The same family challenged South Barrington's septic ordinance, which limits occupancy relative to septic capacity, as religiously discriminatory and as an unlawful restrictive covenant. The court affirmed the Commission's dismissal for lack of substantial evidence, citing 775 ILCS 5/3-102(B), 5/8-111(B)(2), and the Illinois Religious Freedom Restoration Act at 775 ILCS 35/1.

Reporting the two together is the honest way to present this: it was a single family's two-front campaign against an association and a municipality over housing refugees, and both failed on evidence, not on legal theory.

The lesson is documentation, not drafting

This is the point that matters for boards, and it is not the one they usually take.

The association did not win because its single-family-use and leasing covenants were well drafted. It won because there was no evidence it enforced them differently against these owners than against anyone else.

Change that one fact — produce comparators showing other households with unrelated occupants who were never cited — and the case looks entirely different. The covenant text does almost no work here; the enforcement record does all of it.

So the practical instruction is about files, not documents: keep a complete, retrievable record of every violation notice sent, on what basis, to which unit, and what happened next. An association that cannot produce that record cannot demonstrate even-handedness, whatever its rules say.

Why this fact pattern will recur

Occupancy and single-family-use covenants sit directly on top of religiously motivated hospitality, multigenerational living, and refugee sponsorship. Those are increasingly common in Illinois, and a neutral covenant applied to them will keep producing charges.

The exposure grows rather than shrinks. Illinois has now codified disparate-impact liability — though notably not in Article 3, the real estate transactions Article — effective June 1, 2027, and an occupancy limit stated per bedroom rather than per unit is the classic effects-based target.

And IDHR's procedural posture has hardened. Under P.A. 104-0465 the Director or a designated representative may now issue subpoenas directly in real-estate-transaction charges, rather than requesting them from a Commission member. An association responding to a housing charge should expect faster and more direct document demands — which is another reason the enforcement file matters.

What does not follow for a board

That charges of this kind are unwinnable for owners. These two failed for want of evidence. The Illinois Department of Human Rights received a coordinated mass filing of 176 housing-discrimination complaints against 165 respondents in January 2025 on a source-of-income theory, which indicates both the volume and the organisation now behind housing charges in Illinois.

What to watch next

No petition for leave to appeal was found in either case. The question worth following is whether an effects-based theory under the amended IHRA reaches association occupancy rules after June 1, 2027.