After dealing with the pollution from the industrial sites, residents started to take a stand, complain, and try to make a change. Many of the residents came together and tried starting a lawsuit, but most of them were overlooked or weren’t good enough reasons for them to want to sue over. The one lawsuit that made it through was the one against the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) demanding that they move all the residents out to a safer area as well as compensate them for all the problems they have suffered while living there. The residents filed this lawsuit because they were “surrounded by industrial pollution, tainted water, and contaminated soil...Altgeld Gardens was unsafe and posed a threat to the health and well-being of the residents.”

Their attorney for this lawsuit was S. Jerome Levy. After investigating this lawsuit, he stated that Altgeld Gardens is “not a place where these people should be living. As a landlord, CHA has an obligation to provide safe housing.” Levy fought very hard for the residents in this lawsuit. This lawsuit concluded with Levy and the resident’s winning, but their winnings for the lawsuit, was in agreement by the courts as well as CHA, would go to the housing for those residents rent. The residents were not happy about how the lawsuit ended. Many commented that this felt a lot like slavery and that it isn’t happening anymore in America. Many residents didn’t like the fact that they were told how they would spend their money, or the fact that they didn’t get to see the money before it was spent. The President of a local advisory counsel/resident of Altgeld Gardens said she didn’t like the way the lawsuit ended because people in general shouldn’t be told how to spend their money. Another resident looks at the lawsuit as “short term we won, but long term we lost. The main element was enviroment and we lost. But we would have won substantially on the environmental side.” Out of all the lawsuits that were filed, this was the only one that made it all the way.