Behind the scenes: The Tenant Trap
By Alejandra Cancino & Maya Dukmasova, Injustice Watch
On paper, Chicago is a “tenant-friendly” town.
This project began more than a decade ago when Maya Dukmasova started requesting data on eviction lawsuits from the Cook County Circuit Court. Court records are public, but in order to analyze the data, Maya needed bulk, case-level information in a database. The court system is not subject to FOIA, but Maya figured out the protocol for accessing the data through many layers of court bureaucracy. She went on to produce investigations on evictions and continued collecting the data, even when not actively working on a story.
By the time David Kidwell and Alejandra Cancino joined Injustice Watch in 2023, Maya had collected 15 years of data. Alejandra had spent years writing about building conditions in public housing and had questions about the conditions of buildings where other low-income tenants live, especially those not receiving rent subsidies.
David had co-edited a Pulitzer-winning investigation using the city’s data on building code violations and we all wondered what we could learn if we linked the city’s building conditions data with the county’s eviction records. Were tenants evicted from buildings frequently docked for building code violations?
We worked with Syracuse University journalism professor Alex Richards, who cleaned the data, standardized addresses and linked the evictions and building code violations.
He also filtered for what the city had defined years earlier as serious code violations, such as sewage in the basement, lack of heat in the winter and a rodent infestation. The final database allowed us to see if evictions were happening at buildings with those kinds of violations.
As we waited for Alex to finish his analysis, we began mapping the legal system and bureaucratic structures surrounding the landlord-tenant relationship. How were code violations reported? Who was responsible for enforcing them? What were the laws protecting tenants? What were the laws protecting landlords? Who were the judges in eviction court and how did they treat complaints about code violations?
We also began following renters across the city who announced the formation of tenant unions specifically to push their landlords to address code violations. Some told us they had withheld a portion of their rent, which is allowed by the city’s landlord-tenant ordinance but it’s risky. Historically, tenants who do so wound up in eviction court.
And that’s exactly what happened: The tenants we were following also landed in eviction court. We thought things would be different in the cases we were following because the city had documented code violations and had even filed lawsuits against landlords for their failure to remedy them. It wasn’t just the tenants’ word against their landlords’. The tenants thought the law would be on their side, and we had no reason to doubt it.
It surprised us — and the tenants — to learn they had no voice in housing court, where city lawyers were prosecuting property owners for code violations. Despite long-established state law that made room for tenants to become parties in such cases, the judge who headed the housing court section routinely ignored or denied requests to join the process.
Without formal rights as parties to a case, tenants who showed up to court were at the mercy of judges’ moods. As they waited on the sidelines, some were repeatedly ignored or silenced by a judge, hoping for a day in court that never came. Lucky ones were sometimes allowed to speak, then reassured and told their interests were being fully served by the city’s building officials and its lawyers.
Meanwhile, eviction court judges didn’t ask tenants if they had a defense against the eviction lawsuit. Nor did they show much interest when tenants attempted to explain why they were withholding rent. While the law allows tenants to withhold a portion of their rent, they found out in court they had to take very specific steps to exercise that right. Even those who followed those steps faced an uphill battle against their landlords. And staving off an official eviction didn’t protect them from retaliatory rent hikes or lease non-renewals that would displace them anyway.
The on-the-ground reporting allowed us to ask better questions of the data. We began looking at patterns and wondered how many buildings were repeat offenders with serious code violations. Some buildings were dinged by inspectors one year, then disappeared from the data only to reappear when they were dinged again. We needed a formula to capture the patterns we were seeing across the 15 years of data. DataMade co-founder Forest Gregg helped us write the code to identify buildings with a history of serious code violations cited in the last three years of the data. In the end, we identified more than 2,600 buildings.
After we verified most of these buildings were some form of housing, we checked whether tenants had been taken to eviction court in the same year their landlords were being cited for serious violations. We found 65% of these buildings fit that category. We then took the analysis to its final step, identifying more than 300 buildings where eviction proceedings against tenants were initiated in the same year the city sued the landlords over the severity of code violations. We found the median city lawsuit against one of these landlords took 10 times longer to resolve than the median eviction case against their tenants.
This last narrowing of the data allowed us to compare how the landlords and tenants were treated differently in courtrooms separated by a mere three floors in the same courthouse. After months of court observations, data analysis and interviews, we discovered separate and unequal justice systems for property owners and their occupants.
The housing court proceedings against landlords, even in the words of the judges presiding over them, are designed to give landlords time to correct their mistakes, not punish property owners. It is essentially a restorative justice process in which the city’s building code prosecutors seek to have a building brought back to safe condition. Meanwhile, in the eviction courtrooms, judges quickly move cases along by ordering tenants to leave or by getting both sides to reach a settlement agreement — which often also requires tenants to move out.
Though landlords and tenants enter into a contractual relationship and both carry responsibilities, our court system is much more swift and efficient at dealing with tenants who don’t hold up their end of the deal. More than 60 percent of tenants who are taken to eviction court in Chicago every year wind up with an eviction order against them. We found only a handful of examples in which landlords who rented out buildings rife with code violations faced serious consequences such as fines, building closures or the appointment of receivers to take over their business.
The judges who decide the fate of those landlords and their tenants told us “slumlords” were a thing of the past in Chicago.
“There might be some bad, bad property owners, but they’re not slum landlords,” the supervising judge heading housing court told us.
But we interviewed tenant after tenant who said they spent most of their income on rent at buildings with collapsing ceilings, flooding sewage, rat and roach infestations, lack of heat, and mold. As we toured the buildings we saw the same conditions Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. moved to Chicago to protest in 1966. And yet, despite years of promised reforms, tenants, especially those who are Black, are still living in substandard conditions. Having a low income, a large family and/or bad credit makes shoddy, unaffordable housing even harder to escape.
After we confronted the Chief Judge of the Cook County court system about the inequities we observed, he announced a new reform: the creation of a pipeline entitling tenants facing eviction to quickly access information about building code lawsuits against their landlords.
In theory, it could bolster their defense — if they’re lucky to land on an eviction court judge willing to listen. Still, most tenants facing eviction come to court without a lawyer, while most landlords send their attorneys to deal with the case. In our adversarial court system, the odds are heavily against litigants representing themselves, without an attorney, no matter what kind of evidence they bring.
The most rewarding aspect of this work for us has been taking what we learned back to our community through workshops teaching people how to use the public records databases that form the bedrock of this project.
A tenant who wants to avoid moving into a building with a history of serious code violations doesn’t need sophisticated data analysis skills; and neighbors who want to know the true identity of their landlord don’t have to remain in the dark. We have shared the basic skills needed to access this vital information with hundreds of people across Chicago through in-person and virtual events, an online guide to using these databases, and a pamphlet that will soon be available across much of the Chicago Public Library system. We plan to continue expanding this public education project in the future.