Court Case Threatens Civil Rights Protection

By: Shawn AlleeThe Appellate Court of Illinois will soon decide whether to uphold a lower court ruling that landlords can legally refuse to rent to people solely because they have federal rent subsidies, The Chicago Reporter has learned.

The case has alarmed the city’s fair housing advocates, who say it threatens the city’s policy to protect renters with Housing Choice Vouchers, also known as Section 8, one of the few such policies in the state.

If the appellate court upholds the ruling, “it will take away one tool tenants have for gaining access to units in the city,” said Kathleen Clark, executive director of the Chicago-based Lawyers Committee for Better Housing, a nonprofit housing law organization. Many advocates fear the court ruling would allow landlords to legally discriminate against African Americans, who form a majority of the families with vouchers. “Chicago is still a very segregated city, and [the city’s policy] is one tool to combat that,” Clark added.

Real-estate representatives contend that administrative red tape, not discrimination, makes landlords reluctant to take voucher holders. “There are times when a landlord has accepted an individual and they wait two or three months [for the mandated inspection],” and receive rental payments, said Judy Roettig, a spokesperson for the Chicagoland Apartment Association.

The city’s Fair Housing Ordinance currently prohibits landlords from refusing to rent to potential tenants due to their source of income, and the city has interpreted the law to include the federal vouchers. A group of state lawmakers tried unsuccessfully this spring to pass a law that would have banned such discrimination.

But, in June 2002, Cook County Circuit Court Judge Bernetta D. Bush issued the first ruling in favor of a Chicago landlord who refused a voucher-holder, writing that the city’s source-of-income protections did not specifically include vouchers and landlords were under no obligation to participate in the program. The city has joined the voucher-holder in an attempt to overturn Bush’s ruling.

Chicagoans cite “source of income” as the most common form of housing discrimination, according to data collected by the Chicago Commission on Human Relations, the arm of city government that judges civil rights complaints.

From 1998 through 2002, Chicagoans, most of them renters, filed 702 cases alleging housing discrimination, commission data show. Forty-three percent cited their source of income as one reason landlords refused to lease to them. City officials say the income in question is, in most cases, a federal voucher. Racial discrimination, the second most common complaint, was alleged by slightly less than 30 percent.

The idea behind the voucher program, according to federal law, is to give poor families not just decent housing, but the opportunity to live in neighborhoods with better schools and services. Income requirements vary, but in Chicago, a family of four can earn up to $37,700 and remain eligible for the program. More than 33,000 families use vouchers to pay rent, according to CHAC Inc., the private company hired by the Chicago Housing Authority to administer the program. More than 85 percent of the households are African American. Voucher-holders generally pay 30 percent of their income toward the rent, and the government picks up the rest.

Housing advocates say the struggle over the appellate case highlights not just the need for the current ordinance, but also its flaws, including its failure to specifically include vouchers and weak enforcement.

Between 1998 and 2001, the average amount of time it took for the commission to fully investigate a claim of housing discrimination more than tripled, to longer than 21 months. Officials blame the city’s budget squeeze.

Even so, if Bush’s decision is upheld, advocates say they will push the City Council to specifically write voucher-holders into the city’s law. And, whatever the outcome, they say they’ll continue their battle to pass similar laws at the county and state levels.
“I think [these laws are] important to have on the books as an alert to landlords that they have to consider voucher-holders the same” as any other tenant, Clark said.

But the political prospects for strengthened protection seem uncertain. Efforts have recently failed in Cook County and Springfield, and Mayor Richard M. Daley’s office would not comment on whether he would push for changing the law if the city loses the legal battle.

Sara Bales, deputy commissioner of the adjudication division at the city’s Human Relations Commission, said that, even with the law’s faults, the city’s decision to defend its interpretation was “a progressive thing. Overall, despite budget cuts, the city has still made a commitment to [fairness].”

Lagging Enforcement
The current dispute began in April 1999, when June E. Sullivan-Lackey was forced to move from her West Side apartment after it failed a federal inspection, court documents show. She then tried to rent a West Side apartment in a building owned by Julio Godinez, a Chicago landlord.

Her daughter was already a tenant, and Sullivan-Lackey wanted to care for her grandchildren while her daughter was at work. But Godinez’s son informed Sullivan-Lackey he would not accept the voucher for a portion of the rent.

Voucher-holders face a 180-day time limit, and, after failing to find another suitable apartment, Sullivan-Lackey’s voucher expired. She filed a complaint with the commission, and, 21 months later, in April 2001, the commission ruled that Godinez had violated the city’s ordinance.

Chicago landlords typically accept the commission’s rulings. But Godinez challenged the ordinance in court.

“We’ve been all cringing and holding our breath, hoping [a challenge like] this wouldn’t happen,” said Clark.

Neither Godinez nor Sullivan-Lackey would comment for this article.

The long wait for decisions often discourages renters from filing housing complaints, experts say.CHAC will indefinitely extend the 180-day time limit for any tenant pursuing a discrimination case. But Jennifer L. O’Neil, CHAC’s deputy director, said “it’s difficult to motivate a person to do something that’s going to take time.”

In 1999, commission reports show, the time to complete a housing discrimination investigation nearly doubled to more than 12 months, and then rose to 19 months in 2000. Bales said the steep rise began during an effort to clear a backlog that formed after “a huge flurry” of cases was filed in 1998. That year, 241 cases were filed against Chicago property owners, more than double the 94 filed in 2002. She speculates that tenants became more aware of complaint procedures after CHAC restarted the voucher program in 1996.

But the city’s budget crisis last year delayed hiring two staff attorneys, Bales said, and three investigator positions were eliminated. Now the commission is “not completing any cases filed in 2002 and 2003.”

Although the numbers have not been compiled, Bales estimates the average time needed to finish an investigation has risen to more than two years. According to the ordinance, investigations should be completed within 180 days.

Bales said she considered the situation “appalling,” but hopes to shorten investigations to one year. “We need to find ways to work smarter,” she added.

Constricted Choice
Officials say the high number of voucher holders who find units within the 180-day time limit shows the program works.
CHAC’s O’Neil reported that approximately 96 percent of first-time voucher-holders in Chicago are successful. She added that success rates are typically highest in cities with civil rights protection for vouchers.

But vouchers are also meant to help families escape undesirable neighborhoods.

“Locked Out,” a study published in 2002 by the Lawyers’ Committee for Better Housing, found that voucher-based discrimination is already curtailing choice. Trained fair housing testers, pretending to be voucher-holders, telephoned landlords to inquire about advertised apartments. In a random sample of 59 Chicago landlords, 46 percent refused to accept vouchers. The study also found that more than half of the landlords in higher-income neighborhoods refused to accept vouchers.

But the time limit forces renters to use the vouchers or risk losing them, so any discrimination can force participants to take units they might not find desirable.

And advocates claim that, if landlords win the legal right to refuse all voucher-holders, it will further limit those families’ choices and lead many to settle in poor, segregated neighborhoods.

A 1999 study by the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based nonpartisan policy research group, notes that many voucher-holders expect landlords’ resistance and limit their apartment-hunting to “voucher friendly” listings.

“This increases the concentration of people in undesirable neighborhoods; that’s where the landlords advertising Section 8 are,” said Susan Popkin, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute.

CHAC allows landlords to list available units on its Web site; 352 were listed as available in June. The South Side Englewood community had, with 56, the highest number of postings. The neighborhood’s median household income is $18,955, or less than half the city median, census figures show.

The CHA’s Plan for Transformation, a 10-year, $1.5 billion redevelopment effort, in which the agency will move 24,000 families, also intends to offer relocated families access to integrated neighborhoods, and vouchers will play a huge role.

Kathryn Greenberg,the CHA’s managing director for communications,said approximately 50 percent of the displaced CHA families will use vouchers when their public housing units are vacated or demolished.The agency plans to displace 1,276 families this year, and 682 will use a voucher to move into the private market.

In a January report, Paul Fischer, a professor of politics at Lake Forest College, found that 82 percent of CHA voucher recipients ended up “living in areas that are overwhelmingly African-American and disproportionately poor.

Stay Tuned
Advocates point out that the city could settle the issue by amending its Fair Housing Ordinance to specifically protect voucher-holders from discrimination.

But Jennifer Hoyle, public information officer for the city’s Department of Law, said the city was confident about defending the current ordinance in court.

“We don’t think there’s any ambiguity in the ordinance that would actually require us to specify every program that people would be getting assistance from,” Hoyle said. The city will consider an appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court if the appellate judges rule against them, she added.

But Alderman Helen Shiller of the North Side’s 46th Ward, who has long pushed for more affordable housing, said, “if the courts said you had to be more explicit, then I’m sure some of us would say, ‘Let’s be more explicit.’”

Advocates say they will continue their recent efforts to lobby Springfield to prohibit landlords from refusing potential tenants solely because they have vouchers.

State Rep. Karen A. Yarbrough, a Democrat from west suburban Maywood, was the chief sponsor of such a measure in the Illinois House this spring. But Yarbrough’s bill was defeated 59 to 39, and a similar bill sponsored by state Sen. Donne Trotter, a South Side Chicago Democrat, did not make it out of the Senate Rules Committee

Yarbrough remains optimistic. “At least we had a hard, roll-call vote.”

“We will be going back to the state next spring,” said Clark of the Lawyer’s Committee. “I hope [the media] will stay tuned as we attempt to get it passed.”

Contributing: Eryn S. McGary and Alice Ockleshaw of the Medill News Service in Chicago and Brian J. Rogal. Angela Caputo helped research this article.