A group of community activists announced Tuesday they plan to sue the Chicago Housing Authority over last month’s CEO vote, the latest turmoil facing the agency after it went 16 months without a permanent leader.
The Lugenia Burns Hope Center, Working Family Solidarity and Chicago Housing Initiative said they will file the lawsuit on Thursday seeking to undo the appointment of Keith Pettigrew as the next executive of the nation’s third-largest public housing authority.
The legal threat came a day after Mayor Brandon Johnson’s office released a statement claiming Matthew Brewer, the CHA official who led the search, was in fact at one point preparing to bring on close Johnson ally Walter Burnett before leading the board to approve Pettigrew instead.
“There was not adequate or proper notification to the public about what they were doing. We believe this was done intentionally and deceptively,” Roderick Wilson, executive director of the Lugenia Burns Hope Center, said at a news conference outside CHA’s downtown headquarters. “Our goal is to rescind this vote. CHA has an opportunity now to do this before we do.”
Brewer, who has publicly opposed Burnett’s candidacy, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Johnson’s allegations. Last week, Brewer said the agency would move on from its CEO drama, with or without the mayor — whom he previously accused of favoring political “cronies” over the interests of public housing residents.
On March 17, the board under Brewer’s voted 7-2 to appoint Pettigrew to be its next CEO, dealing Johnson a critical loss and setting him up for another showdown with a city government board. The mayor has since demoted Brewer from board chair and seeks to remove him as operating chairman as well, but the soonest Johnson can wield the supermajority likely required to fire Pettigrew for cause would be this summer.
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The result is another power struggle between the mayor’s office and a sister agency playing out in the media and perhaps in the courts, after former Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez sued the district following a 2024 vote to terminate his contract.
Also listed in Tuesday’s media advisory as supporters of the lawsuit, but not as plaintiffs, were People Matter, which is co-led by Consuela Hendricks, one of Johnson’s two new proposed appointees to the CHA board, and Northside Action for Justice, a grantee of the Chicago Teachers Union Foundation. Both of the mayor’s proposed CHA appointments remain stuck in the council’s Rules Committee after mayoral opponents sent the items there as a stalling tactic.
Wilson told reporters Tuesday that his coalition consulted with the mayor’s office about the impending lawsuit but declined to endorse Burnett or any other alternate candidate, stressing that his fight remained against the CHA board.
“We’re here mainly because of process. The process was not right,” Wilson said, adding that Burnett did have an “initial” meeting with him. “If they want to consider Pettigrew, we would want to meet with him too.”
Meanwhile, a Monday statement from Johnson spokesperson Griffin Krueger contended that Brewer’s “characterization distorts his involvement in the process while contradicting his prior actions” on the CEO search.
Krueger wrote that Johnson did meet with three finalists, but not Pettigrew, and that Burnett in fact had “enough support to be confirmed, leading in Brewer to … begin negotiating a contract agreement with Burnett.”
“Brewer never expressed to the administration or the public any negative perceptions of Burnett or the process, only secretly submitting a letter to HUD which contradicted his formal effort to secure the waiver,” Krueger wrote.
Brewer had written a letter to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development last fall as the search committee waited for a pending waiver on Burnett’s potential conflicts to the job, including him and his wife owning property where CHA voucher recipients live. That correspondence said the mayor has delayed the CEO appointment process because he won’t give up on Burnett, whom “we informed the Mayor that we do not recommend.”
He also wrote that the agency worked with the mayor’s office to ensure the two were “aligned” on a national search process before recommending two finalists to the mayor, with a third as a backup. Earlier, in July 2025, over a dozen people who make up CHA’s Central Advisory Council, an elected resident board, said Burnett would be the wrong choice for the position and did not respect their leadership.
Johnson, for his part, has argued that Burnett’s lived experience as a former resident of the Cabrini-Green public housing complex and as the City Council’s longtime “dean” made him more than qualified for the CHA role. He also challenged Brewer’s statements that it was the pending HUD waiver standing in the way of Burnett’s confirmation.
Whatever the status of the HUD sign-off, the mayor’s hurdles with moving his ally over the finish line at the CHA are indeed local. The 10-member Board of Commissioners — who are appointed by the mayor to five-year terms, and can only be removed for cause — has evidently been not stacked with enough Johnson allies to be favorable to his wishes, though four members’ terms have expired.
But Johnson appears to see a lane in attacking the board’s process when it revolted to approve Pettigrew, formerly leader of the public housing agency in Washington, D.C.
A day after the vote, Johnson told reporters he took issue with Pettigrew’s name not being publicly revealed until the vote. The group of housing activists threatening the lawsuit on Tuesday concurred, arguing his appointment violated the Open Meetings Act because the resolution only said “Approval of Personnel Actions.”
A spokesperson for Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul has said his office “would need a formal request for review in order to look into the allegation” of violating the meetings act. A previous attorney general opinion from 2023 ruled the statute “does not require the agenda to identify the subject” of the personnel vote — but it should specify the type of employee and action.