Sierra Club Supports Shape Oak Park
On September 30, 2026, the Sierra Club Chicago Group sent the following statement to the Oak Park Village Board in support of Shape Oak Park. It is reproduced in full with the Sierra Club's permission.
September 30, 2026
To the Village Board of Oak Park,
My name is David Teeghman, and I am the Executive Committee Chair for Sierra Club’s Chicago Group, which includes Oak Park and nearby suburbs.
Sierra Club is one of the nation’s oldest and largest grassroots environmental organizations with a mission to explore, enjoy and protect our planet. I am writing to you on behalf of Sierra Club to strongly support Oak Park’s bold efforts to add environmentally-friendly gentle housing density through Shape Oak Park.
For over a century, Sierra Club has fought to protect natural spaces and wild places across our country. The simple truth is that we can either build UP through gentle housing density near transit or build OUT through suburban sprawl. Each time we choose not to build a dense housing project in a transit-rich community like Oak Park, a large plot of farmland 40 miles west of here is converted into a new car-centric subdivision. This harms our ability to preserve Illinois’s natural places and to lower carbon emissions from motor vehicles.
Sierra Club is deeply committed to fighting the climate crisis that threatens our wilderness and our very way of life. People who live in higher-density neighborhoods near public transit produce only half the emissions of people in low-density areas. Transportation from motor vehicles is one of the largest sources of carbon emissions fueling the climate crisis. Though hybrid and electric vehicles are a modest improvement on the combustion engine, the best car for the planet is the one you do not have to buy. Shape Oak Park helps make car-free and car-light living much more convenient in Oak Park by adding more housing density near transit.
Sierra Club also understands the intersectionality between environmental, racial and economic justice in Oak Park’s housing policies. Single-family-only zoning is a tool of segregation that raises housing costs to decrease the racial and economic diversity of our communities as we face an affordable housing crisis. We can not let a relic of Jim Crow like single-family-only zoning hold Oak Park back from living up to its inclusive values.
We know there are one-time environmental costs to replace a single-family home with missing middle housing. We must do everything we can to mitigate those one-time environmental costs through landfill diversion practices. But let’s not miss the forest for the trees: the environmental return on investment in building more gentle housing density in a transit-rich community like Oak Park is far greater than the environmental costs.
Sierra Club was proud to work with this Village Board and partners from across the environmental movement to pass Oak Park’s first-in-the-Midwest ban on fracked gas in new housing projects. Thanks to our movement’s incredible work, every new housing project built under Shape Oak Park can take a fracked gas connection offline and replace it with clean and affordable electricity from renewable sources.
Sierra Club is proud to support Shape Oak Park, and we urge Oak Park’s Village Board to enact this environmentally ambitious plan to make Oak Park more walkable, bikeable, transit-forward and affordable.
In solidarity,
David Teeghman
Chicago Group Executive Committee Chair
All statements and Sierra Club iconography in this communication may be quoted and used in part or in full with attribution in any medium to support the passage and implementation of Shape Oak Park.