To examine the link between dangerous building disrepair and evictions in Chicago, Injustice Watch analyzed roughly 1.9 million code violations, 60,000 administrative court dockets, 300,000 eviction court dockets, and 43,000 housing court dockets dating back to the early 2000s.
Because Chicago Property Index Numbers were absent from these records, Injustice Watch relied on street addresses to conduct its initial analyses. Building violations and administrative hearings clearly identify the offending address, while location information from eviction records is based on the defendant’s address in each case.
For eviction filings, this creates a few issues. Addresses transcribed from court paperwork into a computer system are far from flawless. They can be rife with misspellings and omissions, and many filings don’t even list apartment numbers. To correctly link these thousands of Chicago evictions with their buildings’ respective inspection histories, as well as legal sanctions against the property owners, the addresses present had to offer a near-perfect match.
To do this, Injustice Watch enlisted the help of an online platform called Geocodio to repair the many valid addresses with problems and bring them all under a standard format. This process also identified eviction filings with addresses too erroneous to be included in any analysis. From there, reporters had to harmonize thousands of legitimate street addresses often represented multiple ways within the records, such as “3000 S. Martin Luther King Dr.” and “3000 S. King Dr.”
Tourists may marvel at Chicago’s grid system, but street addresses in the city can be complicated. Streets may share the same name but have varying suffixes, such as “boulevard” or “road.” Buildings aren’t limited to a single address, either — a sprawling residential complex may use a half-dozen different addresses for the units within.
So while one part of the challenge was to ensure accurate and complete addresses, the other was to link the multiple addresses to the same Chicago building or property.
Injustice Watch used a city-provided building identification number present in the code violations data to accomplish this, using it to cluster various addresses from eviction filings under a single property. The address cleaning and standardization process was repeated to link buildings to administrative hearing and housing court records.
The city inspection records didn’t explicitly delineate between minor infractions and the potentially life-threatening ones that can put residents at risk, either. For the hundreds of building violations in municipal code, severity isn’t clearly defined.
Injustice Watch relied on guidance from a 2015 Chicago Department of Buildings document used to classify problem landlords and their properties. The “Problem Landlord List Rules” contains dozens of offenses the city considered serious, including having exposed electrical wiring, inadequate heating, and cracked interior walls and ceilings. Injustice Watch found about one in five violations in city records rise to this level.
The “Problem Landlord List” was repealed by City Council under then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot in 2021. The building code violations its rules identified as “serious” in Appendix B remain the only official guideline available to differentiate between severity of violations on their face.
Buildings with chronic, serious code violations
Using the property identification number, Injustice Watch found 149,758 buildings with code violations. Of those, 78,889 had serious building code violations. Some of these buildings with serious violations were cited once, some every year, while others appeared to be in a cycle. The pool of buildings with repeated serious code violations narrowed as years went by. But the analysis showed once buildings clocked four distinct years with serious code violations, the vast majority (89%) continued racking them up. The analysis also found two-thirds of these buildings had another serious violation within five years.
To understand how many of the buildings with four separate years of serious code violations were still a problem, Injustice Watch narrowed the data to those buildings with a recent serious code violation — at least one in the last three years. The total was 2,654 buildings.
Not all these buildings were residential. With help from Chicago Cityscape, a real estate information platform, each building was then connected to its corresponding Property Index Number from county records. Cityscape ran the list of addresses against its database of property records and confirmed at least 2,331 were residential buildings.
Injustice Watch also connected the addresses of the 2,654 buildings to the historical data on eviction filings and found landlords of at least 65% of those buildings filed evictions in the same year as the buildings racked up serious code violations.
These buildings can be found in every ward in the city, but cross-referencing the locations with U.S. census data showed most are concentrated in neighborhoods with higher Black populations. The buildings are also concentrated in areas where more than half of households are considered low income by federal standards for Chicago.
To determine how the court system treats landlords and tenants from these buildings, Injustice Watch enlisted the help of DataMade, a Chicago civic tech company, which pulled housing court docket data going back to 2009.
A comparison of the nexus between housing and eviction courts identified 328 buildings where landlords filed evictions in the same year the city was taking them to court over building code violations — some buildings had just one such eviction; others had dozens. The rate at which judges issued eviction orders against tenants in these 328 buildings did not deviate from overall Cook County trends: About two-thirds of tenants taken to eviction court were ultimately ordered out by judges. The analysis also found the median housing court case against a landlord took nearly 10 times longer to close than an eviction case against a tenant.
Covid-19 pandemic-era reforms, which have lengthened the eviction court process, are not well-represented in the analysis because the eviction data only goes through the end of 2022. Housing court case length today is also typically years longer than the pre-2022 median, according to the supervising judge of the housing court section.
Inconsistencies in the data entry on court dockets made a more detailed analysis of the data unreliable.