It wasn’t always tense between Megan Franklin and her landlords.

In 2014, when she moved in, most of the 35 units in the courtyard building with castle turrets  were occupied by condo owners. It showed in the details. Her second-floor apartment had granite countertops, exposed brick walls, a gas fireplace, and central air conditioning. She liked Woodlawn, a historic Black community with a good neighborhood school. And she said the rent was fair — $1,215 for two bedrooms and two bathrooms. It became the home where the 34-year-old raised her two children, one who’s 8 years old and an older boy who turned 10 this year.

In 2018, she began noticing a young man named Ariel Lowenstein knocking on doors and asking to speak with condo owners, including her then-landlord. At the time, she had a feeling of dread about what would happen next, she told Injustice Watch recently.

Her neighborhood was gentrifying, which she knew often leads to long-term tenants being displaced. She wasn’t wrong. The following year, Lowenstein and his brother, Raphael, bought the unit from Franklin’s landlord, and her rent jumped by $450.

Maintenance issues quickly began to mount, she said. In April of last year, Franklin opened her stove’s bottom drawer, where she kept pans, and saw a scampering rat. She told her landlords, but she said she was ignored. So she called an exterminator, who found rat droppings, she said.

Not long after, a foul smell settled in the kitchen. She knew the rat must have died, so she messaged her new landlords again. Franklin said Lowenstein showed up at her apartment and blamed her for the smell and the city for the rats. Frustrated, she called back the exterminator, who pulled out the stove and found the dead rat stuck close to the hole where it crawled in. A limp foot dangled outside the hole.

Franklin said she pushed for a replacement stove because the exterminator told her the rat likely made a home inside it and chewed through wires, and Franklin didn’t want to risk contracting a disease or the stove catching fire. It took her two months to get the new appliance. When she finally saw it, she realized it had two missing knobs.

“That’s when I started talking to other tenants and finding out he’s pretty much doing this to everybody,” said Franklin.

Those conversations led them to form a tenant union three months after the alleged rat incident with the help of Not Me We, a community organization helping fight gentrification and displacement of long-term tenants in communities surrounding the future Obama Presidential Center. Those communities include Woodlawn, where Franklin lives.

In August 2023, the city sent inspectors. One found 41 code violations in mid-August, including missing smoke detectors, water damage on walls and ceilings, and an array of electrical and plumbing issues. The inspector also noted roaches, rodent droppings, and holes throughout the building.

Then came two letters from Franklin’s landlord, dated Sept. 6, 2023.

One letter said her lease would be terminated in January. No explanation was listed. The other demanded she pay $2,497 in “past due” rent within five days or face eviction court. According to the paperwork, even if she paid the money her landlords were seeking, she’d still have to move.

In Franklin’s view, she didn’t owe a penny. She and her neighbors had been withholding half their rent since August to force their landlords to make repairs and to address the rat problem.

They felt empowered by Chicago’s Residential Landlord and Tenant Ordinance, a city law allowing tenants to withhold a portion of their rent under very specific rules and prohibiting landlords from retaliating.

But few Chicago tenants successfully use the ordinance to withhold rent, and landlord retaliation is common, according to interviews with dozens of tenants, attorneys who represent them, advocates, and academics.

Injustice Watch observed dozens of eviction court hearings over the past year, and judges rarely ask tenants why they are withholding rent. When tenants brought up these reasons, judges said they weren’t relevant or wondered aloud why tenants didn’t just move out for better conditions.

Injustice Watch also followed the court cases and organizing efforts of five tenant unions. Tenants in all those efforts faced eviction or said they were retaliated against in other ways — large rent hikes, move out notices, or letters demanding they pay inflated balances.

Tenant advocates and attorneys said it is unknown how many tenants in the city who withhold rent land in eviction court. Asked for an estimate, the Metropolitan Tenants Organization, a nonprofit advocating for tenants rights, said about 15% of tenants who called its hotline in 2023 cited an eviction and a repairs issue.

Often, tenants agree to move out in exchange for the case being dismissed without a formal eviction order. About 60% of eviction cases end with a judge ordering tenants to move out, and those who do not are forced out by sheriff’s deputies, Injustice Watch found. Unless their landlord agrees to seal the record, the eviction follows the tenant as they try to find a new home.

Injustice Watch also spoke with tenants whose withheld rent was listed as debt in credit reports. At least 10 tenants Injustice Watch spoke with were essentially homeless for a period of time after moving out from a home with chronic, serious building code violations.

In Franklin’s case, her landlords filed an eviction lawsuit against her in the Cook County Circuit Court less than two weeks after sending the September letters terminating her lease and demanding back rent.

Eleven days later, the city filed a case against Franklin’s landlords in housing court, the division within the Cook County Circuit Court, which is where the city sends buildings with the most serious violations. Franklin took it as vindication. Her landlords made her feel as if she was causing trouble, she said. And the city’s suit argued they were the problem.

She soon realized she wasn’t the only one facing eviction. By October, at least 10 of Franklin’s neighbors and fellow union members were also taken to eviction court, setting off the dual court cases in housing court and eviction court. In the post-pandemic world, these happened mostly via Zoom, rather than the towering downtown courthouse known as the Richard J. Daley Center.

Some tenants were worried, but Franklin was convinced they’d ultimately win because the city was on their side. She said she hoped the city’s suit against her landlord would serve as proof they legally withheld rent, and the eviction cases would be dismissed.

“I don’t think that the eviction is going to fly,” she said.

And she was hopeful the judge in housing court would force their landlords to address the building’s code violations.

“We have done all we can do,” Franklin said at the time. “Now, it’s time for the people we pay to protect us to do what they need to do to keep us in our homes.”

New owners, worsening conditions

Like many properties in Chicago, the Franklin’s building is owned by a limited liability corporation — a shell company protecting the real owners. Often, shell companies are stacked within others. For example, 6610 S. Kenwood Residences, is managed by Lowenstein Capital, which is managed by the two Lowenstein brothers — Franklin’s landlords.

The brothers come from a wealthy family with a prominent history in local business, real estate, and civic life. They grew up with three other siblings in a sprawling gray stone house on a half-acre lot in Skokie. Their father, John, is a former executive of the sporting goods chain Sportmart, which was founded by the brothers’ maternal grandfather and owned by the family until they sold it in 1998.

After graduating from Washington University in St. Louis in 2014, Raphael Lowenstein, the older of the two, returned to Chicago and began buying buildings on the South Side under various company names. One of the early companies was JJR Realty, which he registered with his father and his older brother, Joshua. They later changed the name to Lion Cub Enterprises, though both names were set aside when Raphael Lowenstein created 312 Real Estate and two other entities with a similar name in 2015. His father was also listed in two of those companies as a manager.

Ariel Lowenstein followed in Raphael Lowenstein’s footsteps, attending the same university and joining the family’s real estate company after graduating in 2017. The following year, Franklin saw Ariel Lowenstein knocking on doors at her building. In 2019, The brothers created a new company, Lowenstein Capital, which has become the parent of the shell companies that on paper own their buildings.

The Lowesteins now own land and more than a dozen multifamily buildings in Bronzeville, Kenwood, Woodlawn, and South Shore. Several of the buildings were once condominiums and cooperatives where middle-class Black families got a foothold on property ownership.

Before her unit was sold to the Lowensteins, Franklin rented from a doctor who had moved to the East Coast but dreamed about returning to Chicago. Former condo owners were surprised when, in a matter of months, the Lowensteins gobbled up more than half of the building. Some fought back, but by the time the brothers reached nearly 75% ownership, they begrudgingly sold their units while they still had some negotiating power.

They weren’t the only ones who felt forced out. In 2022, long-term residents at a historic Bronzeville cooperative told the Hyde Park Herald the brothers were informally evicting them, flouting the pandemic moratorium as they turned the 114-building into a construction zone. At other Lowenstein buildings, residents have complained of flooding, leaking, rats, mold, and lax security.

The issues escalated this year, prompting the city to file at least eight suits against the Lowensteins’ companies for building code violations. The cases are pending.

The Lowensteins declined interview requests, but in an emailed statement, they said they have hired a management company to deal with the issues.

“Our goal always was and is to provide quality services to residents and maintain code compliance,” Ariel Lowenstein said in the email. “We made the decision to hire a professional and well-respected property management company to quickly handle any code issues and to ensure great service to residents. We feel that this is what is best for the community and are excited about new management’s ability to properly serve the needs of residents.”

It’s not the first time the Lowensteins have faced the city because of code violations. Since they began acquiring properties in 2014 and converting condos and co-ops into rentals, they’ve been fined at least $78,000 for building code violations. As of February, the majority of the fines have gone unpaid, according to city records.

Separate from the city’s suits, the brothers are being accused of negligence by the family of DeShawnay Yoakum, a high school senior who died after being shot by her aunt’s ex-boyfriend in a building owned by the Lowensteins. Yoakum’s family filed a suit last year alleging her aunt repeatedly asked the Lowensteins to replace the lock to her back door because she suspected an ex-boyfriend had been letting himself in and destroying property. Despite the “danger at issue,” they claim in court documents the Lowensteins failed to change the lock in a timely manner.

The Lowensteins have denied the allegations in court.

‘All bets are off’

In eviction court, the Lowenstein brothers claimed Franklin owed back rent totaling $2,197.50 — a figure higher than the amount Franklin said she had withheld. Arguments about rent payments weren’t new. Franklin said her landlords kept multiple records and online payment portals. One portal said she owed nearly $14,000. Another said she owned $300 more than the amount listed in the eviction filing. Either way, Franklin said she was locked out of the online payment portal after the case was filed, a common tactic used by landlords in eviction court, according to attorneys who represent tenants.

Franklin got a pro bono attorney to help her fight the case. She was lucky, as the vast majority of tenants facing eviction show up alone and struggle to defend themselves with little knowledge of the technical and often-confusing process.

Judges often encourage tenants to settle, warning those who proceed to trial they will likely lose because the evidence is often on the landlord’s side. As one judge put it to a tenant last year: “If it goes to trial, all bets are off.”

In court records, the Lowensteins described Franklin as a “health and safety risk to other tenants in the building” and asked the court to expedite the process. Before the pandemic, a landlord could obtain an eviction order from a judge in a couple of weeks. But efforts to help tenants have extended the process, which could now take several months.

The Lowensteins also accused Franklin of delaying or denying maintenance workers access to her unit. They also accused her of confronting a worker “with two unknown individuals holding firearms in a threatening manner.”

At a hearing in November, the judge who reviewed the evidence against Franklin — a written statement signed by Ariel Lowenstein — denied the request to send the case straight to trial. The judge’s written order offers no explanation, but Franklin, who attended the virtual hearing, said her lawyer successfully showed the alleged incident with the gun didn’t happen.

Franklin said she was pleased with the outcome but was increasingly concerned about retaliation from her landlords.

“I hope I’m going to be OK,” she said.

Tenants speak up in housing court 

Meanwhile, the city’s case against the landlords inched forward in housing court. At the first hearing, also in November, tenants unmuted themselves at various points to share with Judge Leonard Murray their complaints about pest infestations, failed inspections, and what they thought were retaliatory evictions.

“This is really escalating,” Franklin told Murray.

“We’re not gonna tolerate any of that, rest assured of that,” Murray said.

It’s rare for tenants to speak up in court cases against landlords, but Murray, the supervising judge of the housing section, sometimes allows it. He made it clear he couldn’t address the eviction cases in housing court, but he told the tenants the Residential Landlord and Tenant Ordinance protected them against retaliation, and he promised to personally attend the next city inspection. More importantly, he said, they now had the attention of the city’s building department.

“You have a court case; believe me that court case will be enough,” he said.

Murray kept his word about attending the inspection. But the result wasn’t what tenants expected. At the next court hearing later in the month, he said he did not observe dangerous and hazardous conditions. Franklin disagreed and pushed back against Murray’s perception of the building, arguing he was not treating the tenants’ complaints as seriously as he should.

“The overall building is not unsafe,” Murray said. If it was, he said he would have to board it up and order tenants to move out.

Franklin argued back, telling Murray how she had fallen when a tile broke as she walked down the stairs, how tests she had paid for showed there was mold in her walls, and how the inadequate repairs were making things worse for her and her neighbors. Murray told Franklin to sue for personal injury. Franklin said she had looked into it, but it led nowhere. The back-and-forth continued for a while until Murray, sounding increasingly frustrated, said: “This is not a bar fight; this is a court case.”

He reminded tenants they couldn’t simply speak up in his courtroom when they wanted. But Franklin wasn’t done. She asked Murray when he planned to read their request to formally be allowed as a party in the case.

“I’m not answering that question,” Murray said before hanging up. “You are not my supervisor.”

In an interview with Injustice Watch after the hearing, Franklin acknowledged she had lost her temper in court. She was frustrated with Murray and disappointed after all their efforts organizing and getting the attention of the city, the decision of whether their homes were safe or whether they got to participate in a case rested with Murray. That made her wonder: “When in court, do you actually get to hear from people who are not landlords?”

“I just know when something isn’t going right, you have to speak up,” Franklin said. “This is my life, and this is my home.”

Housing must be ‘habitable’

The dual battles in housing and eviction court aren’t new.

From 2009 to 2023, Injustice Watch found at least 328 buildings with cases in housing and eviction court in the same year. It’s impossible to know whether tenants in these buildings withheld rent to protest building conditions, but the long history of tenants doing so is well documented in news stories.

Withholding rent has time and again landed tenants in eviction court, where until the 1970s, tenants essentially had no way to defend themselves. Judges would ask a single question: Have you paid rent? If tenants said they hadn’t, no matter the reason, the judge would side with the landlord and order an eviction.

Back then, landlords didn’t have to make repairs or ensure apartments rented were habitable unless it was explicitly written in a lease. And because leases were written by landlords, tenants took the apartments as they were, or worse — they took responsibility for maintenance work.

The fights between landlords and tenants escalated during the 1960s civil rights movement, as highlighted by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s move to North Lawndale to protest “slum” conditions, price gouging, and discriminatory housing practices affecting mostly Black Chicagoans. In response, tenants held rent strikes, which landed them in eviction court. When a judge inevitably ordered an eviction, tenants protested by chaining themselves to radiators or sleeping in tents outside their former homes.

Reforms began to be enacted in the mid-1960s, when the state passed a law allowing Cook County’s then-public aid department to withhold subsidized rent payments to landlords whose buildings violated building and fire codes. But even when the county was the one withholding the rent, tenants still landed in eviction court.

In a landmark 1972 ruling, the Illinois Supreme Court said habitability in rental housing was implicit, meaning when tenants signed a lease vowing to pay rent, landlords were expected to provide apartments substantially in compliance with building codes. The justices also ruled tenants living in multiunit buildings had a right to use evidence of substandard building conditions to defend themselves against eviction suits.

The Illinois ruling followed another landmark case decided two years earlier by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, where justices argued the old rule absolving landlords from any obligation to maintain or repair units was medieval.

It was born, they said, in the agrarian society of the early Middle Ages, when the land was more valuable than the tiny structures used as homes. Over time, the justices argued, things got absurd. As an example, they cited an 1860s case in which a landlord whose building had burned down took a tenant to court for failing to pay rent for a unit that no longer existed. The court saw through the landlord’s argument and let the tenant off the hook, reasoning urban dwellers had “no interest in the land, only in the attached building.”

Tenants win new protections

After the Illinois Supreme Court ruling, landlords pushed back by writing leases stripping tenants of their rights and tasking tenants with the apartment’s maintenance. Some went even further.

Henry Rose, who was a legal aid attorney at the time, recalled how tenants complained their landlords were garnishing their wages, and they didn’t understand why or how it was legal. When he investigated, he realized landlords were writing leases allowing them to sue tenants and to appoint an attorney to admit liability on their behalf — all without ever telling them about it.

“That incensed me,” said Rose, now a professor of law and social justice at the Loyola University Chicago School of Law. “Eventually, we convinced the Illinois General Assembly to prohibit” this practice.

Rose was based in Evanston, which had passed an ordinance regulating leases to protect tenants. That got the attention of then-Chicago Ald. David Orr, whose ward bordered Evanston and who had been active in a tenants organization in Rogers Park. Orr began sending attorneys to represent tenants in his ward in housing court to argue how violations such as broken boilers or leaking roofs were serious and had to be addressed quickly.

“It made a world of difference,” said Orr, adding judges paid more attention when lawyers were involved.

Orr thought of other ways to help tenants. In the late 1970s, he introduced an ordinance he called a tenants’ bill of rights, but real estate groups organized against it, arguing it would lead to higher rents, discourage investment, and reduce the number of city apartments. He saw a window of opportunity in 1986, when many of the Chicago City Council members opposing Mayor Harold Washington were defeated, giving Washington the votes he needed to enact stalled legislation. In September of that year, after years of pushing and months of negotiations, the City Council enacted the Residential Landlord and Tenant Ordinance by a vote of 42-4. Among those in opposition was then-Ald. Ed Burke.

The ordinance was created primarily to regulate rental agreements, but its sponsors understood the importance of requiring landlords to responsibly maintain their buildings. Incorporated into the new ordinance were tools to give tenants more power. For example, the law allows tenants to withhold a portion of their rent for code violations after following a series of steps, including sending a written letter requesting the repairs.

The original version of the ordinance allowed tenants to simply make repairs and deduct it from their rent, but the section was rewritten to add complicated provisions after several rounds of negotiations with City Council members who opposed the initial proposal. Rose and Orr said they hoped the threat of withholding rent would be enough to get landlords to comply.

“We recognized that very few tenants would likely exercise those rights because they were technical and detailed,” Rose said. “Without legal advice, it would be difficult for them to exercise those rights in a legally proper way.”

After it was approved, the Chicago Board of Realtors sought to block the ordinance in court, arguing it interfered with the constitutional rights of property owners. U.S. District Judge James B. Parsons of the Northern District of Illinois disagreed and upheld the law. He did, however, strongly criticized it, calling it “harsh” because it cast upon landlords “the profile of dishonesty.”

Parsons also warned it was “dangerous” because it would increase landlord-tenant tensions and could lead to “repeated and unpredictable incidents of property mistreatment and civil disorder.”

The ordinance survived but not without further challenges from real estate groups and later attempts to weaken it. But the fear from Parsons it would lead to civil disorder never materialized.

Ever since, tenant groups faced an uphill and often-insurmountable battle educating renters of their rights and helping them make sense of their right to withhold rent. Part of the problem continues to be lack of enforcement. Without a city department specifically focused on landlord-tenant disputes, tenants’ only recourse is to take their landlord to court. Though some have been successful, tenants, advocates, and attorneys say success is limited.

Consider a May 2023 case filed by tenants of a Logan Square apartment building who claimed they had no heat for a full week the previous December. They formed a tenant association during the Christmas holiday and decided to withhold half their January rent. Before they did so, they notified the landlord, M. Fishman & Co., and the property manager of their intent to withhold rent, as required under the RLTO.

Almost two weeks later, they were told rent withholding was not permitted under their leases, and those who didn’t pay faced late fees. The tenants secured the help of the Law Center for Better Housing, which Orr co-founded in 1980. But by the time the suit was filed, accumulated late fees exceeded $300 for many tenants.

The suit is still ongoing. Attorneys for the landlord asked the judge last year to dismiss the case on grounds the tenant association didn’t have a right to sue. They also blamed Peoples Gas for the lack of heat and said tenants failed to properly notify the landlord of their intention to withhold rent because they sent an email, rather than a written notice, to the address listed on their leases.

The suit survived the challenge, but many tenants have moved out or agreed to pay up, rather than have the debt listed in their credit reports.

One former tenant, Miles Bennett Hogerty, said when their lease ended, their rent spiked, so they asked about moving to a cheaper unit elsewhere. They were told they wouldn’t get a new lease until they paid the overdue rent and late fees. They paid, but the lease didn’t materialize.

“After the fact, you feel a little foolish for paying,” Bennett Hogerty said. They ended up signing a lease with a new landlord for a unit about $300 more expensive.

“The rent withholding was one in what will be many fights,” Bennett Hogerty said.

Judge denies tenants’ rights in housing court

After his argument with Franklin last November, Murray denied the tenants’ petition to join the city’s case against their landlord. Their attorney, Sam Barth of the Law Center for Better Housing, asked in January for Murray to reconsider, but the judge stood firm in his decision, saying the law didn’t give the tenant association the right to intervene.

Barth began to say the law was worded “a bit backwards,” but Murray cut him off. The law, he said, “is worded as worded.” And if Barth had a complaint, he could “go down to Springfield.”

A 1973 appellate court decision found state law is clear on tenants having a right to intervene in housing court cases, giving them a voice in the outcome. In fact, city attorneys, who do not represent tenants, have pointed out in other recent cases the law’s plain language gives tenants this right. Though the city has supported tenant intervention in other cases, when Murray asked city attorney Megan Stiarwalt for the city’s take in this case, she sided with him.

“The motion to reconsider is denied,” Murray said, ending the argument.

In an Injustice Watch interview, Murray said he disagreed with other judges who had allowed tenants to intervene in city cases against landlords for code violations. In his reading of the law, it only allows a building’s neighbors to intervene “to the extent that their property rights and valuations are affected in what’s going on in that building.” Tenants, he said, “can file an action against the landlord” but do not have an intervention right in housing court.

“You think I’m wrong? Appeal. I ain’t perfect,” he said.

Franklin spoke again at subsequent hearings, updating the judge on issues tenants said they were having, including dirty water coming out of their faucets and no heat. But the judge didn’t believe her and accused the tenants of causing problems.

“There has been sabotage in this location,” Murray said at a hearing in January. “Things are repaired and mysteriously damaged.”

Murray lectured the tenants and their attorney and warned that if he caught them lying, “they are going to spend some time in county jail.”

The same day the city sent inspectors to check on the allegations they found an immigrant family with no heat. The inspectors reported a burst pipe that flooded the lower level of their unit. The city scheduled an emergency hearing the following afternoon, citing “hazardous and dangerous” conditions.

At that hearing, Murray asked the landlords whether they suspected sabotage.

One of the Lowenstein brothers, who appeared together on the Zoom screen, said the pipe had naturally burst because of weather conditions. But they accused Franklin of making it difficult to service the unit.

Murray believed the landlords and lectured the tenants on the need for affordable housing and how, in his opinion, the landlords had done a “fairly decent job” with the building. Almost on a weekly basis, he said, he has to balance how to find housing for people whose buildings need to be shut down. “It’s hard as hell,” he said.

Less than two weeks later, the case was closed.

The city said the building was in “substantial compliance” and reached an agreement with the Lowensteins to pay a $12,500 fine. Before agreeing to dismiss the case, Murray asked about the rat problem residents had brought up to an Injustice Watch reporter. The city inspectors said they did not observe rodents, and the Lowensteins’ attorneys said the building was receiving regular extermination services.

Franklin said she had been prepared to lose the court battle.

“The court always works in the favor of landlords,” she said.

But she was determined to keep fighting.

“This is my home,” Franklin said. “I’ve been here for 10 years.”

Losing the battle

By the spring of this year, most of the tenants who were part of the union in Woodlawn had moved out, were in the process of moving out, or were evicted, Franklin said. A handful, including Franklin, were able to negotiate settlements with the Lowensteins. Franklin and others applied for a state program offering emergency rental assistance. She was approved, and the state sent her landlords a check for about $11,000.

Since its 1970s ruling establishing landlords must keep housing “habitable,” the Illinois Supreme Court has expanded and strengthened a tenant’s right to withhold rent in response to poor conditions, though tenants continue to struggle to effectively use it in court.

That’s in part because tenants cannot withhold all the rent — just a portion of it. And figuring out how much to withhold because of a broken radiator or a rat roaming in a kitchen is a challenge. Also, circuit court judges, the ones dealing with tenants in eviction court, have historically not asked tenants whether they had a defense or have refused to consider building code violations as a defense for not paying rent.

Bias against tenants in eviction court is well-documented, though it became harder to prove after court reporters were eliminated as a cost-saving strategy in the early 2000s. It took years for court transparency advocates to get recording equipment installed in Chicago eviction courtrooms. But even with proceedings being back on the record, the process is stacked against the tenant.

It’s rare for a case to go to trial, where the tenant would be able to present evidence against the landlord. Those moving forward face a landlord’s attorney, who can wield their knowledge of the law and the system to win a case.

As part of her settlement with the Lowensteins, Franklin agreed to begin paying rent in March. She said she was getting ready to pay rent, but when she opened the online portal, she saw a balance from the months that were covered by the state’s rental assistance. She decided her landlords were playing games and refused to pay rent, which landed her in eviction court again.

Franklin increasingly thought she was losing the battle.

“I don’t have no faith in the city or in the courts or anybody to make it happen,” she said in early April. No one cared they were withholding rent because of building conditions, she said. She saw in her situation echoes of displacement her family has experienced throughout history.

She is a descendant of sharecroppers who migrated north to escape the Southern racist laws known as Jim Crow. Most recently, her grandmother lost her home during the foreclosure crisis because, like millions of other Americans who bought a home during the early 2000s bubble, she had a mortgage with variable interest rates. When those increased, the mortgage payments were too high for her to keep her home.

“That’s what’s spirit-breaking,” Franklin said. “Because no matter how much you try to play by the rules, the rules will change when it comes to Black people.”

What makes it especially difficult for her, she said, is even after she made it to college, earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and masters’ in education, and learned about the history of Black people in America, she and her two boys were still facing displacement from their community.

“My kids went to day care right next door; they’ve been there their whole lives,” said Franklin, as tears fell and her usually vibrant voice became almost inaudible. “So I wanted to stay, so that they didn’t have to change homes and change schools and go through what I went through.”

Rats land brothers back in housing court

Later in April, one of Franklin’s neighbors, DiCole Stillwell, was preparing dinner when she heard a pop and a sizzling sound. She knew the stove wasn’t on yet because she was still cleaning the chicken.

“What is that?” she wondered and turned around to check. She saw smoke coming from the stove and told Injustice Watch later she thought it was a gas leak. She yelled at her teenage son and his friend to get out and call 911. They ran out the back door, and she left through the front.

The fire department arrived within minutes to find the stove’s electric cord had caught on fire.

“Come to find out they said that that’s because the rats ate through the cord,” Stillwell said.

She figured the Lowensteins would give her a new stove. She said she sent pictures of the fire to a Lowenstein employee and waited to hear back. It surprised her she didn’t get a call — not even to check on her. She said she had been asking management to get rid of the rats, and they had responded with superficial fixes, such as screwing a piece of wood over holes.

“The rats are already chewing back through that,” she said. “That’s not gonna work.”

Three days later, the city filed a new case against the Lowensteins’ company. As part of the new court case, the city asked the judge to appoint an outside company to specifically deal with the rodent infestation. The attorneys representing the Lowensteins fought back, arguing appointment of the “limited receiver” was not necessary because they had performed “substantial work” on the building and had shown to be “exceptionally proactive” and were willing to cooperate with the city to make the repairs.

In explaining why the city reopened the case, Marlene Hopkins, commissioner of the Chicago Department of Buildings, told Murray in court the original inspection had missed the extent of the rodent problem. The city, she said, had to ensure renters were living in safe living conditions.

The city by then had also filed seven additional suits against the Lowensteins for code violations in other buildings they owned. In the wake of the suits, the Lowensteins hired Crump Realty Group to manage Franklin’s building and some of the other properties. They also abandoned a proposed $68 million redevelopment project for nearly a whole block in Bronzeville and are now selling the site.

Paul Crump, Crump Realty’s owner, showed up to court in May and shared his plan for Franklin’s building. He told Murray a new pest management company had been hired and shared his comprehensive plan to abate the rodents.

Stillwell, the tenant whose stove caught fire, had also been showing up to the Zoom hearings. She told the judge the management company wasn’t moving fast enough. She simply couldn’t stay in the rat-infested apartment any longer and told Murray she was moving out.

“Good for you,” Murray told her.

But the rat problem continued. At a June hearing, the city asked Murray, again, to appoint a company specifically to deal with the rats. The city had asked Crump to pull out all the stoves and patch the holes, but an inspector said that hadn’t happened. The inspector said she had gotten on her hands and knees during the most recent inspection and spotted holes underneath cabinets and rat droppings. The city’s attorney asked Murray to order all the kitchen cabinets pulled out, so the holes could be identified and patched.

“Is it absolutely necessary that that’s done?” asked Murray, who was taking the call on his phone. He then said he had to jump off the call because he was at the doctor’s office but promised to call back 40 minutes later.

An hour later, he called back the half-dozen city workers still waiting for him, including inspectors, city attorneys, and Hopkins, the Department of Buildings commissioner.

Murray denied the request to appoint a company because he didn’t, “think Mr. Crump is incompetent,” and there didn’t seem to be issues with funding the repairs. He kept pushing back against the city’s request, questioning whether there was evidence of rat droppings in all the kitchens and calling the request to pull out all the kitchen cabinets a “pretty dramatic act.”

Ultimately, he said, the rats were coming in from the outside.

After a back-and-forth with the city’s attorney, the Department of Buildings commissioner spoke up. 

“Tenants have had to deal with these conditions for an extended period of time,” Hopkins said. “At what point do we focus on the tenants and making sure that they are in safe living conditions?”

“What I’m after here is the path of least resistance,” Murray said.

Hopkins held her ground.

“We have spent too much time on this one property,” she said. “So my frustration is that we’ve continued to pull resources, including your time and my time and inspectors’ time, at a property that clearly has not taken seriously the conditions the tenants are living in — that’s my frustration.”

“I’m frustrated, too,” said Murray, granting the request to pull the cabinets out but holding firm on denying a receiver.

In an interview with Injustice Watch, Murray blamed the city for having to hang up and call back during his doctor’s appointment. He said he wouldn’t have had to do so if the city’s attorneys hadn’t been late to call him to start the hearing.

“That was unusual,” he said, explaining he had an annual appointment, and if he didn’t take it, then he would have had to wait until December. “I had no choice.”

At a follow-up hearing, he asked whether those present had been “put off” by him having to hang up and call back or whether anyone had minded that he was on the phone, rather than on video, during the call. Hopkins was the only one who spoke up. She said warmly, “Your honor, we always want to see you.”

Forced out

After the cabinets were removed from her unit, Franklin rented a hotel room. She expected to be there for a weekend, but a week later, she still didn’t have a kitchen. At a court hearing in late June, a week after the kitchen work began, Crump, the new property manager, said cabinets had been reinstalled in 14 of 20 or so units.

He planned to finish four more the following week, but the overall rat-abatement work was not expected to be completed until mid-July. He said tenants who had stayed in their units had received $200 for groceries, and those who had refused the money were getting a credit toward their rent. Hotel stays were being reimbursed at $100 per night, he said, adding Franklin had asked for more, but he hadn’t yet gotten approval to reimburse her.

In the end, Franklin said she spent 11 days in a hotel while the kitchen cabinets were removed and reinstalled. As of mid-July, she had yet to be reimbursed for the hotel cost. She said she returned home to find a broken refrigerator and the sink and dishwasher leaking.

“The house is ruined,” she said.

Looming in the background was her second eviction case. She had paid rent in May, once the new property manager was installed, but the case still inched forward. Later that month, Raphael Lowenstein offered her $1,500 to leave the apartment.

“Let’s end on good terms and move forward in a way that’s good for both of us,” he wrote in an email.

“I do not believe it would be in my best interests to move myself and my family out of the home we have been in for 10 years within 3 weeks,” Franklin wrote back.

Franklin said she stopped paying rent in June, at the advice of an attorney who also suggested she make a deal with her landlords to leave her home in exchange for dropping the latest eviction suit and sealing both cases. Her landlords agreed to give her until Sept. 15 to move out. But she was in a tough spot. While the case was ongoing, the eviction filings were showing up on her record, which made it difficult to find a new apartment.

“This is the option that I’ve been given, so I have to figure it out,” she said.

Still, she said, she doesn’t regret the decision she made a year ago to start the union with her neighbors. Even though it didn’t help her, she hoped it would help others navigate a system that’s stacked against tenants.

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