Northa Johnson was living with her parents and her four siblings in a rented house in Evanston, Illinois, a small city north of Chicago, in the 1950s when she experienced something she said still haunts her.

Her family was among the Black families that had left the South for what they had hoped would be better opportunities in the Chicago area. Her dad was working as a janitor at Public Service, the municipal energy provider that’s known today as ComEd, while studying to become an electrician for the company when he and his wife tried to buy a house in Evanston in 1955, she said.

“I remember hearing my father’s voice tremor when he told my mom that the bank would not finance the house,” Johnson said.

Almost 70 years later, the city of Evanston has approved a reparations program that is one of the first of its kind in the United States. Proponents say it attempts to rectify some damage done by discriminatory redlining practices that kept scores of Black residents from buying homes in the city decades ago. The program is garnering national praise for its historic effort but it's also sparking debate. And if it should lead to a nationwide effort, that could have an effect on the larger multifamily rental market.

After years of planning and more than a dozen community meetings, the Evanston city council voted 8-1 to approve the Local Reparations Restorative Housing Program late last month. Pulling from the city’s collected taxes from recreational marijuana sales, the program is meant to award up to $25,000 to qualifying households to use on either home mortgage payments, the down payment on a home or home repairs.

The city of Evanston adopted Resolution 126-R-19, which established the city's reparations fund and reparations subcommittee, in November 2019. The city also commissioned a report on systemic racism in Evanston authored by local historian Dino Robinson and Jenny Thompson of Evanston History Center; that report published in late 2020 was part of the basis for the implementation of the city's program.

"For decades, Black Evanston residents were denied equal access to schooling, housing, retail, recreational, and commercial facilities, and many other areas," according to the report. "The city’s segregational and unequal systems were created over time and, for the most part, they were tacitly constructed both through private and public methods."

But some current and former Black residents who meet the qualifications for the Evanston program told CoStar News they aren't interested in participating in a program that seems to be a housing initiative and doesn't address the totality of the discrimination that they and their families faced, while others acknowledged that the program has potential to start the process of repairing the damage caused. All agreed that, by itself, the program isn't enough.

“We want programs that give African Americans autonomy to use the money that’s owed to them as they see fit,” Lesley Williams, a Black resident of Evanston, told CoStar News in an interview. “We want people to see [reparations] as an obligation, that municipalities, banks, real estate agents and other institutions are complicit in.”

Williams lives with her husband in Evanston in the home they bought in the mid-1990s. She and others argue that the program is too restrictive, offers little restitution for those who rent their homes and fails to fully address the harm caused by discriminatory lending practices. She said she fears it could become a national model for future reparations efforts.

Evanston's program has been touted as a potential model as the issue of reparations has increasingly become a focus of American political conversation in the wake of the racial justice protests in 2020 following the death of George Floyd. As more Americans have started to grapple with the legacy of systemic racism, housing — and access to housing — has emerged as a point of inequity between Black and white Americans.

Qualifying residents for the program must have lived, or be descendants of those who lived, in Evanston between 1919 and 1969. Residents who didn’t live in Evanston at that time can still apply if they can prove they faced discrimination in housing because of city or private practices in Evanston after 1969. The city said those practices include segregation, routine discrimination and redlining, which is the practice of denying things such as bank loans, mortgages and other essential financial services to members of neighborhoods based on their racial or demographic makeup.

Working with an initial housing budget of $400,000 means the program is able to award the maximum $25,000 to up to 16 qualifying residents. Long term, though, the city is planning to dedicate a total of $10 million in collected marijuana tax sales to reparations.

“This is just the first step, the first step in a thousand,” said Peter Braithwaite, 2nd Ward alderman and a member of Evanston’s city council. “By no way do we think this will provide the total repair we need for our community.”

Braithwhite said the city chose to focus its first reparations program on housing because, after several community meetings, the issues of housing and economic development emerged as chief concerns among the city's Black residents. Braithwhite also noted that discrimination in housing acutely affected Black residents' ability to build generational wealth, making it an important starting point for the program.

One immediate criticism of the program is that it seems to offer less restitution to Black residents who rent their homes, compared to those who either own their homes and are still making payments or are seeking to buy a new home. Under the program's written guidelines, the only way a resident who rents their home could use the reparations would be on home improvements.

"It may be better to make a cash reparation and to allow people to use it for other needs that they have, including renting, if that is preferred," said Thomas Craemer, a professor at the University of Connecticut's Department of Public Policy who has studied the issue of reparations for years.

Renters are increasingly making up a large proportion of Americans. In 2017, more Americans were renting their homes than at any other point in the past 50 years, according to data from the Pew Research Center. And in Cook County, which encompasses the greater Chicago area including Evanston, the number of residents who rent their homes remains "near historic highs," according to the 2019 "State of Rental Housing in Cook County" report published by DePaul University's Institute for Housing Studies.

In 2017, 43.3% of residents in Cook County were renting their properties, according to the report, which used the most recently available public data. In 2017, roughly 244,000 residents who earned less than 30% of their area median income were renters, according to the report. When that figure increases to those earning between 30% and 50% of their area median income, the number of those residents who are renters falls to 130,000. The figure hovers around there until you reach renters who make more than 200% of their area median income; among that group, just 61,000 were renters.

Renters tend to make up the county's lower-income earners; the more a resident's income increases, the more likely they are to be a homeowner, according to the data.

Some residents who own their homes and qualify for the $25,000 payment said they would have little to no use for it, though. Williams, who lives with her family in the condominium she’s owned since the mid-1990s, isn’t in the market to buy a new house.

And even for those who prefer to buy a home, there isn’t an abundance of homes in Evanston for which a $25,000 down payment would do much. The median value of owner-occupied homes in Evanston is about $391,400, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Private brokerages report higher values, though. Coldwell Banker, the New Jersey-based real estate company, states that the median home price in Evanston is more than $700,000, and the local real estate brokerage Bowers Realtors said that the median selling price for a house in Evanston was roughly $664,500 as of March 2021.

“There’s just not a lot available that’s going to cost someone less than 30% of their income,” Williams said.

William’s father, Willis, attended Northwestern University in the late 1950s. Northwestern, which is located in Evanston, did not allow Black students to live in all of the university’s on-campus housing, so Williams’ dad did what a lot of Black students did in those days: He found a Black family in the area to house him while he got his degree.

Northwestern said in a statement that they started desegregating on-campus student housing with dormitories for men in 1953. The city-commissioned report on discrimination in Evanston states that the university did not completely desegregate its student housing until the 1960s.

“My dad grew up in Jim Crow Florida, so this was not exactly a surprise for him,” Williams said. She noted that it was common for Black families to welcome Black students into their homes during segregation, since that would often be the only way they could ensure the next generation was able to get a college education.

Williams’ father studied history at Northwestern. He eventually became a high school history teacher and later served as the assistant principal at Englewood High School in Chicago’s South Side.

Williams has several grievances with the reparations program. For one, she said she feels the city telling Black recipients how they can spend their money is demeaning and ironic, noting that the residents are only allowed to pour money back into the banking and real estate system that discriminated against them in the first place.

She also said the city should treat reparations as any other line item of its budget. The city is using a portion of its revenues from recreational marijuana sales, a figure that isn’t stagnant and could ebb and flow over the years. She said that makes the program feel less like something the city sees as essential, and more as something that feels like charity.

“They’re almost treating it as ‘It’s so nice for us to do this for you,’ instead of treating it as an obligation they have for something they stole,” Williams said.

When presented with these criticisms, Braithwaite said the city chose to restrict what Black recipients could do with the funds out of an abundance of caution, given the threat of lawsuits the city faced from residents who disagreed with the reparations.

“We wanted to make sure that what we were able to prove was sound and the remedy we recommended would stand up in courts,” Braithwaite said. Residents who disagree with the program have a natural remedy in the form of an option of going elsewhere to buy marijuana, the sales of which fund the reparations, he said.

Braithwaite is one of the eight city council members who voted in favor of the program. He also noted the pandemic compelled the city to launch the reparations program now, rather than later, hence the $400,000 fund it’s pulling from. Braithwaite said the city has so far received $400,000 in taxes from recreational marijuana sales, so that’s the cash it has to work with on hand.

“Rather than wait for it to build up to $2 million or $3 million, we wanted to get this up immediately,” Braithwaite said.

Evanston is home to one marijuana dispensary, at 1804 Maple Ave., and it is being operated by the national cannabis company Verano Holdings. The company, which sells medical and recreational marijuana, is looking to double the square footage of its space for recreational products, Braithwaite said, and the city is targeting up to three additional dispensaries to open in Evanston.

Katherine M. Franke, who is white, also grew up in Evanston. She is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia University and serves as Columbia's faculty director of the Law, Rights, and Religion Project. She most recently published “Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition,” a 230-page book that makes a case for reparations.

“I had one Black kid in my school,” Franke told CoStar News. “The residential segregation in Evanston was rather thorough.”

Franke said her parents were able to buy their home in Evanston because her grandparents gave them what was, at the time, probably a couple thousand dollars to put toward their home. Having that “little leg up” allowed her parents to buy the house, which then accrued in value, which they then sold and continued the process of attaining intergenerational wealth, Franke said.

“Most Black people don’t have that accumulated, collected family wealth,” Franke said.

While Franke recognizes that no program can fully heal the hurt done by robbing Black Americans of their ability to accumulate wealth, she believes Evanston’s reparations program is “a good place to start.”

“What the city is trying to do is trying to give them this nest egg now,” she said.

Craemer joins others in noting that, in many significant ways, today's housing market is still prohibitive to Black Americans aiming to buy a home.

"If you try to even the playing field now, the housing stock is already divided up in a segregated fashion, and you have to wait for a house to become available and be sold in a nondiscriminatory way," Craemer said. "And the housing prices have appreciated in a way that it’s no longer comparable."

It's largely for that reason that Craemer supports reparations that are cash payments, which would also benefit those who choose to rent their homes, he said.

Craemer has studied reparations for years and authored several award-winning papers on that topic, including one that received the International Society of Political Psychology’s Roberta Sigel Award in 2010.

Johnson, whose family was forced to leave Evanston after her parents were denied a home loan because they were Black, relocated with her family to Gary, Indiana, where they were able to buy a home.

Because of the move, she said, she saw her extended family in Chicago far less frequently, especially her father Henry. His commute back and forth had him leaving the house when it was dark and arriving home late in the evenings. Her great-grandmother, who had been living with them in their rented house in Evanston, had to move in with another family in Detroit. The family opted out of having a phone so Henry could afford enough gas money for the long commute to Chicago every day.

And while Johnson maintains that she never wanted for anything as a child and that her parents still gave her and her siblings a wonderful childhood, the hurt still lingers.

“I remember all the things we missed," Johnson said. "But, the people that did these things to us and made the decisions that went against us, they never went home to their kids and told their kids about the dastardly deeds they did. But we, the Black children, knew about these things, because we saw the changes we had to go. The white kids never knew about that. They never knew about the damage their parents did.”

In considering future reparations programs, it's important to realize that one of the cornerstones of a successful reparations program is that it wholly acknowledges the scope of the harm done, Williams said. She doesn't feel the program is quite there yet.

“This wasn’t a coincidence. This was a federal program intentionally defrauding and robbing African Americans,” William said, speaking specifically about redlining. “It can’t be a piecemeal response.”