Chicago Better Housing Association
housing organization to counter discrimination in housing in the US
The Chicago Better Housing Association (CBHA) is an open housing organization created in the 1950s to counter discrimination in the allocation of housing in the United States. The group campaigned for open housing legislation, and later planned and commissioned several affordable housing schemes and other improvements in the Chicago area.
History
CBHA was founded as part of the fledgling civil rights movement that followed the Brown v. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court in 1954. It was created by a coalition of civil rights groups including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and advocates for equal housing.
Later in the early 1960s, the group joined forces with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), headed by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Chicago Chapter of the NAACP, headed by the Rev. Herbert C. Martin, and the local black church community, and Operation Breadbasket to push for legislation for open housing. When federal and state open housing legislation was passed, they were one of the groups that worked with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the local successor to the SCLC which after Dr King's death became Operation PUSH, along with CORE and the NAACP, and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, to provide "testers" to trap unwary and unscrupulous landlords and real estate firms that block busting and were steering blacks, Hispanics and Asians away from or to certain neighborhoods.
After a ruling in the early 1990s by the Supreme Court making it harder for testers to be used as a weapon against civil rights violations, and after the cumulative effect of 12 years of conservative, anti-civil rights judges being appointed to the federal courts by the Reagan and Bush (Snr.) administrations, the CBHA shifted its focus away from litigation and toward the development of affordable housing and redevelopment work in blighted underprivileged communities.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Chicago Better Housing Association” as housing organization to counter discrimination in housing in the US. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as housing organization to counter discrimination in housing in the US. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5095504. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1954.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chicago Better Housing Association” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.