Chicago Suburb to Settle Bias Suit for $4.3 Million

CHICAGO —  Under pressure from federal and private lawsuits, the suburb of Addison has agreed to pay more than $4.3 million to avert a trial on charges that officials used urban renewal to force Latino residents out of town.

The case was the most dramatic of five brought in recent years by federal authorities against municipalities around the country where local officials allegedly used the tools of government to discriminate against Latinos. As the nation’s Latino population grows and disperses from large cities into suburbs and small towns, private fair-housing groups and government civil rights authorities have noticed growing evidence of hostile reactions.

The Addison Board of Trustees, the town’s governing council, decided in 1994 to place the two neighborhoods inhabited most heavily by Latinos in redevelopment districts. Within the district boundaries, trustees planned to demolish small apartment complexes, which they called “blighted” but which they later admitted were structurally sound. The trustees had no firm vision for what would rise in the buildings’ place.

Village officials said at the time that they would help families find other housing on a case-by-case basis, but they set no money aside for that purpose.

Eight buildings were torn down and three others were boarded up before the lawsuits were filed in 1995.

Both sides claimed victory in the settlement announced Thursday.

“We are pleased with Addison’s cooperation to preserve and improve these neighborhoods instead of destroying them,” said Isabelle Katz Pinzler, acting assistant attorney general for civil rights.

“They caved,” said Barry Moss, Addison’s attorney. “They wanted us to stop tearing down buildings altogether. But they ended up saying we could do our entire redevelopment plan if we would pay relocation costs.”

Despite Addison officials’ insistence that they did not discriminate, the town will pay as much as $7,000 to each of 44 families already displaced by its renewal plan. Those payments, along with relocation benefits for other families who have yet to move, will total nearly $1.8 million, Justice Department and private lawyers said.

The town has also agreed to pay $2.5 million to the plaintiffs’ attorneys.

Addison will guarantee housing within a 1.5-mile radius for the displaced, and children will not have to change schools. Occupants of razed buildings “will have first choice, absolutely” to buy condominiums and townhouses in a $30-million project to be built by private developers on nearby vacant property, Mayor Larry Hartwig said.

Under terms of the agreement, the town will also pay for a park in one of the redevelopment districts, as well as a resource center.

The mayor said he hopes the resource center will help the town’s immigrant Latinos assimilate. “I don’t think it’s a racial issue; it’s a cultural issue,” Hartwig said. “We have our well-established Hispanics that lived here for years that are the average American type. And then, there is the immigrant group that has much closer ties to Hispanic culture.”

Hartwig said the planned center would likely contain “an added police presence,” English classes and programs teaching renters how to “become home-buyers and take care of a home.”

The resource center would not cost much, Hartwig added, because he expects that rather than constructing a new building, the village will renovate one of the apartment structures that might otherwise have been torn down.