John Warren has been in the real estate business for a decade, and for the first time, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents showed up armed at one of his properties last week to conduct a raid.
Until recently, it wasn’t normal for Warren to see ICE agents patrolling Chicago area neighborhoods. Warren, operations manager and managing broker of Forte Properties, oversees 450 units, mostly in western suburbs with heavily Latino populations such as Berwyn and Cicero.
He received word from his maintenance staff at a 24-unit apartment building in Cicero on Oct. 7 that there were federal agents at the property.
“It is kind of shocking,” Warren said. “You hear it on the news that these things are happening, and it feels far away. I was in the building two hours before [the raid].”
No one, to Warren’s knowledge, was picked up by ICE. He might not know until rent is due, and payments are missed.
The fear among residents and workers, both documented and undocumented, is palpable, he said. Residents are scared to open their doors for maintenance workers, and it has become harder to schedule repairs with his work force.
Other property managers and owners said workers are not showing up to job sites — frightened by ICE — and it’s causing delays on building repairs and maintenance. Some residents are not able to pay rent on time as they are holed up at home, too afraid to go to work with federal agents popping up throughout the city.
This adds to the already rising business costs for building owners and managers, some of whom say they are eating the increased expenses connected to ICE raids. But if the enforcement activity continues into the busy spring moving season, property managers and owners like Warren said they may have to increase rents to recoup some of their costs.
The housing providers’ concerns follow a recent ICE raid at a South Shore apartment building. Armed federal agents in military fatigues busted down doors overnight, pulling men, women and children from their apartments, some of them naked. Agents approached or entered nearly every apartment in the five-story building, and U.S. citizens were among those detained for hours.
Agents from the U.S. Border Patrol, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives arrested 37 people in the raid, including some who “are believed to be involved in drug trafficking and distribution, weapons crimes and immigration violators,” according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Gene Lee, founder of TLG Development, is keeping a closer eye on the 18 apartments he owns and manages in Washington Park and Bronzeville, following the South Shore raid. He doesn’t want there to be any “activity making for unsafe living conditions,” after he heard about potential gang activity at the South Shore building. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has not provided evidence to the Sun-Times of the alleged gang activity at the building.
Lee has made sure to arrive on time at his buildings when work is scheduled so his contractors aren’t vulnerable as they wait outside.
He said most of his workers are of Hispanic descent, and he has noticed absenteeism and disguises, with workers wearing street clothes then changing into work gear once inside the building. The absences have caused paint and electrical jobs to be deferred, and Lee’s labor costs to rise. He’s had to spend time finding new vendors, as opposed to relying on workers who he has known for years.
When moving season starts in the spring, he will have to decide if he passes on the added costs to tenants or continue to stomach them himself.
“All the risk you try to factor into making a business decision to lease and buy property, never had I had to compute ICE or federal authorities,” said Lee, who has been in the real estate industry for a decade.
Housing providers said the immigrants they rent to and work with are law-abiding, tax-paying individuals and families. The Illinois Human Rights Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of citizenship and immigration status.
The last time Tracy Scanlon was this scared for Chicago and her community was after Sept. 11, 2001. She was newly married to a Mexican immigrant and would go on to start her property management business in 2003 called Edge and Up, after Edgewater and Uptown. Scanlon now manages 70 buildings, totaling around 1,000 units, on the North Side.
“We didn’t need them here,” Scanlon said, referring to ICE. “Nobody is benefiting by this. It is making even my American residents and staff, who are Black and brown, scared to go to work.”
Scanlon had contractors tell her two weeks ago that they could not come fix a clogged bathtub and overflowing toilet at one of her buildings because ICE was in the neighborhood.
She had an HVAC system installed in an apartment last week, after waiting four weeks instead of the normal two because the workers were staying home. These delays are costly. She could not rent the apartment until the system was installed.
She has already had tenants, most of them immigrants who have resided in America for years, miss rent payments or notify her that they are going to miss payments because they were unable to work for fear of ICE.
She is providing residents with resources for rental assistance and outreach programs, hoping they can clear their debts. But Scanlon said she will have to initiate an eviction promptly because the process can take months.
Drexel Properties founder Jeff Weinberg has been buying and managing affordable and upscale apartments throughout Chicago for more than 30 years. His company, which has 1,100 units, has rented to migrants through the 2023 state rental assistance program.
Weinberg has workers he has known for decades who “can’t do their jobs and are trying to do their jobs and want to do their jobs” but are “scared to death.”
“That’s directly hurting our ability to deliver service to our tenants,” Weinberg said.
While he’s not searching for new workers yet, the cost to replace his staff would be substantially more than if he were able to retain them and the quality of the work would be lower.
“If this continues like this … it is going to hurt renters and hurt renters at the bottom of the bottom rung the most,” Weinberg said.
Rent increases would come as Chicago is in the midst of a severe housing shortage of, by some estimates, over 100,000 units, particularly affordable ones.
For Warren, of Forte Properties, costs to hire vendors such as painters and landscapers have not gone up yet, but he estimates roughly 30% to 40% of his contractors are not coming to work.
“Inefficiencies hurt our community and make housing more expensive to provide,” Warren said.
He called the situation “tragic.” Warren also manages buildings in Broadview, the suburb where an ICE detention center is housed.
“America was built by immigrants,” Warren said. “For us to be chasing the good guys is counter productive.”
Contributing: Cindy Hernandez and Mary Norkol