That third item is the one that reaches boards. Enforcement no longer depends on an aggrieved applicant filing. A regulator that initiates its own complaints can act on patterns, on testing, and on what it learned from this assessment — which is that written denials and individualized assessments are routinely missing.

Why this reaches community associations

Because it binds every housing provider in Cook County, and that includes condominium and HOA boards that screen or approve prospective tenants or purchasers, and the management companies that run the process for them.

Many Illinois declarations give the association a right of approval, or a right of first refusal, over a proposed lease or sale. Where the association exercises that right using a background check, it is doing tenant or purchaser screening and the ordinance applies.

The three-part compliance test

A board using criminal-background screening in Cook County must be able to show:

• a three-year lookback limit — convictions older than that are not “covered criminal history” the provider may use;
• a written explanation for any denial, given to the applicant; and
• a documented individualized assessment step — a real opportunity for the applicant to provide context before the decision is final.

Most association approval processes have none of these, because most were designed to be informal.

What else applies, and what does not

Note that the Commission does not enforce the Cook County Residential Tenant Landlord Ordinance — adopted January 2021, effective June 1, 2021, covering suburban Cook — which runs through an individual right of action instead. Two different regimes, two different enforcers.

Separately, source of income is a protected class in Illinois housing under P.A. 102-0896, effective January 1, 2023, expressly including housing choice vouchers. In January 2025 a housing watchdog filed a coordinated set of 176 complaints against 165 respondents with the Illinois Department of Human Rights alleging refusal to rent to voucher holders in the Chicago area. An association leasing policy or a manager's tenant-approval practice that screens out voucher tenants is exposed on that theory.

And Illinois codified disparate-impact liability effective June 1, 2027 — though notably not in Article 3, the real estate transactions Article, which leaves the reach to association screening rules genuinely unresolved.

What a board can do

Decide whether the association wants to screen at all. Many Illinois boards exercise an approval right they cannot actually enforce, using criteria they have never written down, and the exposure is entirely avoidable by not doing it.

Where the association does screen, write the procedure: the criteria, the lookback limit, the written-denial template, and the individualized-assessment step. Then follow it every time — because uniform application is what defeated a discrimination charge against an Illinois association this year, and its absence is what the Commission has said it will now look for on its own initiative.

What to watch next

The first wave of Commission-initiated complaints, and whether any name a community association rather than a conventional landlord.