HUD and Chicago Housing Authority sued over Chicago Fire land lease
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The Chicago Housing Authority’s agreement to lease land to the Chicago Fire soccer club did not undergo proper local and federal reviews, a lawsuit filed Thursday by three community organizations alleges.
The lawsuit, which was filed against CHA, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge, asks that the federal agency perform a full civil rights review, delay any further development of the site and compensate the plaintiffs for the alleged damages. When performing a civil rights review, HUD evaluates whether or not a project would violate federal civil rights laws.
The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois Eastern Division by the Coalition to Protect Chicago Housing Authority Land, the Chicago Housing Initiative and the Lugenia Burns Hope Center.
Mayor Brandon Johnson’s office did not immediately respond to the Tribune’s request for comment.
The Chicago Fire, CHA and HUD declined to comment on the lawsuit.
The deal has been mired in controversy from its inception, with the lawsuit being the latest effort to stop the Chicago Fire from building a new training facility on 23 acres of CHA land. The City Council initially blocked the deal and then reversed course in September 2022, but housing advocates have continued to express their disapproval of CHA land being used for non-housing purposes, including in letters to HUD. The project broke ground on April 25.
One of those advocates, Roderick Wilson, executive director of the Lugenia Burns Hope Center, said former Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration did not discuss the land deal with community members and hopes the lawsuit will change how CHA does business.
“CHA has been mismanaged for decades … and they displaced thousands of families,” Wilson said, adding that the agency promised to rebuild the housing for those families. “This is our final step to say, ‘You can’t keep allowing (CHA) to do whatever they want if it is a detriment to our community and to Black people and the city of Chicago.’”
The 53,000-square-foot, two-story performance center with multiple soccer pitches would be on the Near West Side, specifically in Roosevelt Square. The site is the former ABLA Homes housing complex in the 28th Ward, bordered by Roosevelt Road, 14th Street, Ashland Avenue and Loomis Street.
Emily Coffey — one of the attorneys who filed the lawsuit and the director of equitable community development and housing at the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights — said HUD continues to rubber-stamp all of CHA’s moves to privatize public land meant for housing.
“The CHA has been disposing of public housing land to private interests that deprives low-income Black families the chance to live in opportunity areas during an affordable housing crisis, and HUD is supposed to provide oversight of this,” said Coffey, who worked with the National Housing Law Project, Legal Action Chicago and global law firm McDermott Will & Emery on the case.
Coffey said that this particular parcel of land is ripe for affordable housing as the neighborhood is rapidly gentrifying. She also said the site’s proximity to amenities such as a medical district is something a civil rights analysis needs to consider.
“I hope that HUD will withdraw its approval of the application in light of their failure to follow their own process and that the future for this site includes affordable housing,” Coffey said.
On May 18, U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, a California Democrat and ranking member of the U.S. House Financial Services Committee — the group that oversees HUD — sent a letter to Secretary Fudge and CHA CEO Tracey Scott, asking them for clarity regarding their approval process for the land lease agreement.
Waters wrote that she was “deeply concerned” and urged them to “consider halting all demolition activity, as well as the disposition of vacant land owned by CHA, until additional information has been provided regarding HUD’s civil rights review process and CHA’s planning process for vacant lands.”
This action came after Wilson and other organizers went to Washington, D.C., to meet with members of Congress regarding the deal between CHA and the Chicago Fire.
“Working within and giving back to communities across the Chicagoland area is a core value of the Chicago Fire Football Club, the team said in a statement responding to Waters’ letter. “Since the inception of the performance center project, we have been highly engaged with residents and key stakeholders on the Near West Side to ensure the performance center has a positive impact on the community and provides numerous benefits to the area, such as additional funds for housing, safe spaces for youth to participate in free sports programming and employment opportunities for residents.”
U.S. Rep. Jonathan Jackson, a Chicago Democrat, sent his own letter to Fudge and Scott a day after Waters, sharing her concerns that the approval may have been made “without a robust civil rights review.”
U.S. Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García, another Chicago Democrat, said in a statement that the city does not have enough affordable housing and he looks forward to a response to Waters’ letter from CHA and HUD.
“We must acknowledge the broken promises and disinvestment that have displaced thousands of Chicagoans and move forward with clarity in our vision of affordable housing for all,” García said. “While the Chicago City Council voted on and approved this plan, I am sympathetic to the need for careful due diligence.”
According to an April news release from the Hope Center, CHA promised 775 public housing units at the ABLA Homes site and to date had only built 245. ABLA Homes consisted of four combined developments, Addams, Brooks, Loomis and Abbott, and, according to the same news release, housed 3,596 families.
The Fire will finance the $80 million facility and provide an additional $8 million toward the “rehabilitation and preservation of nearby CHA housing and the creation of indoor and outdoor community spaces,” according to news releases from the Lightfoot administration. The lease is expected to generate about $40 million in revenue for CHA over the next 40 years, and that money will go toward existing CHA housing efforts such as those at ABLA Brooks Homes, Loomis Courts and Williams Jones, according to those news releases.
Current Near West Side residents have differing opinions about the development.
Mary Baggett, 53, lived in public housing that was torn down on the proposed soccer facility site and now lives in the ABLA Brooks Homes right next to the land. Baggett, president of the local advisory committee for her complex, said her building has not been rehabbed in more than 25 years and would receive much-needed renovations through the money generated by the deal with the Chicago Fire.
“Right now, the conditions we living in are kind of poor,” Baggett said.
She said at first she was not behind the deal but then the Chicago Fire started to feel like “a family versus people just coming in to build.”
Laura Donaldson, 54, disagrees. A resident for seven years of another nearby public housing complex, Donaldson said CHA has not completed its “Plan for Transformation,” its 2000 pledge to tear down and rebuild tens of thousands of units of public housing for Chicagoans.
“There are more people that are homeless because CHA is not living up to what they are there for: housing people,” Donaldson said. “When the deal was presented to us, they made it seem like it was for the community. This was solely a deal for CHA.”
