The Springfield City Council passed an ordinance Tuesday night creating a registry of properties with repeated housing code violations. The registry will include rental properties, personally owned residences and commercial properties – but not all of them.
This is not the comprehensive landlord registry advocates have pushed for since the council voted it down two years ago. Rather, the ordinance doubles as a logistic change to the housing code and a measure to target “bad apple” property owners.
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Mayor Misty Buscher, who introduced the change, said it was spurred by the Illinois General Assembly exploring a ban on crime-free housing ordinances during its spring session.
Prior to Tuesday’s vote, city code included both criminal and housing code violations under the same statute. As written, a future statewide ban on crime-free ordinances could have jeopardized the city’s ability to respond to repeated housing code violations and protect renters from negligent landlords.
“That’s part of why we’re separating (the code), so that if there is legislation passed ever that you cannot have a chronic nuisance ordinance, we can still crack down on our problem properties,” Buscher said.
The second reason for the change is to give the city more teeth in addressing properties with repeated citations. The proposal makes several updates, including steeper fines and placement on an online public registry after three or more independent housing code violations within 12 months.
Owners of cited properties – including the partners or managers behind limited liability companies – would be required to register their names and contact information.
The cited property designation will now apply to all buildings on a property, rather than the city addressing them one by one. Buscher says this will help confront large problem properties such as the 23-building Olde Towne apartment complex, the subject of a protracted legal battle with the city.
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“If you have a rotten apple, you’re not just attacking the rotten part, you’re talking about the whole apple now,” Buscher said. “This ordinance allows us to do that, not just separate out specific buildings of a big campus that might be deteriorating.”
Residents and some alderpeople called a landlord registry long overdue, with many raising concerns that the proposal did not go far enough.
A sticking point in last week’s discussion came from the ordinance’s property-level approach, rather than an owner-level approach. If a homeowner or landlord owns a handful of properties, only the subset with repeated violations would be added to the registry. Critics said the code would be stronger if all properties of the violating owner were added to the list.
The council found compromise on an amendment introduced by Ward 10 Ald. Ralph Hanauer. The final amendment mandated that owners of three or more properties with the cited property designation will be required to register all of their properties, not only those with violations. They will also be subject to a fine of no less than $5,000.
The council voted unanimously to adopt the ordinance as amended, except for Ward 5 Ald. Lakeisha Purchase, who was absent for the vote.
Jill Steiner, president of the Springfield Independent Coalition for Our Neighborhoods (ICON), said that limiting the registry to problematic landlords is a reactive approach which will delay relief to residents.
“It can’t be, ‘this is a registration for bad landlords,’ because then something has to go terribly wrong and somebody has to live in that terribly wrong place before you get on the list,” Steiner said, citing the long timeline for tenants to wait for the completion of three administrative hearings on three separate incidents.
ICON previously expressed disappointment with the ordinance, issuing an opposition statement to the proposal and asking council members to table it for a later date. In particular, the coalition was concerned the ordinance was discussed without proactive outreach to community organizations and without addressing what they see as the key issues at hand.
After learning the rationale for the ordinance, Steiner said ICON appreciated the “extra tool in the toolbox to address properties, whether privately owned, multi-unit, an LLC or a corporation.” However, she still hoped to see further discussion of a landlord registry.
“You haven’t done what we really want to have done, which is a landlord registration,” Steiner said.
Of Illinois’ 10 largest cities, Springfield is one of only three that does not require all landlords to register their properties with the city.
This article appears in CC Jobs Fall 2025.
The reason that our woke city council speakers want a landlord registry is because they are communists who are consumed by envy. They think that somehow, houses should magically be free. They hate landlords – even the good ones – because they hate capitalism.
Hamburger Addict did you forget to take your meds again? Alternatively, are you such a MAGA fanatic that you lost all concept of reality? You are writing your deranged thoughts on many articles printed in the IT. Perhaps instead of medication you should limit your time watching FOX News, Newsmax, or listening to all the brainwashing pod casts that abound. In addition, your thoughts and words match our current dictator/47. Enough said dude.
Hi Bill Bassett,
Thank you so much for the advice! You sound like a highly intelligent individual so I will certainly follow your instructions.
Unfortunately where I live we have a Potential Environmental Disaster on our hands. Possible Raw sewage in peoples back yard. I called My County Board member 3 times. His Name is Kevin McGuire. Still No Response. My elected officials response is Worse than our Property owner.
Don’t bother arguing with Burger Addict. Arguing with fascists gives them fuel and drains your energy. Go write a letter to your alderperson instead.
The city’s property registry doesn’t go far enough. It doesn’t solve the problem—it covers it up. It tracks buildings, not the people who own them. So the worst landlords remain invisible while renters, especially Black low-income families, continue to suffer.
For example:
A slumlord with ten rotting properties can rack up 20 violations in a year and still fly under the radar. Why? Because the registry tracks buildings — not owners. Even when one address gets flagged, nothing touches the rest of their portfolio. They’re free to keep harming dozens of people while they walk away with a slap on the wrist. This is not accountability. It’s a shield for holding companies and slumlords — and a knife in the back of renters.
The racial impact of our housing policy is undeniable. In Springfield:
Black households earn nearly 60% less than white households and face poverty at almost five times the rate.
19% of black households own their homes while 75% of white households own their homes.
62% of black households rent compared to just 27% of white households *the 11th highest gap in the nation.
The consequences of racially harmful policy in Springfield are not abstract. We’ve already seen what happens when Black residents are treated as disposable. The killing of Sonya Massey wasn’t a fluke—it was the end result of a system that devalues Black lives. That same system is at work in this housing policy. When leaders protect landlords from consequences, they leave Black renters more vulnerable to harm—and they know it.
These decisions don’t happen in a vacuum. Mayor Buscher has financial ties to real estate groups and a spouse who runs one of the city’s biggest real estate firms. Council members who voted against a stronger registry took money from the Capital Area Realtors PAC. This isn’t just ideology—it’s profit. The people paying for it are Springfield’s tenants, especially Black and working-class families.
Slavery and segregation didn’t disappear in Springfield—they evolved. Today, control isn’t exerted through chains and whips, lynchings, or fire hoses and attack dogs. It comes through inequitable policy. Through ordinances written to preserve wealth and power, enforced selectively, and marketed as neutral. The property registry is one of these tools: a system that pretends to protect tenants while shielding the people who profit from their suffering. In another era, this city let landowners profit off Black bodies. Today, landlords profit off Black suffering. The mechanics have changed. The logic hasn’t.
Every family pushed out in winter, every tenant too scared to report violations, and every child breathing black mold in their sleep—that’s on the city council and the mayor until this city holds landlords accountable and amends the registry.