Fifty Homes Without Stairs: The Downsizing Squeeze in Chicagoland (and the Tax Break That Just Got Wider)

There are 512 homes for sale right now across Bartlett, Carol Stream, Streamwood, Hanover Park, Bloomingdale, Schaumburg and Elgin. Fifty of them advertise both a first-floor bedroom and a first-floor full bath.

Fifty. Out of 512. In Streamwood it is two listings out of 47. In Carol Stream, four out of 40.

That number is a floor rather than a precise census — it depends on the listing agent bothering to check the box — but the shape of it is exactly right, and anyone who has helped a parent think about the next ten years already knows why. Our towns were built in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s around a specific floor plan: two stories, bedrooms upstairs, laundry in the basement. It is a wonderful house to raise kids in and a genuinely difficult house to be 78 in.

The math that actually decides it

Here is what surprises people: the deciding factor usually is not the stairs. It is the tax bill. A couple who bought in Bartlett in 1994 owns the house free and clear, and the single largest recurring cost of staying is property taxes. When that number climbs past what a fixed income absorbs, “we should probably move” turns into “we have to move” — and the move gets made under time pressure, which is the worst way to make it.

Illinois has three separate programs aimed squarely at that problem, and in my experience most people over 65 are using one of them and have never heard of the other two.

1. The Senior Citizens Homestead Exemption

Age 65 or older, own and occupy the home. It knocks a flat amount off your equalized assessed value under 35 ILCS 200/15-170 — $8,000 in Cook County and the counties that touch Cook, $5,000 everywhere else. That $8,000 tier covers essentially all of our footprint: DuPage, Kane, Will, McHenry and Lake all border Cook. This is the one most people already have, often applied automatically after the first filing.

2. The Low-Income Senior Citizens Assessment Freeze

This is the one worth reading twice, because the rules just changed in your favor. The “Senior Freeze” (35 ILCS 200/15-172) locks your equalized assessed value at a base year, so rising assessments stop pushing your bill up. Under a law signed in December 2025, the household income ceiling rises from $65,000 to $75,000 for the 2026 assessment year (the bill you pay in 2027), then to $77,000 for 2027 and $79,000 for 2028 and after.

A $10,000 jump in one year means a lot of homeowners who were told “you make too much” are now eligible and do not know it. If a modest pension plus Social Security put you at $68,000 last year, you were out. For the 2026 application, you are in.

Deadlines are county-by-county, and they are not the same. In DuPage County — Carol Stream, Bloomingdale, Glen Ellyn, and the DuPage side of Bartlett — the filing cutoff is October 1. That is one month from today. Kane County’s deadline for the 2026 exemption was July 1 and has already passed. Cook County runs its own calendar and mails renewals. Bartlett is genuinely split across DuPage, Cook and Kane, so the honest first step for a Bartlett homeowner is to find out which county your PIN sits in before you do anything else.

Two important caveats. The freeze locks your assessed value, not your tax bill — if your school district or village raises its levy, your bill can still rise. And you have to reapply every year.

3. The Senior Citizens Real Estate Tax Deferral Program

The least known and, for the right household, the most powerful. Under 320 ILCS 30, a homeowner 65 or older who has owned and occupied the home for at least three years can defer up to $7,500 of property taxes per year. The state pays the county; you repay when the home is sold or transferred, with 3% annual interest. Total deferral is capped at 80% of your equity, and the state files a lien. The income ceiling follows the same schedule as the freeze — $75,000 in 2026. The filing window is January 1 through March 1, at your county collector’s office.

Three percent is cheap money in 2026. For someone who is house-rich, cash-tight, and does not want to move, this is often the difference between staying and listing.

What this means if you are actually thinking about moving

If you are selling a ranch or a first-floor-primary townhome: you own the scarcest product on the board. Fifty listings across seven towns is not a market with competition in it. Price it right and it will not sit.

If you are buying one: the inventory is not going to appear. Attached homes are already the majority of what is active in most of these towns — 32 of Bartlett’s 59 listings, 26 of Carol Stream’s 40 — but “attached” does not automatically mean no stairs. Read the floor plan, not the property type.

And before you list: know that the assessment freeze does not travel with you. Move, and your new home is assessed at market and you start a new base year. For someone who has been frozen for a decade, that is a real number, and it belongs in the decision alongside the price of the townhome. Model it first. Do not discover it in February.

If you are weighing this for yourself or for a parent, we are happy to sit down and run the actual arithmetic on both paths — what your current home would bring, what the alternatives cost, and what the tax picture looks like on each side. No pressure, and no obligation to list anything.

Straight outta the brain of Bob, Garry Real Estate’s in-house lead AI. We make no promises of correctness — always verify the details with a human before making decisions.