The delight of having purchased a home lasted just eight days for Arturo and Laura Mora.
They were thrilled to have moved out of a tough neighborhood where Arturo had been threatened at gunpoint. They would now be living close to a relative of Laura, and their two sons, Arturo Jr. and Miguel, could enter a good public school.
But on July 8, 2003, when the family of four had barely settled into the two-bedroom townhouse in west suburban Villa Park, a letter arrived from the homeowners association saying local codes would allow only three people to live in the townhouse. According to the DuPage County codes that cover the unincorporated neighborhood the Moras had moved into, the townhouse’s small second bedroom could accommodate just one person, not the couple’s two sons.
When the Moras unwittingly ran afoul of the local occupancy code, they got caught in a bind that housing experts say is increasingly common for immigrants in the Chicago area. Struggling to afford housing, they may put more people in one home than codes designed to protect health and safety will allow. And when municipal code-enforcement officers point that out, something’s got to give.
“Nobody had told us this at all,” Laura Mora, whose primary language is Spanish, says through an interpreter, Florentina Rendon of Hope Fair Housing Center in Wheaton. “If anybody had said anything about it, we wouldn’t have bought that house.”
But, somebody had told them — in a paper document written in English, a language neither Arturo nor Laura reads. It seems none of the English speakers who were at the closing, including their own real estate agent and attorney, and the mortgage agent, pointed out the problem to the Moras. And seeing two bedrooms in the townhouse, they had no idea their two sons wouldn’t be able to share one.
Only after filling out a form for the homeowners association on which they wrote, with the help of someone who speaks both languages, the names of everyone who would live in the townhouse and the make, model and license plate of their car did the couple learn of the occupancy limits on the place they had bought.
The Moras’ new home was one of three floorplans that the Brandywine Towne Houses Improvement Association classifies as a three-person unit, based on square footage in the bedrooms.
Eighteen months and $3,500 in fines later, the family moved in January into a three-bedroom townhouse not far from the first. The $12,000 profit they made on selling the two-bedroom place was eaten up by fines, an early-payoff penalty on their mortgage and the heftier down payment they had to put down to step up from the $115,000 two-bedroom to a $170,000 three-bedroom.
One good thing did come out of the experience: When they were trying to sell the two-bedroom, a family of four put in a bid, but Laura knew to tell them they wouldn’t be allowed to live there. “I told them, `We’ve been through that, you don’t want to,'” she says.
In the rental market, college students are notorious for crowding too many people into one space, but among homeowners the most likely to overcrowd are new immigrants, says Linda Pieczynski, a DuPage County attorney with a specialty in occupancy-code cases.
“They pool their resources to get to the next step in the American dream,” Pieczynski says. “My German ancestors did it when they got to St. Louis, and my husband’s Polish ancestors did it on the South Side. But a lot of people died in tenement fires and from diseases, a lot of children were sexually abused from living in close quarters with unrelated adults. That’s why we have these codes now.”
Standards set by the International Code Council dictate that a one-person bedroom must be at least 70 square feet, and that bedrooms for more than one person should have at least 50 square feet per person (i.e., 100 square feet for two people). They also require escape windows in any basement space used as a bedroom.
“The codes are based on ideas of what is reasonably considered best for health and safety,” says Tom Frost, senior vice president of technical services in the council’s Chicago regional office, in Country Club Hills. “Over-crowding is not only bad from a physical health standpoint but from an emergency evacuation standpoint. If a bedroom is wall-to-wall with folks, the ability of them all to get out expeditiously would be impaired.”
Frost says the council’s codes have been adopted by about 97 percent of jurisdictions in the country, including 46 states. In Illinois, which has no applicable state building code, Frost says at least 400 municipalities have adopted ICC codes.
“These are issues of life safety the codes deal with. They’re not about trying to target any one population group,” says Karyn Byrne, code-enforcement officer for Warrenville, Berkeley and several other western suburbs.
Because the largest number of new immigrants in the Chicago area are Hispanic — U.S. Census figures from 2000 showed that there were four times as many new Mexican immigrants here than Polish, the second-largest group — contemporary problems over occupancy are rising mostly with Hispanic home buyers.
“I handled five cases last year, and every one of those properties was Latino-owned,” Byrne says. There is no comprehensive tally of such cases, but Joan Laser, assistant U.S. attorney in charge of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in Chicago, and Pieczynski concur with Byrne that most cases involve Latinos.
The consequences can be disastrous for families trying to establish a good financial foothold in this country. Maria Salazar estimates that she and her husband, Antonio, will have to spend as much as $7,000 to install escape windows in their basement and tear down a wall that now divides one code-approved bedroom into two smaller ones.
The house they bought in West Chicago for about $185,000 last fallwas listed by the sellers as a three-bedroom. The Salazars figured that those rooms and space in the basement would suit their three-generation family of 11. But when neighbors complained about the number of cars parked in front of the Salazar house, a code inspector determined that sleeping in the basement was a violation and that a bedroom had been improperly divided by a previous owner.
Along with laying out money to make the house meet the codes, Salazar points out, “we thought we had a three-bedroom house and now it’s a two,” which automatically makes it worth less on the open market. In effect, they have taken a one-two punch in the wallet.
Conditions in the house are not ideal. When asked if she doesn’t feel at least a bit cramped with 11 people living in the small three-bedroom, Salazar answers, “well, sort of,” but she goes on to say, “this is what we could afford, and now we are going to have to deprive our family of certain things to do all the work so we can keep the house.”
With help from Hope Fair Housing Center, West Chicago and other municipalities work with homeowners who violate occupancy codes to find a solution that works for everybody.
In some cases, Hope Fair Housing’s Rendon helps members of extended families secure mortgages so they can stop sharing relatives’ housing, or gets them set up with credit-cleanup agencies so they can aim for homeownership down the line.
In others, a family like the Salazars gets enough time to make whatever changes it can to make the home suitable. “If people are willing to comply and they are trying to comply, I’m not going to take them to court,” Byrne says. ” If they’re doing something sneaky like shuffling cars around the neighborhood to hide how many are parked at their house, that’s not trying to comply.”
While most occupancy issues stem from lack of knowledge on the buyers’ part, as was true for the Moras and the Salazars, occupancy codes have at times been wielded by mostly white municipalities to slow the entry of Latinos, Laser points out.
In the late 1990s, the Justice Department alleged that municipal leaders in Cicero, Waukegan and Addison were doing just that.
In Cicero, for example, Laser recalls, at a time when 87 percent of new home buyers in town were Hispanic, “they enacted an ordinance that required this extra-large amount of space per person, more than the model codes require. We alleged that they believed Hispanics had large families and this was a way to keep them from being able to afford to come into Cicero. That was an example of an occupancy code that really didn’t have to do with health and safety.”
Officials in Cicero, Waukegan and Addison agreed to consent decrees that ended discriminatory use of occupancy codes. Those cases “woke up some towns to the notion that they weren’t going to be able to engage in blatant discrimination like that,” Laser says.
On a smaller front, her run-in with occupancy codes clearly woke up Laura Mora. While her husband works two jobs and she works one, she also makes time for English language classes, hoping among other things to protect herself and her family from another misstep like the one they made when they bought their first townhouse.
