Housing - Legal Action Chicago

Legal Action is committed to litigating impact cases and pursuing policy changes that will increase housing options, improve housing conditions, and prevent unwarranted evictions.

Our Values:

Everyone should have stable, decent, and affordable housing. It is a basic right and essential to ensuring human dignity and providing a solid foundation for families to thrive.
Whenever a low-income person is threatened with eviction, experiences unlawful discrimination, or is deprived of safe living conditions, that person must have meaningful access to free and effective legal advice or extended representation.

To learn more about some of our current Housing initiatives, click below.

Public housing residents typically pay a reduced rent equal to a percentage of their income. Under this model, a family with no income pays no rent. Federal law, however, authorizes CHA to charge its lowest-income residents a “minimum rent” of $75 a month—effectively raising the rent for hundreds of CHA residents from $0 to $75. Because this amount is unaffordable for many families, the law also requires CHA to provide eligible families with hardship exemptions from the minimum rent requirement. But CHA grants these exemptions only upon request, and most tenants have no idea the exemption even exists. After drafting a class action complaint challenging CHA’s minimum rent policies, we started negotiating with CHA to find an effective solution to the problem. Our goal is to create a policy that ensures every tenant who is or was eligible for a hardship exemption receives the benefits of that relief.
More than 30,000 eviction actions are filed every year in Cook County. The vast majority are filed against low-income families, many of whom have children or have household members with disabilities. Many of these families have meritorious defenses, but what they do not have—because they cannot afford them—are attorneys who know how to present these defenses or negotiate with opposing counsel. Legal Action is working with other tenants’ advocates on a right-to-counsel initiative that will provide every tenant with meaningful access to an attorney, regardless of whether they can afford to pay for legal representation.