On June 16, the Justice Department asked a federal judge to halt the Restorative Housing Program in Evanston, Illinois, the first government reparations program for Black Americans in the United States. Federal attorneys filed a complaint in intervention in Flinn v. City of Evanston, the suit six non-Black descendants of Evanston residents brought against the city in May 2024. The government now argues alongside those plaintiffs that paying residents by race violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Fair Housing Act.
Evanston adopted the program in 2019 and began paying in 2021. The city pledged $20 million to Black residents who lived in Evanston as adults between 1919 and 1969, and to their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Each recipient can take $25,000 as a direct cash payment or as assistance toward buying, repairing, or maintaining a home in the city. More than $5 million has gone out so far.
Mayor Daniel Biss told CNN the payments answer a debt the city ran up itself. The program targets “specific acts taken by the city on purpose,” Biss said. “That created a wealth gap that exists today, that people are suffering from today, and we created a program to address that gap, repair the harm that we caused.”
The Wealth Gap the City Says It Helped Build
The Federal Reserve’s 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances put the typical White family’s wealth at about $285,000, roughly six times the wealth of the typical Black family. Home equity accounts for much of the distance between those two numbers.
Wealth and income measure different things. A household can earn a steady paycheck and still hold almost nothing. Wealth is what remains after debts are paid. It is the balance a family draws on in a crisis, or passes to a child.
Income sets the starting line. The U.S. Census Bureau’s 2024 Current Population Survey recorded a median household income of $56,490 for Black households against $84,630 for White households. The spread runs $28,140 a year. A household saving toward a first home out of the lower figure reaches the down payment years later than one saving out of the higher figure, if it reaches it at all.
Robin Rue Simmons proposed the program in 2019 as alderman of the 5th Ward and now chairs Evanston’s Reparations Committee. She has pointed to the city’s own record. Banks and property owners refused to sell or rent to Black families across most of Evanston between 1919 and 1969, pushing them into the segregated 5th Ward. “Evanston has set a new precedent,” Simmons said. “It has shown that racial reparations are possible.”
Federal Examiners Drew the Lines in the 1930s
Between 1935 and 1940, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation graded neighborhoods in more than 200 American cities, coloring each one by lending risk. Green meant safe. Red meant hazardous. Examiners marked neighborhoods with Black residents as hazardous almost without exception. Lenders avoided the red zones for the next three decades. The original residential security maps sit in the National Archives, and researchers have matched their grades to neighborhoods that remain economically distressed today.
Families inside the green lines borrowed, bought, and built equity that compounded across generations. Families inside the red lines could not borrow at all. The word redlining comes from those maps, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the same statute the Justice Department now invokes against Evanston, outlawed the practice.
A family kept out of a green zone in 1950 had no equity to hand a child buying a first home in 1985. That child had less to hand the next one.
Homes in Black Neighborhoods Appraise $48,000 Low
Research from the Brookings Institution found that owner-occupied homes in majority-Black neighborhoods are undervalued by about $48,000 each on average. Nationwide that runs to roughly $156 billion in lost value. Drawing on Federal Housing Finance Agency data, the same researchers found homes in Black neighborhoods valued 21 to 23 percent below what they would fetch in comparable non-Black neighborhoods.
A low appraisal reaches a household in specific ways. The mortgage shrinks, because a lender will not finance more than a home is judged to be worth. The buyer covers the gap in cash or walks. The sale price falls. So does the equity available to borrow against for a business, a tuition bill, or an emergency room visit.
Evanston’s $25,000 covers about half of that average per-home loss.
Same Income, Same Credit Score, Higher Denial Rate
The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis examined confidential federal mortgage data covering millions of applications. A Black applicant is more likely to be denied than a White applicant with the same income and the same credit score, applying for a similar loan on a similar home. The gap persisted after researchers accounted for the financial details lenders say drive the decision.
An applicant turned down at one lender may stop looking. Others take a higher-rate loan somewhere else. Thirty years of a higher rate costs tens of thousands of dollars on the same house, and the borrower owns less of it at every point along the way.
Race Alone Decides Eligibility, and That Is the Legal Question
The program reaches Black residents who lived in Evanston as adults between 1919 and 1969, and their direct descendants down to great-grandchildren. Applicants choose between a direct cash payment they may spend on anything and housing assistance applied to a home in the city. Most early recipients chose cash.
Evanston does not require an applicant to document that they or their ancestor personally experienced discrimination, and the Justice Department built its filing on that point. The city has not identified specific acts of discrimination the payments are meant to remedy, federal attorneys wrote, which leaves race as the criterion that decides who receives $25,000.
Evanston answers that the acts are on the books. The city ties the program to its own zoning and housing practices across the covered decades. FirstRepair has defended the design as addressing what it calls the specific, documented impacts of unlawful zoning and housing policies instituted by the city. Biss has said the city spent its effort on narrowing the program to the harm it caused rather than to race in the abstract. Whether that record satisfies the court is the question in front of U.S. District Judge John F. Kness.
Michael Bekesha, the Judicial Watch attorney who sued Evanston on behalf of six plaintiffs in May 2024, said his clients would qualify for the program if they were Black. Bekesha drew a line between Evanston and earlier compensation programs. He pointed to the payments made to Japanese Americans after the government imprisoned more than 100,000 of them in internment camps during World War II. He pointed to the people tortured by Chicago police between the 1970s and the early 1990s. Those programs paid named people for documented injuries, he said.
The money comes from Evanston’s own tax base. The City Council committed the first $10 million from a 3 percent cannabis sales tax in 2019, then added revenue from a real estate transfer tax. Payments arrive only as those taxes come in.
Justice Department Calls the Program Race Discrimination
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, framed the government’s case in a statement announcing the filing. “There are sound ways for a city to remedy past discrimination or direct resources to its most vulnerable citizens and neighborhoods,” Dhillon said. “Simply handing out money based on race, however, is not the answer. It is race discrimination, pure and simple. And it is illegal.”
U.S. Attorney Andrew S. Boutros for the Northern District of Illinois put the constitutional argument alongside it. “The Constitution demands that the government treat citizens as individuals, not as members of a racial class,” Boutros said. “Distributing public funds based on an individual’s ancestry or race divides the citizenry and establishes the very hierarchy the Equal Protection Clause was designed to dismantle.”
Judge Kness denied Evanston’s motion to dismiss on March 27, 2026, finding the plaintiffs had standing to press their constitutional claims. The Justice Department opened its own investigation of the program that same month. The city declined to cooperate, and the June 16 filing followed. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche personally certified the case as one of public importance, which authorized the government to intervene to enforce the Fair Housing Act.
Biss said the city expects to win. “We stand behind our first-in-the-nation reparations program, are confident in its constitutionality, and look forward to defending it in court,” he said. Simmons called the federal intervention a “fear tactic” aimed at discouraging other governments from building similar programs. She also called it an “attack on the revived hope that Black communities have felt having a path, through a hyperlocal process, to reparations.”
Both sides describe a case that reaches past Cook County. Simmons, who also directs the nonprofit FirstRepair, called the filing an “unfortunate escalation” that was not unexpected. “We recognize this not merely as a challenge to one city, but as a direct attempt to obstruct the broader, growing movement for reparative justice,” she said. Dhillon said much the same from the other direction, writing on her official account the day of the filing that other cities are on notice.
Hundreds of Approved Families Are Still Waiting for Checks
Evanston pays roughly 40 grants a year against a $20 million pledge, because the cannabis and transfer taxes arrive in increments. The city has verified hundreds of direct descendants who qualify and has reached a fraction of them. Recipients hold selection numbers marking their place in line, and the city tells them funds go out as revenue lands.
Eight ancestors died before their payments arrived, and the Reparations Committee has worked with their families to redirect the awards. The Justice Department told the court the city plans to distribute millions more as funds become available.
A court order halting the program would leave the families already paid with their grants and everyone behind them holding an approval and nothing else.
Down Payment Assistance Runs Through State Agencies
Most Black families harmed by housing discrimination live nowhere near Evanston and cannot apply to its program. Down payment assistance exists in every state, run by state and local housing agencies, and the Flinn case does not touch it.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development keeps a directory of homebuying programs covering all 50 states. A resident selects a state and reaches the housing finance agency for that state. The agency lists local grants, forgivable loans, and below-market mortgages. Most programs serve first-time buyers, which HUD defines as someone who has not owned a home in the past three years. Programs also set income ceilings tied to the area median income.
HUD also funds housing counseling agencies that charge the buyer nothing. A counselor confirms which programs an applicant qualifies for, what documents each one requires, and which local lenders accept the assistance. Counselors often know about local funds that never surface in a general search. HUD’s counselor directory lists approved agencies by state and county.
Many state programs structure assistance as a forgivable loan. The debt is erased once the buyer has held the home as a primary residence for a set number of years, commonly five to ten, and a buyer who meets the term owes nothing. Amounts vary widely. One state agency may offer 10 percent of the purchase price while a neighboring one offers a few thousand dollars. A counselor can confirm the current numbers before a buyer commits to a lender.
