What kind of buildings Skokie renters live in

Of 6,173 ±597 renter households in Skokie, the largest single group — 25.8% (±5.2 points) — lives in a building the Census files under "3 or 4" units: the three-flat and the four-flat. Here is the full split by building size from the U.S. Census Bureau, citywide and by ZIP, with every margin of error printed — because in Illinois several renter-law exemptions are drawn by exactly this number.

Renter households by building size, citywide

The Census asks each household how many separate units the building it lives in contains. These are the renter-occupied rows of its table B25032 for Skokie, 2020–2024 ACS 5-year; the ± on each count is the Bureau's published margin of error, and the ± on each share is derived from the counts with the Bureau's formula for a proportion (see the methodology).

A row with a small count and a margin larger than the count (for example the mobile-home row) means the survey could not distinguish that number from zero; read it as "very few", not as the printed figure. The shares in this table are of renter households, not of buildings: a 50-unit building counts fifty times, a two-family once or twice.

The same figures in four bands

The law pages on this site turn on a handful of cut-offs — one or two units, four, five, six, twenty — so here are the Census rows grouped into the bands those pages use. Each band's count is the sum of the published rows above; its ± is the Bureau's approximation for a sum (the square root of the summed squared margins), which the Bureau itself calls an approximation that ignores how the rows move together. No band here sums more than four rows.

Two cumulative cuts the exemption rules ask about directly: 45.9% (±5.9 points) of Skokie renters — 2,831 ±455 households — live in a building of four or fewer units, the federal owner-occupied line; and 33.8% (±4.9 points) live in a building of ten or more. Neither figure says whether the owner lives in the building — the Census table does not ask — so the first is a ceiling on how many homes an owner-occupied exemption could reach, never a count of exempt homes.

By ZIP code

ZIP shares are rounded to whole percentage points and their ± figures run wider than the citywide ones — the smallest ZIP's margins can be as large as the shares themselves, so read the ZIP rows as rough proportions. ZIP figures use ZIP Code Tabulation Areas, which approximate but do not exactly match postal ZIP boundaries. Each ZIP's own page carries its renter share, rent and income figures.

Why building size matters for a Skokie renter

No rule below is new on this site — each is quoted on its own page. What this page adds is the denominator: how many renters each size-based line can actually reach.

Fair housing: the owner-occupied exemption stops at four families

The Illinois Human Rights Act's owner-occupied exemption, 775 ILCS 5/3-106(B), covers a building of not more than four families where the owner lives in one; federal law, 42 U.S.C. §3603(b)(2), draws the same four-family line. The rows for single-family, 2-unit and 3-or-4-unit buildings above add up to every Skokie renter household the exemption could reach — the table does not say whether the owner lives in the building, so that figure is a ceiling, not a count — and the advertising rule applies to exempt owners regardless. The fair-housing page quotes 3-106 and the federal text.

The Cook County ordinance: six units or fewer, owner-occupied, is the main exclusion

The Residential Tenant and Landlord Ordinance that covers Skokie excludes owner-occupied buildings of six units or fewer (Sec. 42-802), while the no-lockout rule still reaches them. The Census bands do not break at six: renters in the single-family, 2-unit and 3-or-4-unit rows are in buildings small enough for the exclusion to matter if the owner lives there, the 5-to-9 band straddles the line, and every renter in a building of ten or more units is in one where that exclusion cannot apply. The tenant-rights page explains the ordinance's reach.

Security deposits: state law adds duties at five and at 25 units

The Illinois Security Deposit Return Act governs buildings of five or more units outside the ordinance, and the Security Deposit Interest Act requires interest only in buildings or complexes of 25 or more units once a deposit has been held more than six months. Which rows a Skokie renter's building falls in decides which of those state rules can apply at all. The deposit page has the rates, the clocks and the county cap; the sold-or-foreclosed page adds 735 ILCS 5/15-1508(h), which in a foreclosure of a building of five or more units transfers the deposits to the purchaser with an accounting.

Smoke and CO alarms do not depend on building size

The Smoke Detector Act and the Carbon Monoxide Alarm Detector Act put an alarm within 15 feet of every room used for sleeping in every dwelling unit, and the ten-year sealed-battery rule applies in a single or multi-family home alike — one of the few renter rules in this list that reads the same in every row above. The alarms page quotes both Acts.

Building age is the other dimension

This page sorts Skokie's rentals by size; the lead-paint rules sort them by age, and the same survey answers that too. The lead-paint page prints the share of renter-occupied homes built before 1980 — the closest Census cut to the 1978 federal ban — citywide and by ZIP. In Skokie that share is 76% of renter-occupied homes.

What this page does not say

• Whether the owner lives in the building. B25032 records units in structure and tenure, not owner-occupancy of the building. Every exemption that depends on an owner living downstairs is bounded, not measured, by these shares.
• How many buildings there are. The counts are households. Skokie has far fewer 50-unit buildings than two-families, even where the two rows hold similar numbers of renters.
• What a unit is. The category is what the respondent reports; a house carved into three apartments is "3 or 4", a townhouse that shares a wall is "1, attached", and a condominium apartment is counted by its building's size, not its ownership form.
• Anything about listings. These are households already living here, 2020–2024 ACS 5-year, not units on the market. For today's asking rents see the Skokie rent overview; for who rents, what they pay and earn, the who-rents page.
• One more honesty note on the window. 2020–2024 ACS 5-year includes 2020, the pandemic year, when the Bureau collected about two-thirds of its usual responses and re-weighted the data; margins of error for 5-year estimates containing 2020 run wider than before. The methodology quotes its documents.

Source & caveats

Every number on this page is from the U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey (2020–2024 ACS 5-year), table B25032, Tenure by Units in Structure, renter-occupied rows, pulled through the Bureau's public API for Skokie (IL) and its ZIP Code Tabulation Areas. Margins of error are the Bureau's, at its 90-percent confidence level; shares and band totals are derived here with the Bureau's own formulas, as the methodology explains. The legal lines in the section above are described, not quoted, on this page — the pages linked carry the statutory text and its sources.

Page last updated November 8, 2026 · rent index data through September 2026.