ominously predicting that his bill would spell the end of development and rehab of the state’s housing stock.
Curiously, identical language can be found in the rent control prohibition laws of Michigan, passed in 1988, South Dakota, passed in 1990, Arkansas, passed in 1993, Tennessee, passed in 1996, and others. And if you google that bit of text, one of the top results will be a link to a model law from the American Legislative Exchange Council—ALEC. Illinois’s Rent Control Preemption Act is a verbatim copy of this model law, which appeared in ALEC’s handbook for state legislators until 1995.
Conservative lawmakers and real estate interests networking through ALEC thus acted to prevent the spread of rent control laws elsewhere. And the climate in many state legislatures was ripe for easy passage of antiregulation laws. In Illinois’s General Assembly, both houses were under Republican control.
“There is not a single group lobbying in favor of rent control,” Schakowsky argued on the house floor, “and yet at the behest of all those in the business of building housing, [sponsor Ron Stephens] has decided to bring before us a bill that has no relationship to any real-life situation.” In conclusion, she called the “silly bill” a “completely useless piece of legislation.”
Though the Reader reached out to every member of ALEC’s public relations team, no one responded to e-mails or voice mails.
