Evanston's Housing Reparations Program and the Lawsuit Against It

In November 2019, the City Council of Evanston, Illinois, a college town of fewer than 80,000 people on Lake Michigan just north of Chicago, made a decision that drew reporters from around the world. It voted to put tax revenue from the sale of recreational cannabis, which Illinois had just legalized, into a fund for local reparations, up to $10 million over time. The money did not come from property taxes or general revenue. It came from a product that had for decades been a reason police arrested Black residents at far higher rates than white residents who used it just as often. The council member who championed the idea, Robin Rue Simmons, represented the city's Fifth Ward, which for most of the twentieth century was where Black families in Evanston were allowed to live. The first program the fund paid for would be about houses, and about that ward.

In short: Evanston created the first publicly funded local reparations program in the country, paying housing grants to Black residents and descendants harmed by the city's discriminatory housing practices from 1919 to 1969. It is small, carefully designed, and contested from both sides, and a federal lawsuit filed in 2024 argues that limiting the program by race violates the Constitution.

The history the city wrote down

Before Evanston paid anything, it did something many cities never do: it researched and published an account of what its own government had done.

The city's historical review documented how, in the early twentieth century, Black residents who had lived in various parts of town were pushed into a single section on the west side. Zoning decisions, the actions of real estate agents and lenders, and the federal government's mortgage maps all played roles. Black families who wanted to buy elsewhere faced refusals by sellers, agents who would not show them homes, and banks that would not lend. The Fifth Ward got the city's least favorable treatment in services and investment over many decades, and its schools were segregated in practice.

The research mattered for a legal reason as well as a moral one. A program that compensates people for specific harms caused by an identifiable government is on much firmer ground than one that addresses discrimination in general. Evanston chose housing because housing was where the city's own role was best documented, and it chose the years 1919 through 1969 to match the period the record covered.

Why the money came from cannabis

The choice of funding source was not only convenient. It carried an argument.

For decades, national data showed that Black and white Americans used marijuana at broadly similar rates, while Black Americans were arrested for possession at several times the rate of white Americans. An arrest record could follow someone into job applications, apartment searches and student aid forms long after any sentence ended. When Illinois legalized recreational cannabis, effective at the start of 2020, the state wrote some of that history into the law itself: it provided for clearing many old low-level cannabis records, and it directed a share of state cannabis revenue to a grant program for communities hit hardest by the drug war and by disinvestment.

Evanston's move took the same logic down to the city level. If the city was going to profit from a legal product that it had once policed unequally, the council argued, the proceeds should go first toward repair. Critics saw it as an odd foundation for a reparations fund, since it ties the budget to how much cannabis residents buy. Supporters saw it as fitting. Either way, it gave the program a source that did not require a new tax vote, and that made it politically possible in 2019.

How the Restorative Housing Program works

On March 22, 2021, the council approved the first use of the fund, the Restorative Housing Program, by a vote of 8 to 1. The design was specific.

Eligible applicants could receive $25,000 each. The money did not go to them as cash at first. It went toward one of three purposes: a down payment on a home, home repairs or improvements, or paying down mortgage principal, interest or late penalties on a home in Evanston. Payments went directly to the lender, seller or contractor.

Eligibility had three tiers:

1. Ancestors: Black or African American people who lived in Evanston between 1919 and 1969, who were at least 18 during that time.
2. Direct descendants of those ancestors.
3. People who experienced housing discrimination after 1969 because of city ordinances, policies or practices.

Ancestors had first priority. The first round funded 16 recipients, chosen by lottery from among the eligible ancestors, at a total cost of $400,000. The program was slow at first, and many of the oldest eligible residents were in their eighties or nineties; some of the people the program was designed for died before their turn came.

In 2023, after feedback from recipients and residents, the council voted to allow eligible people to choose a direct cash payment instead of a restricted housing grant. That change answered one of the most persistent complaints: that an elderly woman in her nineties who already owned her home had little use for a mortgage subsidy.

The criticism from the left

The single vote against the program in 2021 came from council member Cicely Fleming, who was herself Black and supported reparations in principle. Her objection was that the housing program was not truly reparations: it dictated to Black residents how they could use the money, sent payments to banks, and called a housing assistance program something it wasn't. Some national reparations advocates made similar points. If the government owed a debt, they argued, the people owed should decide how to spend it.

Others pointed to the scale. Ten million dollars over years, for a group of eligible residents and descendants that runs well into the thousands, could not come close to closing the wealth gap the city's own history created. A program that pays a fraction of the people it identifies risks becoming a symbol in place of repair.

Supporters answered both points plainly. The housing restriction was chosen because it tied the remedy directly to the documented harm, which was legally safer and politically easier to explain. The money was limited because the city was limited; Evanston could not print currency, and the cannabis revenue was what it could commit without new taxes. And the point was to start. The cash option the city later added, and the continuing work of a reparations committee that reviews the program, are evidence that the design could be adjusted as it went.

There's a reasonable middle view here. The program is too small to be what its name promises, and it is also the first time an American local government paid its own residents for its own documented housing discrimination. Both things are true.

The 2024 lawsuit

In May 2024, a conservative legal group, Judicial Watch, filed a federal lawsuit in Chicago on behalf of several Evanston residents who were not Black and said that they or their family members had lived in Evanston during the covered years. The suit argued that the program discriminates by race in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the plaintiffs' view, the eligibility rule is simple: if you are Black and lived in Evanston between 1919 and 1969, or descend from someone who was, you can apply; if you are not Black, you cannot, whatever your circumstances.

That is a real argument, and it is stronger after 2023, when the Supreme Court's decision in the Harvard and UNC admissions cases reinforced how skeptically the current Court views race-based government programs. Under long-standing equal protection doctrine, any government classification by race must serve a compelling interest and be narrowly tailored to it. Governments may remedy their own identified past discrimination, but courts have required strong evidence of that discrimination and a tight fit between the remedy and the people harmed.

Evanston's defense relies on that exception. The city's argument, in general terms, is that it is compensating specific victims of its own documented discrimination, during a defined period, in the area of policy where it acted, housing. That is closer to a remedy for identified victims than to a broad racial preference. Critics answer that the program does not require any individual to prove they were personally denied a home or a loan; eligibility rests on race plus residence during the period, which they say is a racial classification by another name.

The outcome matters well beyond Evanston, because any city or state designing a reparations program now has to anticipate this exact challenge. At the time of writing, the case was being litigated in federal court; readers should check its current status before assuming either side has won.

Questions a careful skeptic would ask

Set the lawsuit aside and there are still fair questions about the program that deserve straight answers.

Does it actually reach the people who were harmed? Partly. Ancestors, the people who lived through the covered years, come first, which is the right priority. But the pace of funding means that most eligible people will wait years, and many descendants may never be reached at the current scale.

Is $25,000 meaningful? For a family facing foreclosure or a roof that leaks, yes. For closing a gap measured in generations of home equity, no. The program does not pretend otherwise; its sponsors have described it as a first step rather than full compensation.

Does it help Evanston's Black community stay in Evanston? This may be the most interesting question. The Fifth Ward has seen rising home prices and the familiar pressures of gentrification near a major university. A program that helps longtime families repair or keep homes they already own may matter more to the neighbourhood's future than one that helps new buyers, because it slows displacement of the very people whose history the city documented.

What other places are learning from it

Evanston's program has become a reference point for every local effort that followed, and the lessons cut in several directions.

First, the research came before the money. That sequence, document the government's own actions, then design the remedy around them, is the strongest legal and political model available. Cities that skip the history and go straight to payments make themselves easier to sue and harder to defend.

Second, a dedicated revenue source helped. Using cannabis tax revenue, with its link to unequal drug enforcement, gave the program a story residents could understand. It also meant the program did not compete directly with schools or police for general funds, which reduced the political fight.

Third, design choices made to reduce legal risk can create other problems. Restricting the money to housing made it easier to tie to documented harm, and it also frustrated recipients who needed something else. The later cash option suggests that a program can start conservative and be adjusted.

Fourth, time is cruel to these programs. The people with the strongest claims are the oldest. Delays in starting, and in litigating, mean that some of them will not be paid at all.

Housing as the through line

It is no accident that Evanston's program focused on housing. Across the country, the gap between Black and white families in wealth tracks closely to the gap in homeownership and in home values, and both were shaped by deliberate public and private policy for most of the twentieth century. Federal fair housing law did not arrive until 1968.

Progressives who care about this issue should also be honest about the present. In many cities, including liberal ones, restrictive zoning and slow permitting still make it hard to build modest homes in neighbourhoods with good schools and transit. That is a form of exclusion that doesn't need anyone's intent to work. A reparations program that helps a family buy a house is undermined if the same city refuses to allow the kinds of housing that would let the next family in. Our page on housing and homelessness covers both sides of that ledger.

The neighbours who will decide whether these programs last are not only activists. They are homeowners who worry about property taxes, renters who wonder whether anything is in it for them, and longtime white residents who remember the old Evanston too. A program that explains itself to all of them, in plain numbers and documented history, has a better chance of surviving its first lawsuit and its next election.

What you can do

Evanston started with a city council, a documented history and a funding source. Those are local decisions, which means local residents can push for them.

1. Ask your city what it has documented. Many cities have never examined their own role in housing discrimination. Find the people who represent you through Find your representatives, which lists your U.S. representative, senators and state legislators with their phone numbers, contact forms and latest votes, and use your city's website for council members.
2. Support fair housing work. Fair housing councils, legal aid groups and community land trusts are listed by state under housing and civil rights in the organizations directory.
3. Comment on federal housing rules. When the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposes changes to fair housing or lending rules, they appear on the public comment page, closing soonest first, with a guide to writing a comment that agencies have to consider.
4. Follow the legal fight. For the wider debate over reparations and the cases that will shape it, read our racial justice coverage, and check Court Watch for Supreme Court opinions and emergency orders on equal protection.