Fulton Grace Realty, which manages about 1,200 rental units across Chicago and its suburbs, has settled a lawsuit accusing its agents of discriminating against renters who use Chicago Housing Authority subsidy vouchers. Five Black women filed the suit in 2025, alleging the company's leasing agents rejected or simply stopped responding to applicants once they mentioned having a housing voucher.
As part of the settlement, first detailed by the Block Club Chicago, Fulton Grace Realty agreed to retrain all 400 of its agents within three months and designate an internal Voucher Liaison to oversee compliance. The five women and the advocacy organizations that joined the case received undisclosed amounts from the company, according to the outlet's report. TJ Rubin, an attorney for Fulton Grace, said the settlement was a good-faith resolution and did not represent an admission of fault by the company.
Mackenzie Speer represented the voucher holders in the case. One plaintiff, Belinda Williams, had received a two-bedroom voucher from the Chicago Housing Authority, but a Fulton Grace agent told her she needed a co-signer because she did not meet income and credit requirements — despite the voucher covering the remainder of her rent and utilities beyond her own contribution. Voucher recipients typically pay about 30 percent of their income toward rent and utilities, with the subsidy covering the rest.
Ghosted After Mentioning a Voucher
Another plaintiff, Nancyann Adams, toured a Fulton Grace apartment at 2522 W. Superior St. in West Town in 2023, but the agent stopped responding to her once she mentioned her rental-subsidy voucher, according to the lawsuit. The pattern reflected findings from the Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, which detailed how plaintiff Shavon Ellis sought housing after being shot in her West Englewood living room in 2023, while plaintiff Lakendra Johnson was rejected for a Woodlawn unit despite a credit score above 700.
Under the settlement terms announced August 10, Fulton Grace Realty agreed to waive application fees for people using vouchers and other rental subsidies for one year starting August 3, and to limit credit screening to housing- or utility-related debts incurred within the past two years, per the civil rights committee. The company must also adopt a formal policy directing agents to calculate minimum income requirements based on a tenant's individual out-of-pocket rent share, rather than the total contract rent that includes the subsidy. The monitoring period for the settlement runs through August 2027.
Advocacy Groups Found a Pattern Through Testing
The Hope Fair Housing Center, which partnered with Northside Community Resources, the Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Legal Aid Chicago on the case, said advocacy groups conducted around 30 fair-housing tests between 2022 and 2024 and found evidence of source-of-income discrimination in 20 of them involving Fulton Grace. Michael Chavarria said testing is one of the most important tools we have because housing discrimination is rarely announced openly. A voucher is supposed to expand a family's choices, Chavarria said, not become a label that closes doors.
Hope Fair Housing Center has received more than 200 allegations of source-of-income discrimination from around Illinois since state lawmakers strengthened the Illinois Human Rights Act three years before 2026, with such allegations comprising 23 percent of the center's total cases during that period. The Chicago Commission on Human Relations received 31 source-of-income complaints from January through early August 2026, while source-of-income complaints accounted for more than a third of 82 total housing discrimination complaints citywide that year — up from 34 of 88 such complaints filed in 2025.
A Statewide Pattern Beyond One Brokerage
The Fulton Grace case landed amid a broader statewide reckoning over voucher discrimination. In January 2025, the watchdog group Housing Rights Initiative submitted 176 complaints against 165 Chicago-area real estate brokerages, agents and landlords to the Illinois Department of Human Rights, in what advocates called the largest housing discrimination case in state history, according to Disability Rights Advocates. Undercover testing that led to those filings found prospective tenants who disclosed Section 8 vouchers faced discriminatory refusal or ghosting 36 percent of the time, as reported by The Real Deal.
Illinois laws already prohibit landlords from turning away tenants based on housing subsidies. Chicago's Fair Housing Ordinance and the Cook County Human Rights Ordinance banned source-of-income discrimination locally before Governor J.B. Pritzker signed House Bill 2775 in May 2022, making Illinois the 20th state to ban such discrimination statewide, according to Housing Choice Partners. That statewide ban took effect January 1, 2023.
A Live Legal Fight Over Paperwork Loopholes
Enforcement of the law continues to face challenges in court. Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul and the Illinois Department of Human Rights filed a brief in August 2026 supporting a Peoria tenant, urging a state appeals court to reject a landlord's attempt to limit the state's ban on source-of-income discrimination after that landlord refused to sign housing assistance paperwork for the tenant. The agencies argue in the brief, detailed by EdGlenToday, that a landlord's refusal to sign Housing Assistance Payment paperwork amounts to illegal discrimination, even though a lower court had previously accepted the landlord's defense.
The stakes for enforcement are significant given how many households rely on non-wage income. Data published by the Shriver Center on Poverty Law in February 2024 found that over 50 percent of Illinois households rely on non-wage income, including government rental vouchers, Social Security disability payments, child support and public assistance. Enforcement actions have reached beyond Chicago as well — the South Suburban Housing Center reached a settlement in December 2025 with Pine Ridge Apartments, a 224-unit complex in Springfield, which paid $6,000 in damages over allegations of a blanket policy rejecting Housing Choice Voucher applicants.
Chicago's Voucher Waitlist Remains Closed
Even with stronger legal protections, Chicago Housing Authority voucher holders face a severely constrained private market. The Chicago area has just 31 homes available for every 100 low-income renters. The CHA's Housing Choice Voucher waitlist has remained closed to new applicants since 2014, when 282,000 people sought to get on the list and 75,000 were ultimately added through a lottery. As of May 2026, that waitlist included more than 16,000 households still waiting for a voucher to become available.
