That is not what this court held. A board treating an owner's discrimination claim as premature because no IDHR charge has been filed is relying on a rationale an Illinois appellate court has declined to endorse.

The two hard edges for owners

Repeated demands do not reset res judicata. An owner who litigates a defect, loses, and then sues again over the same defect — even where the problem is ongoing and the association still has not fixed it — is barred. The remedy for a continuing failure is to enforce the first judgment, not to file a second case.

A disability-accommodation claim has a real deadline, measured from the discrete refusal. Not from the onset of symptoms, not from their worsening, and not from the most recent time the owner asked again. From the refusal.

One day late is late. That is a harsh result on these facts and it is the ordinary operation of a limitations period.

The same clock caught another Illinois owner this year

In Narkiewicz-Laine v. Thorndale Beach North, claims over repeated kitchen-waste and sewage backups were held time-barred under the five-year period at 735 ILCS 5/13-205 because they accrued when the owner knew or should have known of the injury — and recurring later backups did not restart the clock, because the original problem was never resolved.

The two cases together state a rule Illinois owners consistently get wrong: a defect that keeps recurring is one claim with one start date, not a fresh claim each time. “The board keeps promising to fix it” does not toll anything.

What this does not decide

Nothing about the merits. Whether soundproofing between units is a reasonable accommodation an Illinois association must provide — and at whose expense — was not reached in either case.

That question is genuinely unsettled and we are not going to answer it here. What can be said at category level: fair-housing law generally requires a housing provider to permit reasonable modifications at the resident's expense, and to make reasonable accommodations in rules and policies. Which side of that line a structural soundproofing installation between two units falls on is the contested question, and it turns on facts including whether the transmission results from the association's failure to maintain the common elements.

The legislature was asked to address the adjacent problem and declined: SB 1683 would have barred associations from prohibiting reasonable renovations accommodating a health condition or disability. It stalled in Assignments.

What a board can do

Date-stamp accommodation decisions and communicate refusals clearly in writing. That sounds like advice against the association's interest and it is not: an ambiguous non-answer leaves the accrual date uncertain, which is the one thing a limitations defence cannot tolerate.

What to watch next

No petition for leave to appeal was found. Whether an Illinois court squarely holds that exhaustion is not required for a housing-discrimination claim against an association — this order declined the rationale without deciding the point.