If you’ve walked the blocks of Forest Park, you’ve probably come across several single-family homes next to a two-flat, neighboring an eight-story apartment building.
Eclectic, but not exactly legitimate – though it’s not the current village staff’s fault. While the variety of buildings adds to Forest Park’s small-town charm, they don’t all conform to residential zoning codes. And that can be a hassle when homeowners want to expand or renovate a property. Forest Park is now working to update chunks of the code, and bringing hundreds of such properties into conformity is one of the first agenda items.
Steve Glinke, director of the Department of Public Health and Safety, acknowledged how difficult it is for owners of nonconforming homes to follow the village’s code, citing an example of complications around adhering to newer energy codes in older houses.
“When you’re doing a gut rehab, it makes it very difficult to comply with that because you just don’t have the skeleton to support it,” Glinke said. “It’s very hard to take a contemporary building code and apply it to a turn-of-the-century community.”
The large number of nonconforming residences in town can be chalked up to a couple of events.
During World War II, workers flocked to Forest Park to build torpedoes at a factory where Living World Christian Center now stands. Those employees were often put up in local residences, Glinke said, which is why the village once had several non-purpose-built two-flats, which look like a single-family home with an apartment in the basement.
“We’ve tried to undo that,” Glinke said, to bring the buildings up to code, “but you can really only do that one house at a time.” And even then, only when a bank reposes a foreclosed home can it be de-converted to align with the code.
While Glinke’s earliest copies of the village’s zoning code go back to the 1960s, he said that, if there was a code before then, it’s likely it was suspended during the war, allowing many properties to be grandfathered into today’s code.
“We can’t tell someone who has a non-purpose built two-flat, and has had it for the last 15 years, that they can’t sell it,” Glinke added.
When the Eisenhower Expressway was built in the 1950s, many houses in Forest Park were relocated to make room.
“We know for a fact that they were moving houses from the Eisenhower, and just popping them on lots,” Glinke said. He gives the example of a lot on Forest Park’s north side that has three single-family houses on it.
But not all of Forest Park’s nonconforming properties are classified as such because of the buildings on them. Some don’t align with the current code simply because of the size of the lot or how the house is situated on it.
“The north side of my house is the backyard of my neighbors,” Village Administrator Rachell Entler said of her home, which sits right on the property line.
This year and next, the village is updating large portions of its zoning code to make properties like this conforming. This will allow such homes to be more easily managed, both on the village’s side and the property owner’s.
“There have been repeated issues that have come to light: changes in the housing trends and how people utilize their houses,” Entler said. “This is a good opportunity for us to take a look and say, ‘OK, we’re getting a lot of these requests. Maybe we should consider this to be something that’s permitted.’”