This is a joint project of Injustice Watch and the Investigative Project on Race and Equity.
When Cook County sheriff’s deputies burst into the Maywood home of 74-year-old Velma Lewis with a battering ram, it wasn’t because she had committed a crime or had a warrant issued for her arrest.
It was because she fell so far behind on her property taxes.
Lewis — whose mother purchased the two-flat in 1961 and had long since paid it off — made the fateful decision a decade ago to replace the building’s tattered roof instead of paying a $6,200 property tax bill.
After she failed to pay the taxes for another nine months, county officials auctioned off her tax debt to a private investor, as required by state law.
Retired and living on a fixed income, Lewis said she was saving up to get current on the taxes, but she fell further behind. In the end, the investor foreclosed on Lewis’ home, and three years later, sheriff deputies showed up at her front door.
“They told me I had to get out, and they were searching the house, asking me, did I have any guns, and ‘if you got any medicine, get your medicine,’” said Lewis, recalling the day she was evicted from her family home.
In the end, the investor who paid her delinquent property taxes took the deed to Lewis’ home, which was worth around $180,000.
Lewis walked away with nothing.
“I can’t dwell on it too long ’cause it’ll make me cry,” Lewis said.
Stories like Lewis’ have played out time after time throughout Cook County’s predominantly Black neighborhoods, where for decades homeowners have lost their homes over unpaid property taxes.
Some said they fell behind because they lost jobs, others because of emergency expenses or debilitating health issues such as Alzheimer’s disease. And according to a review of hundreds of court records plus a dozen interviews, some said they simply couldn’t keep up.
A first-of-its-kind analysis of tax and property records by the Investigative Project on Race and Equity in partnership with Injustice Watch reveals how, since 2019, more than 1,000 owner-occupied homes in Cook County — including more than 125 homes owned by seniors — were taken through property tax foreclosure.
The investigation comes as Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker considers a run for president, touting his record on issues of racial equity while still presiding over the last state in the nation to adopt reforms aimed at giving homeowners their fair share of tax sale proceeds.
While owner-occupied homes lost to tax foreclosure represent only a tiny fraction of Cook County’s 1.5 million residential properties, records and census figures show they are highly concentrated in predominantly Black communities like Roseland, Englewood, and Chicago Heights.
More than half of all homes were taken following an initial property tax debt of $1,600 or less, records show. A dozen started out owing less than $200.
Collectively, tax sale records show the initial debt that cost people their homes totaled $2.3 million, but an analysis of Cook County assessment data shows these homes have a combined estimated market value of more than $108 million.
All of the equity tied up in their homes — which in many cases, like Lewis’, was built over generations — went largely to a small network of private investors who took over the deeds after paying the delinquent property taxes.
This massive transfer of generational wealth from families in Black neighborhoods to affluent investors has long been criticized by housing advocates and civil rights leaders as yet another racist financial practice — one that has drained wealth from Black Americans since seeking refuge in Chicago from the Jim Crow South in pursuit of the American dream, including homeownership.
In the decades since, Black homeowners in Cook County have weathered predatory contract buying, redlining, discriminatory lending practices, the foreclosure crisis, and a property assessment system leaving them with some of the highest taxes relative to their home values in the county.
Researchers and experts say the unfair property tax foreclosure system was just one of these predatory real estate practices aimed at taking advantage of vulnerable homeowners.
And today, lawmakers in Springfield are the last in the nation to address the unfair taking of the equity homeowners are entitled to keep, the investigation found.
The issue has been pushed to the forefront again after a two-year-old unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision in a case out of Minnesota emphatically declared the practice a violation of the so-called “takings clause” in the Bill of Rights.
“The court ruled the government could take what it was owed and no more, but Illinois keeps taking.”
Kileen Lindgren, legal policy manager for Pacific Legal Foundation
Kileen Lindgren, a legal policy manager for Pacific Legal Foundation, which argued for the homeowner before the high court, said in an email response Illinois’ tax sale policy is the “most abusive property tax forfeiture system” in the country.
“The court ruled the government could take what it was owed and no more, but Illinois keeps taking,” she said. “They’re clinging to a system that just isn’t protecting people.”
Even before the Supreme Court ruling, civil rights leaders for decades have tried in vain to persuade Illinois lawmakers to eliminate or limit the power of the third-party profiteers and give homeowners their fair share of their equity following a tax foreclosure.
At every step, they were blocked by investors — also known as tax buyers — and their well-connected lobbyists, decades of legislative and lobbying records show, plus interviews with researchers and legal experts.
In fact, tax buyers even helped write the laws, sending millions their way, according to news archives.
“These very industries are preying upon people who are already facing extreme hardships because there’s money to be made off of them,” said historian Andrew Kahrl, professor at the University of Virginia and the author of “The Black Tax,” a 2024 book on the tax lien industry and its impact on Black communities in Chicago and across the country.
“It’s really disturbing in its own respect, but it’s even more disturbing when we recognize that our local governments are actually willing partners in these schemes,” Kahrl said.
A half dozen of the most active tax buyers and their attorneys contacted for this report declined to be interviewed.
Representatives of the tax buyers’ lobby groups argue they were invited by state lawmakers to more quickly recoup much-needed tax revenue to fund vital services like public schools.
“Does it benefit the local government? The answer is yes,” said Brad Westover, executive director of the National Tax Lien Association, “because the government receives the funds that they were owed, so they could still pay the police and the fire and the public schools and still cut the lawns at the local park and still build the roads and bridges.”
The high court ruling has already spawned several lawsuits from homeowners throughout Illinois and reinvigorated the resolve of critics who want lawmakers to reconsider long-failed reform efforts.
Several measures now in Springfield seek to address the illegality of Illinois’ system and provide a way for homeowners to get back at least some of the money they are owed. None of them would eliminate the involvement of profiteers.
But as state lawmakers scramble, Pritzker remains silent on the issue.
Pritzker declined to be interviewed for this report, and his spokesperson insisted Illinois is in compliance with the Supreme Court’s ruling — an assertion senior members of his own party say is untrue.
“I believe, and I think that many others in this space believe, that Illinois’ current tax sale system is out of compliance,” said state Rep. Will Guzzardi, D-Chicago. “That puts us in real legal liability.”
“The right thing to do is to make sure that homeowners get as much of their equity as they can at the end of this process, and our current system doesn’t do that,” Guzzardi said.
‘Put them in jail or … take their property’
Illinois lawmakers created the state’s current tax foreclosure system in 1951, at the height of the Second Great Migration, when millions of Black Americans left the South for better economic opportunities in the North.
The Illinois law — drafted with input from notorious tax buyer Allan Blair — made it more profitable for investors to foreclose after buying tax liens throughout the state. Crucially, the updated law allowed Blair and other tax buyers to take full ownership of properties when taxpayers did not pay off a delinquent tax bill within two years.
“There are only two ways you can handle delinquent taxpayers,” Blair told the Chicago Tribune in 1974 — five years before he died — about the law he helped draft. “You can put them in jail, or you can take their property away. Now I ask you which is better?”
The new law invited a wave of profiteering, and local newspapers chronicled many horror stories in its wake. Front page articles and famous Chicago columnist Mike Royko spotlighted cases of mostly older, widowed, and disabled homeowners who lost homes under the system.
At the same time, lawyers took to the courts to argue how unfair the law could be, even to homeowners who understood the consequences of falling behind on their taxes.
In one 1969 case, well-known homeowners’ attorney Marshall Patner likened one of his cases to sentencing “a man to death for stealing a loaf of bread” by taking his home over such a small debt, as cited in Kahrl’s book.
By 1970, public outrage spurred lawmakers to create a special fund to compensate some homeowners who lost their homes to tax foreclosure.
Even this remedy — the so-called “indemnity fund” — was riddled with obstacles, and few homeowners took advantage. To be eligible for a payout, a homeowner had to sue the county and prove in court they had legitimate reasons for not paying their taxes, such as a family emergency or hardship.
In 1970, lawmakers introduced new language in the state constitution effectively guaranteeing a place at the table for tax buyers. Legal experts say removing tax buyers from the process today would require a constitutional amendment, an expensive and time-consuming process.
In 1976, a legislative committee studying the issue condemned the “unnecessary harshness” of the law.
“The only function of total forfeiture is the enrichment of tax buyers at the expense of a very few tragic victims,” the commission wrote.
Instead of relying on the underutilized indemnity fund, the state should introduce an auction process to guarantee the return of at least some equity to all homeowners, the commission recommended.
Lawmakers failed to implement the commission’s proposals.
Attempts at reforms both large and small continued over the next 50 years, targeting the foreclosure process as well as the high interest rates tax buyers charge to homeowners. But most fell short, according to a review of decades of legislation and civil rights lawsuits.
The indemnity fund remained the main source of relief for homeowners.
Decades later, the fund is insolvent. The few homeowners who are approved for payouts wait years to see any money, according to a 2022 report from the Illinois Answers Project.
Between 2016 and 2024, the bulk of the fund’s money, one of the main ways homeowners can reclaim their homes, was signed over in advance to investors, Cook County Treasurer’s Office data shows.
A landmark decision, but miles to go
Finally, in 2023, a case involving an elderly Minnesota homeowner who lost her home under similar circumstances became a landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, guaranteeing homeowners their fair share in tax foreclosure cases.
In a 9-0 decision in Tyler v. Hennepin County, the high court ruled Minnesota’s practice of selling homes for unpaid tax debt and pocketing the difference violated the Fifth Amendment’s “takings clause,” which prohibits government taking private property without just compensation.
“A taxpayer who loses her $40,000 house to the State to fulfill a $15,000 tax debt has made a far greater contribution to the public [treasury] than she owed,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the 2023 ruling.
“The taxpayer must render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, but no more.”
More than a dozen state legislatures — from Oregon to Arkansas to Maine — have passed reforms in the wake of the Tyler ruling, but not Illinois.
“Illinois isn’t even at the constitutional bare minimum floor right now,” said Cook County Public Guardian Charles Golbert, whose office represents disabled homeowners facing tax foreclosure.
The Tyler ruling spawned several lawsuits in state and federal courts from former Illinois homeowners seeking to recover their lost home equity.
In court filings, the counties argue they can’t repay homeowners because tax buyers were the ones who sold their homes and collected their equity. Tax buyers say it’s on the government to make former homeowners whole.
The real culprit, legal experts say, is Illinois’ property tax code, which mandates the sale of delinquent taxes to private investors while failing to provide homeowners a meaningful way to access any of their home equity if they lose their home to tax foreclosure.
In recent court filings, officials from seven collar counties argue the Illinois property tax code compels them “to violate the former property owners’ constitutional rights with no mechanism to alleviate the violations.”
All of the cases remain pending.
In order to protect homeowners from foreclosure, state and local taxing officials have gone further in Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and the state of Maryland to create more robust payment plan options and make tax sale notices easier to understand.
In 2011, New York City passed an ordinance exempting the most vulnerable homeowners — including seniors and people with disabilities — from the tax foreclosure process. And in Baltimore, officials have removed all owner-occupied homes from tax sales for the last five years.
“It would be fantastic if in the process of coming up to the bare minimum of what the Constitution requires, Illinois will follow the leads of other states and actually provide an even higher level of protection for some of the most vulnerable homeowners,” said Golbert, whose office has lobbied — unsuccessfully — for homeowners with cognitive disabilities to be exempted from tax sales.
A snowballing debt
Under the state’s current tax lien system, Cook County’s most vulnerable homeowners, especially seniors, can quickly become buried in a snowball of debt, the investigation found.
Once a tax buyer purchases a tax lien at auction, the balance grows quickly with fees and interest, especially if homeowners miss another tax payment following the sale.
Diana Nesbitt missed the second of two tax installments in 2016, totalling $1,483. Then, she was late paying her first installment of $6,244 in 2017, according to county records.
It took Nesbitt — a 69-year-old cancer survivor raising her teenage granddaughter — two years to pay off the debt. She went back to work from her retirement to do it, she said.
She still remembers how relieved she felt when she made the payment just before New Year’s 2020.
“This is the only home she knows,” Nesbitt said of her granddaughter. “I can’t let them take it away from her, from us.”
Nesbitt paid more than $1,532 in investor fees and another $1,694 in interest, records from the Cook County Clerk show.
The Investigative Project and Injustice Watch found tax buyers are particularly attracted by tax bills belonging to senior homeowners like Nesbitt and Lewis.
On average, tax buyers paid for more than one in every four liens listed for sale during the last decade. But they gobbled up the liens of nearly every senior homeowner — roughly 96% — who wound up in the tax sale during that same period, according to a review of all tax sales.
Last year, more than 800 senior homeowners had their tax debt sold at auction — the most in a decade, records show. Collectively, the seniors owed $2.3 million — about 0.01% of the county’s $17.6 billion property tax levy in 2022, the year their delinquent taxes were due.
In recent years, lawmakers have succeeded in small ways to reduce the costs local government passes on to homeowners. For instance, in 2023, state lawmakers cut in half the interest rates for paying overdue property taxes.
However, efforts to reduce fees and interest rates collected by tax buyers have failed, as have proposals to exempt seniors and other vulnerable homeowners from the tax sale altogether.
When a legislative task force met in 2023 to consider the creation of payment plans for homeowners behind on tax bills, an assembly of legislators and housing advocates agreed that senior and disabled homeowners are at highest risk of losing their homes to tax sale.
As a better solution, meeting records show Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas’ policy director suggested the task force consider cutting out private investors altogether.
Removing investors from the equation would give homeowners “more time to pay back their delinquent balance” and “at a more favorable interest rate without facing the fees and escalating interest rates charged by tax buyers,” read notes compiled from an October 2023 meeting of the Property Tax Payment Plan Task Force.
In an emailed statement, Pappas said “it’s maddening” state lawmakers have failed to pass her team’s reforms.
“Tax buyers for decades have resisted reforms to the tax sale, placing their own financial interests above those of taxpayers,” she wrote.
“Their phalanx of well-paid lobbyists is doing all it can in Springfield to block the sensible reforms that we’re trying to make. Those reforms would ensure that delinquent taxpayers are treated with as much fairness as humanly possible.”
Tax buyers’ most prominent lobbyist in Springfield — former Illinois state rep. Michael J. Zalewski, a fixture in Chicago’s Southwest Side political scene who chaired the state legislature’s powerful revenue and finance committee for six years until 2023 — declined to be interviewed.
Buying the same house twice
It’s been almost three years since sheriff’s deputies evicted Velma Lewis from her home. The eviction order came at the request of tax buyer Greg Bingham, of Northlake.
Bingham, who has purchased thousands of tax liens worth tens of millions of dollars according to a review of tax sale and corporate records, has since offered to sell Lewis the home she inherited free and clear after her mother died in 2008.
The price tag: $180,000.
“It’s sentimental,” Lewis said of her decision to take on debt to get the home back. “My mother bought that place. She worked hard; she worked two jobs.”
In 2023, Lewis took out a 30-year mortgage to buy back the home where she grew up.
But even the effort to purchase her home at full market value has become a logistical nightmare, Lewis said.
The home inspection required for the sale to Lewis found 88 code violations, from electrical wiring issues to missing plumbing fixtures.
“Neighbors in the area had broken in and stolen a lot of contents from the building,” Bingham said. “There are police reports in Maywood to reflect this.”
So, in addition to the $180,000 market value she paid for her mother’s house, Lewis is now responsible for an additional $80,000 of repairs demanded by village inspectors.
In the meantime, Lewis, now 77, is renting an apartment and shouldering the mortgage payments, with help from family members. The money is a burden on her monthly Social Security check, she said, but she feels vindicated that she managed to keep her mother’s house.
Lewis said she wishes she had known how the tax sale system worked better from the start. She also wants the state and county to do a better job informing homeowners what can happen when they miss a payment.
Tax delinquency can happen to anyone, Lewis said. And it’s traumatic to lose a home her family has owned free and clear for decades.
There “should be a way that they can work it out, where you don’t lose your house, you know,” Lewis said. “There’s these hound dogs out here that are going to take it if they can. Period.”
“This man would have took mine. But it’s just that I didn’t want to give it up.”
Tatiana Walk-Morris, Maia McDonald, and Kristen Axtman contributed reporting.
Republish this article for free under a Creative Commons license.
