Brookfield officials are continuing to discuss a proposed rental registration ordinance, but landlords and tenants alike in the community say they’re unhappy with the possible inclusion of yearly inspections of random personal living areas that village staff say could catch health and safety issues.
The village board considered the program for the third time at its Nov. 10 committee of the whole meeting, where Libby Popovic, Brookfield’s community development director, brought forth three new versions. The board will discuss the matter again on Nov. 24, Popovic said.
One version of the program would include annual exterior and common area inspections and triennial random unit inspections, while another would see no in-unit inspections, with common area and exterior inspections occurring every three years. The final version would not include any inspections and would only require rental property owners to register their units each year.
Registering would cost $50 per building for the least stringent version of the program, with fees ranging up to $225 for buildings with more than five units in the strictest version with in-unit inspections.
At the committee meeting, Popovic said information about the registered owner of any given property is noted at the county level and follows a complicated chain from the county recorder of deeds to the treasurer, who associates the information with tax bills and sends it to the assessor.
“Those are three separate websites that you would have to look at to really see who is the legal owner of a property,” but that’s “what staff has to do now to get to the actual owner of a property,” which is why registering the owners at a local level would be useful, she said.
While several public commenters and trustees asked to see more data supporting the need for in-unit inspections to proactively target health and safety issues, one of the stated goals of the program, Popovic said little exists.
“We don’t have specific data because, when somebody calls [to complain], we don’t know if it’s a tenant, or it’s an owner. The data is difficult to come across. We would have to go through and try to vet all of the different files to find out,” she said. “That’s part of why we’re here. We don’t have the data. It was not kept correctly, and it’s difficult to come across. With rental registration, the burden and the onus is on the owner and not on the village or the staff or public resources to find that information.”
Community members speak out
Lou Arzon, a rental property owner who has given public comment against the proposed ordinance, told the Landmark on Nov. 13 he felt there was no evidence supporting the need for a registration program.
“If you are using [other] towns as analogues for, ‘This is what excellence looks like,’ maybe the village doesn’t have its own data, but they could at least, perhaps, do some due diligence” in reaching out to other municipalities, Arzon said. “At least try to understand, have there been any type of measurable safety outcomes as a result of implementing this program?”
At the meeting, Popovic presented examples of similar programs in 20 communities across Cook County, including Riverside, Oak Park, Evanston and more.
Two of Arzon’s tenants, an engaged couple who have lived in Brookfield since July and asked to remain anonymous, said Monday they had concerns about potential in-unit inspections.
“My number one thought was, ‘OK, my privacy,’” one of the tenants said. “This is our first time renting, so it was like, ‘Oh my God, what’s going on?’ We didn’t even know this was possible … I feel like they’re going to be invading my privacy.”
“I do not own a home, but, to me, this is my home,” she added.
Her fiance said he worried Arzon could pass the registration fee onto the couple and make their housing expenses less affordable.
“I don’t feel like there’s a need for them to come in and do an inspection,” he said. “In case it does go in effect in January, that’s probably going to make our rent go up. That’s maybe going to kick us out of here and [make us] go somewhere else because the rent is going to be out of our budget.”
The need, from staff’s view
In an interview, Popovic told the Landmark on Nov. 14 she wasn’t fully surprised by the amount of pushback against the program from public commenters.
“Generally, residents aren’t excited to implement any type of additional restrictions or ordinances of that nature. Rental registration ordinances tend to be a little bit more contentious,” she said. “I anticipated they would come, as they should, so they can make their opinions known.”
Popovic said the idea to create a rental registration program was spurred from the need to closely track who owns a property when tenant issues do come up.
“It’s not something that we would want to simply create for the sake of having it. Our primary goal is to strengthen public safety and property maintenance,” she said. “We were running into some issues with the property maintenance, mostly deferred maintenance. In some of the colder months, in the year and a half that I’ve been here, we receive a lot of calls from tenants that are seeking the village to step in or that are complaining about things that their landlords haven’t or have done. That was the catalyst.”
Popovic said there is some data to back up the need for a program, but much of it has been poorly recorded.
“We’ve been combing through all of the different files. It’s not all in one source or one platform, so that makes it a little difficult for us, and it certainly takes some manpower and some work to get it together,” she said. “In 2023, there were very few property maintenance matters that were actually being completely processed as they should. In 2024, we did see an uptick in that, and we’ve seen an even higher uptick in 2025. To date, and I just got this statistic, we’ve already processed about 1,100 matters.”
She said implementing the registration program would streamline the process further so Brookfield can proactively ensure landlords are treating their tenants right.
“Staff is spending hours locating a correct owner or navigating outdated county records or chasing incorrect information. The registration shifts it to the responsible party, who is the landlord,” she said. “It’s something that would allow us to identify properties that may need additional work, which, in turn, protects the tenants that are staying there. It creates a very structured way that we can address all of the issues, so they aren’t costly or dangerous.”
