After eight years on the waitlist, Mikia Knighten was excited to learn in October 2022 that she had received a housing voucher from the Chicago Housing Authority.
The rental subsidy would allow her to move to a better neighborhood with better opportunities for her and her now 4-year-old daughter, she said.
It was going to “take a little bit of a load off” in a high-cost housing market, she said.
But after spending about eight months applying for apartments, Knighten found no landlord willing to accept her rental subsidy, and her allotted time from CHA to find a unit where she could use her voucher was up, according to the lawsuit she filed in August alleging that housing providers discriminated against her based on her source of income.
Knighten’s lawsuit alleges that housing providers said they did not accept housing vouchers, did not work with CHA or did not respond when she told them she had a housing voucher.
“It was really dehumanizing,” Knighten said. There’s “a real stigma behind having the voucher.”
Within the last year and a half, housing attorneys have filed some of the first lawsuits, including Knighten’s, allowed under Illinois’ nearly two-year-old statewide law preventing discrimination on the basis of someone’s source of income. All the complaints allege that the plaintiffs, who had housing vouchers, were discriminated against. Advocates said the discrimination is still widespread across the city and state despite the law, and they’re eager for legal rulings to help hold real estate professionals accountable.
As the cases wind their way through the court system, housing counseling and legal aid organizations are continuing to enforce the law through other means, such as filing claims with local and state human rights agencies. Before the new state law took effect, attorneys were not legally allowed to sue alleging source of income discrimination; the local human rights commissions in Chicago and Cook County were the primary route for holding housing providers accountable, and their rulings do not come with consequences as severe as lawsuit verdicts.
Knighten, who lives in Lansing, is suing 14 parties, ranging from individuals to real estate brokerages to smaller corporations. Some defendants did not return requests for comment. Others said they did not know they were being sued, that they were no longer the owners of the property in question, had not heard of the plaintiff or declined to comment on pending litigation.
Knighten’s voucher was through the Housing Choice Voucher Program, the primary federal housing voucher program. Formerly known as Section 8, it allows public housing authorities to provide subsidies to low-income residents to find housing in the private market.
The multi-billion-dollar program, administered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development through local public housing authorities, helps more than 2 million households nationwide. The Chicago Housing Authority is supplying vouchers to more than 52,000 renters through the program, according to HUD data. Residents with vouchers from the CHA pay 30% to 40% of their income toward rent and utilities; the CHA covers the rest.
It can take years, sometimes decades, to get off the waitlist for a housing voucher. About 18,000 households are on the CHA’s waitlist. When the agency last opened the waitlist for four weeks in 2014, it got 280,000 applications, 70,000 of which were approved for the list.
In Illinois, the majority of voucher holders are Black, like Knighten, as the Black population has historically faced racial discrimination preventing them from building wealth, making them more likely to use vouchers. Housing advocates said source of income discrimination is another form of racial discrimination.
For those who do get off the waitlist, in 2022 only 61% were able to use their CHA vouchers, the agency’s most recent year with complete data.
The CHA data are consistent with national figures. Only 60% of voucher holders are able to use them to lease homes, according to a 2024 national study conducted with data from 2015 to 2019 by New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. The numbers are worse for markets with an older housing stock and for voucher recipients of color, the study says, both of which apply to Chicago.
Michael Mini, executive vice president of the Chicagoland Apartment Association, a trade group that represents housing providers, said he has not heard of any problems or concerns related to source of income discrimination.
The “vast majority” of his members are “very familiar” with the voucher program and had already been following the city and county laws prior to the statewide law’s passage, Mini said. He said his organization notified its members downstate and beyond when the state law was passed.
“Source of income is a protected class. Like any other protected class, we expect our members to comply with the law,” Mini said.
But housing advocates said source of income discrimination happens overtly and covertly. Sometimes real estate professionals explicitly say they will not accept a housing voucher; other times they do not count the voucher toward a renter’s income and say the renter does not have sufficient income to qualify for the unit. Many property owners and managers require a renter’s monthly income to be three times the monthly rent. And sometimes required credit scores and high application fees are limiting factors for voucher holders.
“There are always emerging strategies … that a landlord can employ that really accomplish the same thing,” said Susan Theiss, an attorney focused on fair housing rights with Legal Aid Chicago. “Landlords are always shifting the ground when they really don’t want to rent to people with housing assistance.”
Theiss and other advocates said the number of callers alleging source of income discrimination has increased since the state law passed, a sign that information about it is getting out.
In one case, fair-housing counseling organization Open Communities and one of its clients filed a lawsuit in 2023 in federal court in Chicago against national property management company Harbor Group Management and software company PERQ. The lawsuit alleged that Harbor Group Management employed an artificial intelligence chatbot that systematically rejected online applicants who had Housing Choice Vouchers.
In January, the parties settled for monetary damages and entered into a two-year consent decree that requires Harbor Group to provide Open Communities data and access related to its fair-housing policies and practices, including its use of PERQ software.
In another case, filed Dec. 17 in federal court in Chicago as a class-action suit, four Black women alleged that Mac Properties discriminated against them for their source of income, housing vouchers and race, steering them away from “desirable apartment buildings,” according to the lawsuit. That hurt them financially and caused them to lose out on housing opportunities in Hyde Park given Mac’s dominance of the rental market in the neighborhood, the suit alleges.
In a statement, a Mac Properties spokesperson denied the allegations in the suit, calling them “entirely baseless” and citing the company’s “ongoing training” of its leasing agents to ensure they comply with “all legal and ethical standards.” The company said it has rented to hundreds of voucher holders in its 5,000 units in Hyde Park. The spokesperson also said one of the plaintiffs filed a complaint with the Chicago Commission on Human Relations that was dismissed this year.
“Mac Properties has a proven and longstanding commitment to providing equal access to housing for all individuals, regardless of income. We strictly adhere to all local, state, and federal housing laws — without exception,” the spokesperson said in the statement.
The outcomes of the initial lawsuits will outline for housing providers and judges how the law should and will be enforced, attorneys said.
Advocates and their clients are also using the new state law to help with eviction cases and are still filing cases through the local and new state human rights commissions.
Allison Bethel, director of the Fair Housing Legal Clinic at University of Illinois Chicago, said she has clients who are voucher holders and are being evicted and/or are facing poor living conditions or fines because of their source of income. The clinic has settled cases where clients have stayed housed or received money, Bethel said.
The Chicago Commission on Human Relations estimates it has received 1,700 complaints related to source of income discrimination since 1990, the year the agency began handling these types of complaints. The commission saw the number more than double from 2022 to 2023, with 101 source of income discrimination complaints filed in 2023, according to agency data provided to the Tribune. A commission spokesperson said many of those complaints were from repeat filers who are typically renters in the midst of their housing search who have been turned away from several housing providers.
In Cook County, fewer than 75 complaints have been filed since 2013, when it made source of income discrimination illegal, according to the county. Since 2022 the Cook County Commission on Human Rights has seen an uptick in filings. A county official said there has been a recent increase in filings since September, too, when the county began accepting complaints via an online form.
The Illinois Department of Human Rights, which began accepting source of income complaints in January 2023, when the statewide law took effect, received 34 complaints in 2023 and 48 in 2024 as of November, according to data provided to the Tribune.
Advocates and attorneys say some cases are settled before an investigation is completed. They also said it can take several months to over a year for the IDHR to process and investigate a complaint, with many of its cases still awaiting results. Some of those advocates said they hope this process can be sped up.
The IDHR said in a statement that each case is unique, with some taking longer than others depending on factors such as “the number of cases received by the agency, the complexity of the allegations raised in a charge, the time parties need to understand and respond to requests for information and/or documents, and investigator caseloads and staffing allocations.”
As Illinois heads into year three of its statewide source of income protections, housing advocates will continue their work and await verdicts that they hope can help guide their paths forward.
“We’ve just got to get … the word out more. … And (we) need a couple of court decisions, too,” Bethel said.
For Knighten — who works at a call center and is paying more than 1.5 times as much for rent as she would have with a voucher — she hopes her case raises awareness.
“Just because people are getting assistance from the government doesn’t make them less of a person,” Knighten said. “(I want to) make sure no one else has to go through what I went through when they are just trying to get help to survive.”
