By Dennis Rodkin
September 4, 2026
Owners of lakefront mansions in Winnetka lost another, and possibly final, round in their battle against a village ordinance that limits future construction on their properties.
A federal judge on Tuesday dismissed the rewrite of a case the property owners originally filed in 2024. They filed after village officials passed an ordinance designed to protect lakefront table land and bluffs, even on privately owned property. Known as the steep slope ordinance, Ordinance MC-01-2024 passed after public uproar in Winnetka over the perceived extensive damage to bluffs during construction of billionaire Justin Ishbia’s 3.7-acre parcel on Sheridan Road. The ordinance includes procedures a property owner can follow to seek approval of a variance.
The plaintiffs, 25 homeowners, argued that preventing people from maxing out their construction on some of the North Shore’s most prized properties would diminish the value of those properties. In July 2025, Judge LaShonda Hunt in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois dismissed the suit because it predicted that property values would go down, rather than showing empirical evidence that values had in fact gone down.
The homeowners amended their complaint and re-filed, arguing the ordinance is “intentionally structured to make meaningful development impossible” with standards so strict any attempt to get a variance would be futile. They argued this amounts to a government taking of private property without providing compensation, which is prohibited under the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
“At most, they allege future theoretical injury,” Hunt wrote, “either in the form of an application that they assume will be rejected or property values that they assume will diminish. But these allegations are not sufficient to sustain their claim.”
Hunt dismissed the four federal counts in the lawsuit with prejudice, meaning they cannot be re-filed. She declined to rule on three claims that pertain to Illinois law and dismissed them without prejudice, which means they can be filed again in state court.
After Hunt’s ruling, Peter Friedman, Winnetka’s village attorney and a partner at Elrod Friedman, defended the ordinance, saying it cesaid was specifically written to protect homeowners like the plaintiffs.
“When the ordinance was considered,” Friedman said today, the village “had hours public testimony and many changes were made to provide additional flexibility and additional room for site specific exceptions to meliorate any loss of property value.”
Baker McKenzie senior counsel Mark Karasik, lead attorney for the homeowners, said he could not comment on the case. Bill Jackson, the first named plaintiff and for past Crain’s stories on this issue a vocal source, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Two other lakefront mansion owners, Andrew Bluhm and Vijay Kotte, declined to comment, and a third, Janice Beck, did not immediately respond to arequest for comment.
Jena Radnay is an @properties Christie’s International Real Estate agent who has represented buyers and sellers of several of the highest-priced properties on Winnetka’s lakefront. She has told Crain’s several times in the past that one factor in the eye-popping prices some lakefront estates have landed in the past two years is that they’re already built out under the pre-ordinance rules.
Buyers, Radnay has said, know they have to grab those properties at any price.
That’s because since the ordinance, she said today, other properties will not be able to keep up by “building infinity pools, terraces, boathouses” and other structures “that normally would increase your home value.”
While Radnay is not a party to the lawsuit and does not speak on behalf of the plaintiffs, she explained what she believes is the flaw in Hunt’s two successive decisions.
“Until you put a lakefront house on the market,” Radnay said, “you don’t know the value lost when your table land (was) decreased with the steep slope ordinance.”
Hunt’s Sept. 1 opinion dismisses the plaintiffs’ contention that the ordinance gives village officials, specifically the engineering director, “unfettered discretion” on decisions about permit applications. They claim the engineer would likely most often lean away from approval. Noting that the ordinance lays out specific steps for seeking a permit, as well as an appeals process, Hunt said this was speculation with no established proof.
Given the detailed mechanism the ordinance created, Hunt wrore, “the arbitrary discretion of the engineering director that (the homeowners) anticipate is, at this point, imaginary.”