Apartment hunting can be hard in Chicago, as renters navigate low housing stock and high rental prices. It’s even more difficult for people who use government housing vouchers, which help eligible recipients afford the private rental market.
That’s according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday by HOPE Fair Housing Center, Northside Community Resources and four Black women in Chicago, who say leasing agents from Fulton Grace Realty stopped responding or failed to move their applications forward once they mentioned their vouchers.
“It was a really stressful time,” plaintiff Nancyann Adams said in a statement.
Adams was determined to move into a better apartment when she became pregnant with her second child in 2023. She lived in a dangerous neighborhood, and a visitor at her building had threatened her with a gun, according the suit filed in Cook County.
A Fulton Grace listing agent showed her a unit in West Town and Adams tried to apply. When she mentioned she would be using a housing voucher, the lawsuit said the agent stopped responding to Adams.
The ordeal lasted so long that she was unable to find another apartment before giving birth. She had to resign the lease at the building she felt unsafe in.
After received several complaints about Fulton Grace, HOPE and NCR partnered with Legal Aid Chicago’s Fair Housing Testing program to investigate the real estate firm. From 2022 to 2024, the lawsuit said the organizations found Fulton Grace discriminated more than 20 times against people solely based on their source of income — in violation of a 2023 state law banning the practice.
Fulton Grace is one of the largest apartment renters in the area with more than 1,200 units.
TJ Rubin, owner of Fulton Grace, pushed back against the lawsuit’s claims.
“Fulton Grace Realty vehemently denies all allegations of discrimination, including any claims to the refusal of housing vouchers as a source of income,” Rubin said in a statement.
The lawsuit tells similar stories of three other women.
Belinda Williams was seeking her own apartment after a decade of being homeless. But a Fulton Grace agent refused to give her an application for an apartment on Western Avenue after she mentioned she would use a voucher.
Lakendra Johnson applied with a voucher to lease a Woodlawn apartment for her and her three children. An agent later allegedly said the application was rejected because of problems on her credit report, even though Johnson disputed the denial and her credit score was above 700 at the time. Unable to move, Johnson continues to live in her current apartment with electrical problems, heat outages and a broken stove.
Shavon Ellis started looking for a better apartment in 2023, after a stay bullet entered her West Englewood living room and struck her leg. She had just taken custody of her late sister’s three children and applied with a voucher to move into an apartment on Madison Street, a few blocks from the United Center. A Fulton Grace agent told her processing vouchers “takes more time” and said the apartment was given to another application, according to the lawsuit.
Gov. JB Pritzker signed the Illinois Human Rights Act in 2022, making it illegal for landlords, brokers and agents to discriminate against housing applicants looking to use Section 8 or disability vouchers to help pay their rent.
But housing discrimination is still rampant. An investigation by the Housing Rights Initiative earlier this year found that voucher holders were explicitly discriminated against about 36% of the time.
Chicago has had its own law prohibiting income discrimination for decades. But the new state law gives housing advocates the power to take the cases to court instead of a city administrative hearing, which can be less effective, said MacKenzie Speer, program counsel at Chicago Lawyers’ Committee, another plaintiff in the suit.
Speer said the plaintiffs are seeking damages as well as court action to prevent Fulton Grace from continuing its alleged discrimination against voucher users.
The company’s actions are preventing many Black women from moving to the North and West sides, where Fulton Grace owns several apartments, Speer said. Chicago’s voucher program, funded by U.S. Housing and Urban Development and run by the Chicago Housing Authority, is overwhelming used by households run by Black women.
HOPE filed a similar lawsuit in December. The class-action suit said Mac Properties discriminated against possibly 40 voucher holders, who experienced income discrimination while trying to apply to their properties in Hyde Park and other areas. Mac Properties said hundreds of people have rented through the company using a voucher.
Read the lawsuit: