In October 2023, a man claiming to be from the Cook County Sheriff’s Office was banging on apartment doors in a building on 67th and Merrill in South Shore.
He left a five-day notice on Steve Johnson’s door, asking for over $3,000 in back rent payments that had been waived by a previous slumlord just months earlier. Made aware of this, a Crusader journalist was both curious and suspicious. Cook County Sheriff officers do not carry out evictions on Saturdays, and other tenants said they didn’t see any police cars outside when that man began banging on doors.
Investigating the incident, the Crusader journalist called the phone number on the notice. The person answering on the other line worked for CHER, a property management firm that was now Johnson’s new landlord. The staff member denied the company was impersonating a Cook County Sheriff’s officer. However, after the Crusader published the story, the firm never bothered Johnson again for the back rent.
Today, Johnson is gone from the Merrill premises. He moved out after less than a year, fed up with the mold problem in his apartment. He was one of many tenants of Catalyst Realty, a slumlord that relocated him to another one of their properties after the one he was living in was condemned by the city because it provided no heat and no electricity to tenants in the middle of winter in 2023.
About eight months after Johnson moved into his new apartment, another slumlord bought the building.
“CHER is trying to intimidate us by making this feel like an eviction when it’s not,” Johnson told the Crusader, at the time anonymously, in a story published October 25, 2023. “This visit to my apartment by this man seems suspicious.”
This would not have happened to Johnson had he been a migrant living in one of the city’s well-funded and well-equipped shelters.
But instead of being among the haves, enjoying the comforts of a warm, clean home, he lived in slum properties with the have-nots under a landlord who, like predecessors, ignored and neglected repairs while expecting tenants to pay their full month’s rent.
While the city’s residents lived in unacceptable conditions, arriving migrants across the city were showered with food, clothing, and hundreds of millions of dollars from local, state, and federal governments.
Today, over 52,000 migrants have settled in Chicago to start new lives. Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration, with the help of state and federal resources, has spent a whopping $638.8 million on the migrant population, according to the city’s migrant dashboard.
About 63 percent of that money was spent on the medical personnel firm Favorite Healthcare Staffing, which provided $400,374,307 in healthcare services. About $128,986,340 was spent on helping migrants find housing through the services of Equitable Solutions, LLC. To feed daily meals to the migrants, nearly $25 million was spent on services from Open Kitchens, Inc. and over $21 million was spent on Seventy-Seven Communities Meal Services, LLC.
The migrants had their clothes washed by Laundry Opps, LLC, with whom the city spent over $3 million on services. Culvers Transportation and Hanco Enterprise, Inc. provided over $2.3 million in transportation services. To ensure the arrivals’ safety, the city paid at least three security firms a total of $3,044,832 to keep the migrants safe and secure. 14 Parish LLC, a Black-owned Caribbean restaurant in Hyde Park, has been paid over $15.3 million for serving the migrants and spent over $425,550 to Sophisticated Events and Design, Inc.
In addition, the city has spent millions on services offered by local churches, community centers, non-profit organizations and sanitation firms.
But at the height of the migrant crisis, there was a forgotten and often overlooked group of people rarely talked about: renters living in slum conditions in apartments in South Shore and other Black neighborhoods on the South Side.
Resentment of Mayor Johnson’s administration escalated among Black residents as migrants were fed and nurtured in warm shelters. Mayor Johnson responded to community complaints with a failed Bring Home Chicago referendum for homeless persons. Still, hardly any attention from the city was given to tenants who lived in slum conditions under bad landlords.
Johnson inherited the migrant crisis from his predecessor, Mayor Lori Lightfoot, another progressive Democrat who lost her reelection campaign, receiving just 33 percent of the Black vote.
During Johnson’s first term in office, residents in Black neighborhoods across the city flooded community town hall meetings, expressing their concerns and disgust at the millions of dollars and city resources being used to help the migrants.
In 2023, Johnson led the City Council as it rejected a proposed referendum that would have put Chicago’s sanctuary status before voters. Five Black aldermen were among those who sided with the mayor. They also voted in favor of separate proposals that gave $121 million to the migrant crisis.
Today, Johnson is making his rounds in the Black community to appeal to his core base of Black voters, as his approval rating sits at 6.6 percent. Though Johnson has pledged to pump hundreds of millions into neighborhoods on the South and West Side, resentment towards his handling of the migrant crisis remains.
During a live interview on WVON 1690 last week, a caller asked how Johnson can “justify” spending hundreds of millions of dollars “putting these people up when you can’t throw a brick without hitting a homeless Black person.”
While migrants in Chicago did little to call attention to their situation and status in the city, in South Shore, tenants of slumlord CKO Real Estate had to hold press conferences to get Alderman Desmon Yancy to respond to a tenant crisis he has known about since last September.
Laverne Craig and Nancy Jones are among many tenants who live or have lived in one of 26 buildings that CKO Real Estate owns in South Shore.
Since 2024, the stench of human feces has filled Craig’s apartment in South Shore, where she struggles to pay $1,200 a month for a two-bedroom unit.
At one point, the dark blue carpet in her bedroom was soaked with sewage water from the burst pipe that left her bathroom tub filled with human waste. Her toilet was filled with the same brown stuff as puddles of sewage water covered the floor in her hallway.
On the same street, Nancy Jones lived without heat and water for three months in November as cold weather settled in. Her apartment was so cold that the dishwashing detergent turned to ice as it sat on the kitchen sink. She said she could see her breath when she spoke.
Both women filed complaints with the city’s 311 hotline. However, emails often gave an estimated completion time of 45 days.
Craig is desperately looking for a new apartment, while Jones moved into a new unit near 71st and Jeffery in South Shore.
Craig is on a tight budget as she looks to relocate. She has filed a lawsuit for damages against CKO Real Estate, but the company closed last month after experiencing severe financial problems. Craig faces an uphill battle to get any compensation.
Officers with the Cook County Sheriff’s Office are unable to serve CKO’s evasive CEO, Chikoo Patel. Investors shut down his firm in February after a fire ripped through one of its properties. Should Patel appear in court and lose to Craig, she may still have a difficult time collecting money from Patel should he file for bankruptcy.
EDITOR’S NOTE:
Because CKO Real Estate personally impacted the Chicago Crusader journalist in this story, the newspaper considered not covering or publishing the story. But as a watchdog for the Black community, this publication has zero tolerance for individuals and companies that operate with no respect for the law, our neighborhoods, or our people. A proud member of the historic Black Press, the Crusader employs a time-honored mission of advocating for overlooked issues that adversely affect African Americans. The editorial board agreed that the story held relevance and interest for the community and warranted coverage.
For 85 years, the Chicago Crusader has been an award-winning publication striving to uphold the highest standards of journalism. Like many news organizations, the Crusader holds elected officials and others accountable.
We have helped exonerate the wrongly convicted, exposed corruption in elected officials, forced institutions to recognize forgotten trailblazers and educated generations about our history and our proud heritage.
Unbought and unapologetic, we add this crusade to our long list of achievements in serving Black Chicago and beyond.
