La Grange’s long-debated affordable housing task force moved from idea to reality Monday night, when the Village Board publicly recognized its members and set a target launch for the last week of June. The announcement came at the board's June 8 meeting, where the new members stood to be recognized — and where residents raised pointed questions about what, exactly, the task force is empowered to do.
The group includes a broad cross-section of residents, among them former trustee Mark Langan and Peg Moster, a co-chair of the League of Women Voters of the La Grange Area's housing committee, which has been advocating for the panel for years. One resident, Victoria Franze, was appointed on the spot after she realized her name had been overlooked. Village President Mark Kuchler apologized for the omission and appointed her from the dais.
A Long Road to This Moment
The task force has been in the works since the village's 2024 comprehensive plan called for one. This spring, a bruising public debate nearly derailed it: in March, Trustee Glenn Thompson accused Kuchler of trying to "kill the whole process" — a charge Kuchler denied — before the full board voted unanimously to create it on April 27. Since then, the village has been taking applications, and the response was strong enough that Kuchler said Monday the goal was to get the first meeting on the calendar within weeks.
Moster, who has been pushing for the task force since before the pandemic, told the board what the moment meant to the LWV housing committee. "Sometimes we got pretty discouraged," she said, per the meeting transcript. "We're so excited right now to have reached this point and look forward to very robust discussions about what could or could not be achieved in La Grange."
Critics Want More Than a List of Names
Not everyone left satisfied. Resident Jonathan Robinson challenged both the structure of the task force and Kuchler's oft-repeated claim that La Grange's 13 percent affordable housing rate makes it a regional leader. Robinson did his own math, looking at the six communities surrounding La Grange. Brookfield, he said, sits at 34.9 percent; Countryside at 49 percent; McCook at 26.4 percent; and La Grange Park at 13.6 percent — higher than La Grange. "We are in the bottom third of the six communities that surround us," Robinson told the board. "We are nowhere close to where we should be."
Robinson also pressed the board on the absence of a formal ordinance governing the task force — defining its charge, authority, budget, and timeline. "We just put 20 people into a book club because we actually don't have an ordinance of what they can, should, or would do," he said.
Trustee Augustine pushed back, saying the task force is being taken seriously and that the rules are still being finalized. "We're figuring out some of the rules as it pertains to a task force versus a commission," she said. "It will be something that everybody who's signed up for this will be proud to serve on."
The Springfield Backdrop
The task force launches as the state-level pressure that helped accelerate it has, for now, eased. Governor Pritzker's sweeping Building Up Illinois Developments (BUILD) housing plan — which would have imposed statewide zoning minimums on suburbs — died in the General Assembly last week without a single vote on its core provisions. Lawmakers did pass $250 million in housing capital funding. A separate bill aimed at strengthening Illinois’ Affordable Housing Planning and Appeal Act had passed the House and picked up Senate sponsors, but did not make it through the Senate before the spring session ended.
The task force’s first meeting is expected in the last week of June. But key questions remain unresolved: how formal its charge will be, whether the village will adopt an ordinance defining its role, and whether its recommendations will come with a budget, timeline or enforcement mechanism. Those questions are likely to determine whether the task force becomes a working policy body — or simply the next stage of La Grange’s long-running debate over affordability.