The Oak Park Village Board reviewed a series of staff recommendations that update local housing policies after a civil rights group’s investigation uncovered a pattern of income-based discrimination last year.
At its June 17 meeting, the board heard from Oak Park Neighborhood Services Director Johnathon Burch during a study session covering updates to a series of village ordinances involving tenant and landlord relations, many of which focus on how rental staff must be trained on tenants’ rights issues. The session followed a report submitted to the village board last October by HOPE Fair Housing Center, which said its independent investigation had found that intake processes at several local housing providers discriminated against people receiving housing voucher assistance.
The discussion was an early step for the village as it looks toward formalizing a set of reforms to its residential rental licensing code, which it hopes will promote fairer tenant-landlord relations in the village, in line with its stated commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.
In addition to new requirements for training programs, the package that will go before the board also involves code changes updating on-the-books provisions related to such issues as landlord responsibilities in the eviction process, the village’s residential rental license revocation and suspension processes for negligent property managers, and rules on what information landlords are required to provide to tenants about community resources.
“The intention is to keep those things moving,” Burch said.
The staff recommendations were developed with feedback from HOPE, village housing providers, and other stakeholders, such as Housing Forward, Burch said.
Bill Planek, president of Oak Park Apartments, which manages and operates over 60 apartment buildings in and around Oak Park, said the suggested updates to the code make sense in terms of the village’s goals.
“They’re trying to create a better procedure to keep property owners in the loop on new trends that they see,” Planek said. “I think it’s important that the village tries to stay on top of that to make sure that they’re able to interject when they see things aren’t going the way they think it should, to make sure things stay in balance, and that the tenants and prospective residents’ rights are respected. With the training they want to do, they want to make it more approachable and comprehensive and that’s a good thing.”
In February, HOPE received another village contract to conduct testing of Oak Park housing providers’ screening processes and other potential barriers to prospective tenants. HOPE’s village contract asks them to conduct that testing with dozens of Oak Park housing providers.
The proposed updates follow the recent appointment of Kellye Keyes as the village’s new DEI Chief. The work on the residential rental licensing code is meant to go hand-in-hand with planned updates to the village’s wide-reaching Human Rights Ordinance, an early priority for Keyes, according to Village Manager Kevin Jackson.
“The fair housing testing will be iterative and I think what we want to do as quickly as we can is follow up from the last set of recommendations to try to get some updates to the ordinance so we can get moving on what we found last time,” Jackson said. “We will be coming back with the human rights ordinances as we bring on the DEI staff to look at that as well, doing that in partnership with neighborhood services. I think what we have here was kind of a milestone point where we got some specific recommendations to enhance our ordinance provisions, so we wanted to get those back in front of you guys and get feedback and try to get those adopted and keep moving.”
One of the main recommendations to come out of HOPE’s report last fall was making revisions to village policy about who within property management companies are required to undergo training on tenant rights from the village, extending it past organizational leaders, Burch said.
“The HOPE recommendation is that everybody should receive training because the people who would be violating fair housing laws might not just be the owner or the agent; it might be the leasing person, it might be the janitor you run into in the building,” he said. “A variety of folks operate on behalf of the owner or agent who are directly interacting with tenants or potential tenants. They also need to be versed in fair housing laws.”
The recommended ordinance would require all new hires at Oak Park property management companies to receive training on fair housing laws.
Part of HOPE’s work in the future will include ensuring that training session materials are up to date and relevant to Oak Park, he said.
“The intention is that HOPE is providing us a report every six months, so we are always changing the testing and the training that we are doing to be in response to the issues we are identifying locally,” Burch said.
In feedback sessions, housing providers also asked for more robust training from the village, Burch said. The proposed ordinances would put a greater emphasis on in-person training sessions for rental staff.
“We asked for feedback from a current housing provider of what they thought the effectiveness of the training we provided in the past,” Burch said. “They have not been especially high grade really since COVID.
“The intention is to move to a much more small-group engagement set of trainings where we can talk about what are the issues specifically being identified through Hope’s testing and talking through scenarios with providers so they are aware of how to be able to handle that in the future and address those challenges.”
Planek said Oak Park is historically a lot more proactive than most neighboring communities when it comes to training initiatives, so this step is not surprising in light of the issues the HOPE study uncovered.
“In the face of that, I think they said let’s change this up a bit and make sure that the message gets out,” he said.
The recommended ordinances will come back before the board for a first reading before they are voted on by the board.