Chicago apartment company Fulton Grace Realty settled a pair of lawsuits that said the company discriminated against housing choice voucher holders.

Hope Fair Housing Center, Northside Community Resources and five voucher holders filed the lawsuits in 2025, seeking damages and changes to the way Fulton Grace treats voucher applicants.

The lawsuit said Fulton Grace discriminated against prospective tenants with housing vouchers who interacted with the company's agents when searching for apartments. It said agents would stop communicating with the prospective tenants, deny their applications or use irrelevant criteria to reject applications once they learned of the housing vouchers.

Hope Fair Housing Center and Northside Community Resources conducted roughly 30 fair housing tests between 2022 and 2024, in which people posing as renters applied for the company's apartments, Block Club Chicago reported. In 20 cases, the groups found evidence of source-of-income discrimination based on voucher use.

Fulton Grace responded to a request for comment with a statement from President and founder TJ Rubin.

“We welcome the opportunity to continue partnering with third parties to ensure our agents maintain compliance with the Fair Housing Act and the Illinois Human Rights Act, including its protections against housing discrimination based on source of income, along with all other applicable local fair housing laws,” Rubin said. “We've worked hard to resolve these disputed claims in a way that's acceptable to everyone involved, and we hold ourselves to the highest standards in doing so. That said, this settlement is a good-faith resolution and does not represent any finding of liability or fault on the part of Fulton Grace.”

Rubin added that the company has always focused on robust training in many aspects of real estate, including fair housing, and that the company is enhancing its training and materials as part of the settlement. He said it is also expanding guidance provided to property owners to further support fair housing practices.

As a result of the settlement, Fulton Grace agreed to pay an undisclosed amount to the plaintiffs and change its application practices.

The company agreed to retrain all of its leasing agents and employees within three months. It has more than 400 leasing agents across Illinois. The company also agreed to designate a liaison to work with internal and external stakeholders to ensure equal opportunity for voucher applicants.

For one year, between August 2026 and August 2027, the company will also waive application fees for applicants using vouchers and other income-based subsidies.

“We hope other leasing agencies, management companies, and other stakeholders take note of the changes Fulton Grace made to its income and credit screening, and ensure their own policies are not blanket barriers to considering qualified Voucher applicants,” MacKenzie Speer, program counsel at Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, said in a release.