Thomas J. McNulty
Thomas J. McNulty

Things started to fall apart for Tricia Downs when she had to quit her office job to move to the suburbs to care for her ailing parents.

Eventually, her father died, and her mother developed dementia. Downs got a part-time job at a library making $6.50 an hour.

Then things got worse.

“I got cancer,” she said. “I was trying to take care of myself and my mom while working part time while I was ill.”

When her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, Downs was forced to move her to an assisted-care facility. Between taking care of her parents and her own medical bills for seven years, most of her savings was gone, and she couldn’t afford to stay in her parent’s house.

On the brink of homelessness, Downs talked to a friend who suggested she apply for a new senior living building in Uptown. She didn’t know if she could afford the rent, but the building manager told her not to worry about it.

The building had support from the Chicago Low-Income Housing Trust Fund for tenants who needed assistance.

Three years later, Downs, 66, is cancer-free and spends her time volunteering at various organizations in the city.

“I just couldn’t believe it. It’s so wonderful,” she said. “I can start my life again. Somebody is giving me a chance.”

The trust fund has been helping thousands of low-income residents like Downs for the past 25 years.

Since the fund’s inception, Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg LLP partner Thomas J. McNulty has served as president of its 15-member mayoral-appointed board and was recently honored with an award for his years of service.

Under his leadership, the nonprofit gained a regular source of funding and spurred the creation of similar programs across the state.

“My hope when we started 25 years ago was that the trust fund would be out of business by now — which is to say we’d have all of our citizens safely and affordably housed,” he said. “But unfortunately, we haven’t been able to meet the demand. Nobody has. That’s always been a challenge, to do as much as you can.”

The fund administers $15 million in rental subsidies that provide 5,400 people with affordable housing in the city. Most state and federal programs help individuals and families with incomes that meet at least 50 percent of the area median income, McNulty said, which leaves thousands of the city’s poorest residents without aid.

The trust fund is dedicated to helping those who earn less than 30 percent of the area median income — about $22,000 a year for a family of four.

The fund’s rental subsidy program takes a unique approach: Landlords and potential tenants choose each other, similar to any other rental agreement. The tenants pay what they can, and the trust fund pays the difference directly to the landlords.

As a result, landlords get the full market value of the apartment, McNulty said, as well as a tenant who has to abide by the terms of a rental agreement just like everyone else in the building.

“We provide a catalyst in a marketplace that’s functioning,” he said. “There’s a supply and a demand. There’s landlords and tenants.”

The trust fund inspects participating properties each year, McNulty said, and won’t subsidize more than 30 percent of a building’s units. The underlying philosophy is to find landlords who properly maintain their properties and already have strong occupancy rates.

That leads to quality buildings with economic diversity and stability for families so they don’t have to spend the majority of their income on rent. It keeps many families out of shelters, McNulty said, and allows them to focus on creating better lives for themselves through education and jobs.

“They’ll have the same chance as anybody else does,” he said. “Or at least as close to the same chance as everybody else does to get out there and compete.”

McNulty’s interest in leveling that playing field started when he was a Cook County assistant state’s attorney from 1980 to 1984. His mentor at Keck, Cushman, Mahin & Cate — the late Robert S. Cushman — told him if he wanted to make a difference for people in the property tax realm, he should go work for the county. Cushman himself had been a prosecutor during the Great Depression.

Then-state’s attorney and future mayor Richard M. Daley assigned McNulty to the tax unit, where he prosecuted delinquent landlords and worked with the arson unit in cases in which landlords torched properties for insurance money.

Back then, there were fewer laws to combat unscrupulous landlords. Many property owners engaged in a common scheme of defaulting on their taxes for five years so a property could go to a scavenger sale and have all its liens extinguished. The owner would get an accomplice to buy it under a fictitious name; some just rebought it themselves.

In one case, McNulty said, a 5 percent interest in a building was deeded to Sammy Davis Jr.

“One of my favorite fictitious names was Angelina Primavera,” he said. “I didn’t know if that was a person or what you could have for dinner at Bennigan’s on a Friday.”

McNulty worked on initiatives to reform state laws on housing, including criminalizing tax sale fraud.

That experience in Springfield came in handy later on when McNulty and the board lobbied the Illinois General Assembly to create a statewide fund that would serve Chicago and other cities with a steady funding stream for affordable housing.

The Illinois Rental Housing Support Program was created in 2005 and is funded through a $9 fee on real estate documents filed with the county recorder of deeds office.

The program is currently facing a constitutional challenge before the Illinois Supreme Court.

Oral arguments in Jason S. Marks et al., etc. v. Mary Ellen Vanderventer, etc., et al., No. 116226, were heard Sept. 16. The plaintiffs allege the law’s original $10 fee created an illegal “fee office” because $1 of the charge was going to the county recorders’ offices for administrative purposes. The law was amended to a $9 fee in 2013, and the lawsuit seeks retroactive relief.

McNulty and attorneys at Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg researched and wrote a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the trust fund for the case. The firm regularly provides the group with pro bono legal services.

Douglas C. Dobmeyer, a former president of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless who served as trust fund board secretary for 23 years, said McNulty knows how to strategize and played a big role in developing stable funding for the trust over the years.

When the trust fund was created in 1989 with $3.2 million from a deal between the city and developers of the Presidential Towers luxury housing development, it had no other financial support. The developers were supposed to keep funneling money into the trust fund, but defaulted and didn’t finish the project.

Working behind the scenes, McNulty got the city to include the trust fund in its annual budget, Dobmeyer said, and was heavily involved in the 2005 state law’s passage. The work of a board is taking ideas and turning them into good policies, he said, and McNulty allows hard questions and strong discussions to flow during monthly board meetings.

“He’s not the kind of guy who dictates everything,” Dobmeyer said. “His modus operandi is to include people and hear what they have to say.”

Cary Steinbuck, the trust fund’s executive director, said the time and expertise McNulty has committed to the trust fund is immeasurable. Steinbuck said he is humble, thoughtful and never turns down a request for help.

“He fights for what’s right. There’s a sense of honesty and decency about him,” Steinbuck said. “He’s just passionate about what he does and what he believes.”

McNulty said some see affordable housing nonprofits like the trust fund as a intrusion on the private sector and attach a stigma to low-income tenants. But poverty, he said, doesn’t automatically make a person a bad neighbor.

By providing stable housing through the trust fund, McNulty said, landlords are not only getting a return on their investment but are also giving families a chance to improve their lives and communities.

“This is one of those things,” he said, “where you can actually affect the quality of life for people in your community.”