A development company accused of failing to make a Naperville apartment complex accessible to people with disabilities will pay $423,000 in a settlement reached earlier this month with the Justice Department.
Foxcroft Partnership, which owns the Foxcroft Apartments in southern Naperville, will spend $380,000 to retrofit its 44 ground-floor units to comply with the Fair Housing Act.
Company officials, who have denied responsibility for the violations in court documents, did not return phone messages. The settlement does not include an admission of wrongdoing.
The Fair Housing Act requires all ground-floor apartments in buildings without elevators to be wheelchair-accessible and took effect in March 1991, months before the 118-unit complex was built, Justice Department officials said.
“When builders fail to make apartments accessible, they are denying housing to people with disabilities,” Assistant Atty. Gen. Ralph Boyd said in a news release. “As this settlement demonstrates, it is far less expensive to make housing accessible in the first place than go back and fix it later.”
Half of the 44 ground-floor apartments have steps leading into the units, narrow doorways, kitchens and bathrooms where wheelchairs can’t maneuver and light switches and thermostats too high for most wheelchair users to reach.
Foxcroft Partnership; Wilfred Barry, a partner in Foxcroft; and St. Charles-based D’Abar Builders must also pay $40,000 in damages. That money will be held in a Justice Department fund and may be paid out to tenants who believe they have a claim against the apartment complex. The builders also will pay a $3,000 fine.
Justice Department investigators sent four discrimination testers to Foxcroft Apartments in summer 2000 to ask if there were wheelchair-accessible units available. Managers told them there were not, according to a consent decree filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Chicago. The Justice Department initially filed suit against the builders in January 2001.
Officials would not say if the testers went to the complex in response to a complaint.
Justice Department officials know of only one tenant at Foxcroft Apartments who was directly affected by the design of the apartments, a man whose father used a wheelchair.
