Abundant Housing Illinois

Chair Castro, members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify. My name is Steffany Bahamon, and I'm co-lead of Abundant Housing Illinois — a grassroots, all-volunteer organization with about 520 members across 36 Illinois municipalities. In recent weeks, more than 1,000 Illinoisans have written to their legislators urging passage of BUILD, and on April 15, 40 of our volunteers came to Springfield to meet with over 20 of you and your staff.

I'm here in strong support of BUILD, and I want to focus on two things: the single-stair provision, and what this bill makes possible for communities of color across our state.
Single-stair allows residential buildings up to six stories to be built with one well-designed staircase instead of two, paired with sprinklers and modern fire safety. Seattle, Austin, and New York already build this way — and they reap the benefits: bigger, family-sized homes that everyone from conservatives to democratic socialists agrees we desperately need more of.

Let me tell you what the current rule actually does. A community land trust here in Chicago — an organization whose entire purpose is to keep families rooted in high-cost neighborhoods — recently had to build a project with two and a halfstaircases to comply with code. Two and a half. That's space that could have been a family's living room. That's a unit that doesn't exist. A mission-driven nonprofit was forced to shrink what it could deliver because of a regulation written before modern sprinklers existed.
Second, BUILD opens real doors for communities of color across our state — in Rockford, Peoria, Champaign-Urbana, the Metro East, and the working-class suburbs of Cook County. These are places with vacant lots, with grandmothers who own their homes outright, with small contractors who know their neighborhoods better than anyone. What they need is permission. Permission to add an ADU so a parent can age in place near their grandchildren. Permission to build a duplex and pass wealth to the next generation. Permission to put a six-unit walkup on a corner where the storefront closed twenty years ago.

I'll tell you why this matters to me personally. I'm a Colombian-American who grew up understanding what a home means for immigrant and working-class families. It's how generations stay close. It's how parents and children take care of each other. It's how wealth gets built one block at a time. I own a two-flat in Chicago with my brother. I recently moved out so that our mom could move in — so she can live in the same building as her son, in the neighborhood she loves, near the people who love her. That's the kind of housing arrangement that built Illinois. Two-flats. Coach houses. A unit upstairs for grandma. Every family in this state, in every community, deserves the chance to do what mine did.

Working Illinoisans can't afford the basics, and it's because we've stopped building them. What does get built too often goes to those at the top first. BUILD changes that. It's how Illinois starts building again, for everyone.Thank you. I welcome your questions.