City Council is set to revisit an ordinance that would provide more protection from eviction. Here’s what that means for Chicago tenants.
By Justin Agrelo
A makeshift brickwall reads “cancel eviction” outside of The Richard J. Daley Center where Chicago’s eviction courts are held. (Photo: Justin Agrelo)
As the country braces for a possible eviction crisis in which one million Illinois residents may face eviction, Chicago lawmakers are set to debate a proposed ordinance that would provide tenants with more protections from displacement. The proposed Just Cause for Eviction ordinance, backed by Progressive Reform Caucus alderman and housing advocates, was sent to the Committee on Housing and Real Estate in late-July. The ordinance would make it harder for property owners to displace longtime residents.
The move to advance the Just Cause ordinance came just days before City Council passed Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Fair Notice ordinance, a law that requires landlords to provide tenants with more notice before they increase rent or refuse to renew a lease. Though similar, Just Cause and Fair Notice laws each have their own scope and limitations.
Here’s a breakdown of those differences, and what they mean for the estimated 1.37 million renters in Chicago.
A vehicle for displacement
No fault evictions are the lay of the land in Chicago. Currently, landlords are not required to have a reason to evict someone or not renew their lease, so long as they provide tenants with proper notice and follow the correct court procedures. This standard allows property owners to force people from their homes, and often cash-in on rising rents in gentrifying neighborhoods by quietly displacing longtime residents in favor of newcomers with higher incomes.
According to Frank Avellone, a senior attorney and policy coordinator with the Lawyers’ Committee for Better Housing, no fault evictions are often the vehicle developers use to displace and gentrify entire communities in Chicago. “If a venture capitalist or an investment firm wants to come into your neighborhood and buy a bunch of properties, and change the income class of the renters,” Avellone explains, “no fault termination is the mechanism by which that happens.”
In Chicago, Black people, specifically Black women with children, are disproportionately impacted by eviction. It’s estimated that 20% of Chicago’s eviction filings are without cause. Avellone says no fault evictions allow landlords to discriminate or retaliate against tenants with impunity. The proposed Just Cause ordinance that was introduced by Progressive Reform Caucus aldermen in June aims to eliminate those possibilities.
A tool to keep people rooted
Just Cause protections, also known as ‘Good Cause’, require property owners to have a reason for evicting someone. The ordinance lists specific reasons a landlord can take back the unit, which is supposed to eliminate their ability to evict tenants whenever they want. These reasons range from severe damage to the property by the tenant, to the landlord or a close relative wanting to move into the unit themselves.
Just Cause protections are not uncommon in the U.S. They’ve been in place for decades in cities like Seattle and currently apply to nearly all federally subsidized housing programs, including about 50,000 units in Chicago, according to the Lawyers’ Committee for Better Housing. Four states and over 20 cities have Just Cause protections.
At the heart of the fight for Just Cause protections in Chicago is the need to keep longtime residents, specifically residents of color, in their homes, shield people from the devastating impacts of eviction, ensure community stability, and slow displacement in a city that’s becoming less and less recognizable to people who’ve grown up here.
“That sense of expectation that I can be where I am and have a sense of place about my neighborhood–its schools, churches, businesses–would be the foremost element of housing as a human right,” Avellone says. “And that's exactly what Just Cause [protections] begins to do.”
The local fight for Just Cause
Last February, Lightfoot said she’d back a Just Cause ordinance. The mayor had been meeting with the Progressive Reform Caucus and housing advocates for months on the city’s many housing issues, including the need for this type of legislation. To the surprise of some aldermen and housing advocates, Lightfoot introduced a Fair Notice ordinance in May and not the Just Cause ordinance she had been in talks about for months.
Mike Saelens, the spokesperson for the Housing Justice League, a coalition of nearly 40 community groups that is pushing for the Just Cause ordinance, told the Chicago Reader that Lightfoot’s Fair Notice ordinance was not “anywhere near adequate enough to deal with the problems as we see them” and that it “doesn't address the meat of the issue, which is making sure that tenants can stay in place."
Immediately after the mayor introduced her ordinance, upset aldermen sent it to the Rules Committee, where legislation typically goes to die, for what they said was a lack of transparency and unilateral decision-making.
The mayor muscled the ordinance out of the Rules Committee after gaining more aldermanic support by revising it to include more tenant protections than what she had originally proposed.
City Council passed Lightfoot’s ordinance into law in July, which now requires landlords to provide tenants who’ve been in their units at least six months but no longer than three years a 60-day notice before raising rent or not renewing their lease. Tenants who have stayed in their units longer than three years will have a 120-day notice. The standard 30-day notice will still apply to tenants who’ve lived in their units for less than six months.
Fair Notice versus Just Cause
While similar, the Mayor’s Fair Notice law and the Just Cause ordinance have important differences. The Fair Notice law aims to minimize the serious consequences of an abrupt move by providing tenants with more time to pay owed rent or find stable housing, and at times, cover moving costs. However, it does nothing to regulate why a landlord can evict someone, choose not to renew a lease, or take back the unit–all key components of Just Cause protections. Under Lightfoot’s Fair Notice law, landlords can still evict people without reason whenever they want so long as they adhere to the newly extended notice periods. The Just Cause ordinance would also extend notice periods on rent increases and obligate landlords to provide a legal reason for eviction.
The impact of Just Cause in other cities
Just Cause protections have had some success in reducing eviction rates and filings in other cities. A 2019 report in the Journal of Public and International Affairs outlined the impact of Just Cause laws in four California cities: East Palo Alto, Glendale, Oakland and San Diego. Using data compiled by Eviction Lab, a research group at Princeton University that studies eviction, the analysis compared eviction rates and filings in each city before and after Just Cause laws were implemented. According to the report, the Just Cause legislation had a discernible effect on eviction and eviction filing rates, decreasing the eviction rate by almost a percentage point, which doesn’t sound like much, but the impact was nonetheless present.
The fate of the Just Cause ordinance in Chicago
It’s unclear whether the Just Cause ordinance will make it out of the Housing and Real Estate committee for a full vote when City Council reconvenes in September. And even if the ordinance were to pass, it alone won’t be enough to fend off developers looking to gentrify the next Black or brown neighborhood in Chicago. Because the Just Cause ordinance wouldn’t control how much a property owner can increase rent, landlords would still be able to displace tenants simply by inflating rents to new unaffordable heights. Knowing this, advocates often call for Just Cause protections to be paired with rent control, so that together these laws have enough teeth to protect vulnerable communities. In order for that to happen, legislators would first need to repeal the statewide ban on rent control, which has been in place in Illinois since 1997.
But even if Just Cause and rent control were to pass, they wouldn’t automatically be the silver bullet that ends displacement in Chicago. In places like Oakland, California, which has both Just Cause and rent control laws, thousands of longtime residents were still unable to withstand displacement as a result of legal loopholes.
Despite its shortcomings in other cities and the flaccidness of the new Fair Notice law, the fight for Just Cause in Chicago is not over. Avellone says housing advocates have learned from other cities’ shortcomings, and are determined to make housing an actual human right in Chicago. Even without rent control, a Just Cause ordinance is an important step towards keeping Chicago’s longtime residents in place, so that the communities we know and love today are still here in years to come.
The Lawyers’ Committee For Better Housing is helping Chicago tenants access housing assistance programs through their Rentervention tool.
This story is available to republish under a Creative Commons license. Read City Bureau’s guidelines here.
Support City Bureau’s community-centered reporting by becoming a City Bureau Press Club member today.
To get twice-monthly emails including Chicago news and events, sign up for City Bureau’s Chicago newsletter.