HUD, whistleblower says CHA has violated disability and civil rights laws for years

Before her daughter died, Lynya Cooper spent more than two years submitting documents to the Chicago Housing Authority explaining why she needed a wheelchair accessible unit.

Cooper’s daughter, Trebora Talbert, had a progressive neurological disease preventing her from walking or performing everyday activities on her own. The pair lived on the second floor of a building without an elevator, which meant Cooper often had to call a private ambulance company or the Chicago Fire Department to help Talbert get to and from her frequent medical appointments.

Cooper requested an emergency move in 2020 to an accessible CHA apartment, but found many units didn’t fit her family’s needs or she was told the family didn’t meet the requirements for the unit.

Talbert died just over two years later, with the family still living in the second-floor unit, according to court documents.

Cooper declined an interview request through her attorney.

Records show the CHA violated federal disability laws and the civil rights of residents like Talbert for at least eight years — leading to negotiations for a voluntary compliance agreement between the CHA and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Court records show the CHA paid Cooper $525,000 last year to settle a 2023 lawsuit that accused the agency of failing “to provide her and her late daughter, Trebora Talbert, with reasonable alternative housing conditions.”

It’s not the first instance of the CHA neglecting its legal requirements to accommodate residents with disabilities.

And a senior manager of compliance at the housing authority is now sounding the alarm, again.

“Black, brown, and elderly CHA residents languished and died, their names sitting on a de facto waiting list for nearly a decade before their much needed and deserved reasonable accommodations were ever made available,” whistleblower Amanda Motyka wrote in her complaint.

The complaint, viewed by the Chicago Sun-Times, was sent last week to the agency’s operating chairman, board, members of senior leadership and filed with the CHA’s inspector general and HUD.

Motyka wrote that she submitted her letter to “shine a light on the dysfunction of CHA’s handling of public housing’s reasonable accommodations,” and three senior leaders were “complicit in the denial and violation of hundreds of CHA residents’ civil rights.”

She was met with “a fabricated Performance Improvement Plan, a hostile work environment, and retaliation,” when she brought these issues to the attention of her supervisors in the property and asset management division, including Interim Chief Property Officer Leonard Langston.

The housing authority rescinded the performance improvement plan three days after she filed the complaint, an email obtained by the Sun-Times shows.

The CHA declined an interview request. Matthew Brewer, the agency’s board chair and interim operating chairman, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

CHA spokesperson Matthew Aguilar said in a statement that the agency is taking the complaint “very seriously,” having escalated it to its ethics officer and the Office of the Inspector General for investigation.

He confirmed Motyka’s continued employment at the CHA and said they “remain in active dialogue to understand and address the complaint as necessary.” He declined to comment further on personnel matters.

The housing authority also decided to transition the accessibility team — which reviews reasonable accommodations requests and oversees unit accessibility and compliance — from the property and asset management department to the resident services department, effective immediately, Aguilar said.

It launched a Reasonable Accommodations Task Force to “conduct a top-to-bottom review of our past practices, compared against best practices, to ensure we are improving the quality, consistency, and transparency of our services going forward,” he said.

HUD declined to comment.

The mayor’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Motyka’s complaint has been forwarded to HUD’s Office of the Inspector General, according to a HUD source who wasn’t authorized to speak on the record.

Longstanding disability violations

In 2018, CHA residents filed a federal complaint against the housing authority saying the agency had failed to install grab bars in their public housing units.

While grab bars were installed for many residents soon after the complaint was filed, Emily Coffey, attorney for the complainants, said the intention with continuing to pursue the complaint was to reform the CHA more broadly.

“The goal is to get CHA back to a place where they are approving reasonable accommodations and complying with disability law as a matter of course, rather than the status that we are still in where residents face a real uphill battle into getting reasonable accommodations met,” Coffey said.

Following the complaint, HUD launched its own investigation and found in 2022 that the CHA had “removed accessibility features during a renovation … relocated Complainant to a unit without the accessibility features present in their previous unit … failed to install the accessibility feature for Complainant after their request for a reasonable accommodation.”

The federal agency also initiated a comprehensive investigation into the housing authority’s overall compliance with disability and civil rights laws.

It said the CHA was in violation of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act, records obtained by the Sun-Times show. Section 504 is a part of the federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in programs that receive federal funds.

The housing authority agreed to settle its issues through a compliance agreement.

The CHA and HUD have been negotiating a voluntary compliance agreement for years to resolve the issues related to the 2018 complaint and broader disability discrimination issues, according to public records and sources involved in the negotiations. The agency was previously under a compliance agreement from 2006 to 2013 for Section 504 and ADA violations.

A former HUD official involved in the investigations said negotiations were initially slow because CHA’s in-house attorneys “stalled.” The source spoke on the condition of anonymity given the ongoing negotiations.

The CHA said it has been “consistently engaged and responsive” to HUD since it agreed to a voluntary compliance agreement in 2023. Aguilar said the CHA moved forward with the agreement “in the spirit of creating long-term sustainability and transparency around its Reasonable Accommodations process.”

A draft of the agreement, reviewed by the Sun-Times, said the CHA must address its unlawful deficiencies through actions including:

• hiring a “disability rights coordinator”
• retain a “neutral accessibility consultant” to survey the disability-related needs of existing residents and the accessibility of housing units
• create an accessibility plan outlining how the agency will come into compliance
• update its reasonable accommodation policy
• maintain a policy for disability-related grievances, including investigating and responding to all grievances within 30 days after they're received
• annual disability-related training for staff

The agreement would become effective for 10 years once approved by the regional director of HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, records show. The agreement could be terminated early, or extended, depending on the CHA’s adherence to HUD’s demands.

Negotiations over the agreement stalled due to staffing changes at HUD, but an email, obtained by the Sun-Times, from Elizabeth Silas, CHA’s interim general counsel, said talks have picked back up.

In December, Silas wrote in her email to senior agency leaders that a new HUD investigator hoped to have updated drafts of their agreement by the end of 2025.

The CHA, which has been without a permanent CEO for over a year, confirmed it provided feedback to HUD on the draft agreement in 2024 and hasn’t received an updated version.

Motyka, residents speak out

The Sun-Times reported last year that CHA residents are frustrated, saying property conditions remain dire, including for disabled residents who say their accessibility needs aren’t being met.

Residents with disabilities make up about 35% of the housing authority’s 135,000 clients, agency records show.

Motyka told the Sun-Times that 35% is likely an undercount because of residents’ disinclination to report disabilities, due to the housing authority’s negligence.

The CHA acknowledged in a statement that disability data “across housing systems nationwide is inherently limited by voluntary self-reporting” and said residents are not required to disclose a disability.

Motyka rejoined the CHA in June 2025, after working for years on disability and civil rights compliance at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and HUD. She previously worked at the CHA from 2004 to 2015 in the accessibility office, when it was under the first voluntary compliance agreement with HUD.

She said the division has been mismanaged for years and the CHA was warned by HUD that staffing levels were inappropriate given the housing authority’s size. The CHA is the third-largest public housing authority in the country.

About one year ago, the housing authority launched a “year of renewal” and Aguilar, of the CHA, said it included expanding its reasonable accommodations team with two more full-time employees.

The CHA is “committed to strengthening our reasonable accommodation process,” Aguilar said in a statement. “When the process does not work as intended, it creates real barriers for residents seeking support, and we must do better.”

Motyka said her goal with her letter is to have the accessibility department “moved to a place of prominence.”

“People need to know what is happening,” Motyka said in an interview. “It is a right and duty as a civil servant to be a voice for residents who are basically voiceless at this point.”