Living on the backstretch: immigrant racetrack workers and their families fight for fair housing.

THE THOROUGHBRED HORSES AT ARLINGTON PARK Racetrack in the Chicago suburbs have much more spacious, comfortable living quarters than the 1,200 mostly Mexican immigrant grooms and "hot walkers," who exercise horses and tend to their needs. During the summer racing season, the workers exercise, feed and groom the horses from sunup to sundown seven days a week. Then, those workers would go home to the "backstretch," barracks-style housing on the racetrack grounds where families lived up to eight people in a 12-by-12 concrete block, cement-floor room without running water, air conditioning, kitchen facilities or private bathrooms. Many would keep buckets in the cramped rooms for nighttime use, rather than walk outside to a poorly maintained, unsecured public restroom shared by more than 100 people.

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At least that's the way it was through last summer. This March, a settlement was reached in a housing discrimination lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice and the HOPE Fair Housing Center against Arlington Park Racecourse LLC and its parent company, Churchill Downs Inc.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) also levied discrimination charges against the track in 2005, noting among other things: "Because there are no kitchens or running water ... the workers and their families used the communal bathrooms for many purposes including toileting, diaper changing, washing dishes and clothes and preparing food, endangering the health of those using overcrowded bathrooms." This was likely the cause of a major outbreak of the intestinal disease shigellosis on the backstretch in 1994.

"Shigellosis is a preventable bacterial infection that can be caused by environmental conditions like 400 people sharing one unequipped bathroom," said Cook County Assistant Health Officer Valerie Webb. "By unequipped I mean no soap, no soap dispensers, no paper towels, not sufficient hot water, not even potable water. Because there were no cooking facilities, people were very often washing their food and their children in the same broken sink. Those conditions will cause outbreaks."

Now, thanks to the lawsuit, the racetrack is building new, higher quality units for families, with air conditioning, microwaves and private bathrooms. As part of the settlement, it also promised to invest $100,000 to expand its summer educational program for track workers' kids.

Rev. Dave Krueckeberg, a Lutheran minister who held services at the track for 38 years, said that decades ago the track workforce was a men-only atmosphere full of heavy drinking and fighting and made up mostly of Black and white workers. Like many industries, in the 1980s the workforce shifted to primarily Latino immigrants with families. Today, the bulk of workers at racetracks around the country are Latino immigrants, including most of the approximately 2,000 stable workers at Churchill Downs, home of the Kentucky Derby. The Arlington Park Racetrack formerly barred children from the backstretch completely, but in 1990 a state appellate court ruled they must offer housing to families.

"You will not find children in a commercial, industrial area like this anywhere else in the U.S.," said track president Roy Arnold. "Nowhere else in the country do you have families in the backstretch. We're not happy with it."

He said the track agreed to settle the HOPE lawsuit since they were already planning to upgrade buildings for families. Arnold also notes that the track provides housing free of charge, a common arrangement at tracks nationwide. "We're being taken to court for a problem that involves people we do not employ, for housing for which we don't reap any financial benefit," he said.

Krueckeberg said workers were long upset about housing conditions at the track but felt they had nowhere to turn. After hearing HOPE executive director Bernard Kleina speak at a conference, Krueckeberg told him about the track workers' plight.

Since the racing season opened in May, it appears the racetrack is making meaningful changes in worker housing, Kleina said. Under the consent decree in place through the 2009 season, HOPE will continue to monitor their performance.

But the larger issues that allowed the workers to live in such poor conditions remain. Like many Latino immigrants, racetrack workers' undocumented status and fear of losing their jobs make it easy for employers to exploit them. The HUD complaint notes that workers would only testify anonymously, for fear of retaliation.

Many of the workers are employed at another racetrack in the southwest Chicago suburb of Cicero during that track's winter racing season, then shift to Arlington Park in the summer. Cicero is a lower-income and heavily Latino neighborhood where more affordable housing and a sense of community are easier to find. The Arlington Park track is located in Arlington Heights, a 90-percent white, higher-income neighborhood that has not opened its arms to the growing Latino population in the Chicago suburbs. And because of the higher housing prices there, workers have little choice but to live on the backstretch.

"I'm sure they would live somewhere else if they were paid a living wage so they could afford it," Kleina said.

He finds it heavily ironic that workers were forced to live in extremely overcrowded conditions on the racetrack property, out of sight and out of mind of other residents. Meanwhile, in other suburbs in the general area, as around the nation, local governments are invoking previously little-used municipal regulations against overcrowding as a thinly veiled way to try to kick out immigrants.

"If a family leaves the racetrack and moves into a one-bedroom apartment in another part of town, people will say they're overcrowded," said Kleina. "But there was nothing wrong with it on the backstretch. If you hear about a town dusting off their zoning code regarding overcrowding, you know there's a growing Latino population."

In nearby West Chicago, for example, city officials settled with HOPE in a lawsuit regarding a family who was allegedly targeted for months by city officials trying to prove their home was overcrowded. Building inspectors and police raided the Romeros's home at 4:50 a.m. in June 2002, terrifying the children and photographing personal family documents as they looked for "evidence of overcrowding," according to the lawsuit.

HOPE also won a settlement in a lawsuit challenging the use of zoning codes to target the growing Latino population in the Chicago suburb of Elgin. There, building inspectors allegedly carried out invasive early-morning raids, evicted tenants on the spot or with short notice and drastically revised building codes so that, among other things, people are only allowed to sleep in strictly defined "bedrooms" that have a half inch of gypsum board on the ceiling and a latching door. Elgin also adopted a minimum new housing price guideline of $325,000, with the mayor stating he wanted to retain a white, middle-class population.

In Arlington Park, even with better housing, many quality-of-life issues will persist for workers and their families. Access to the backstretch is heavily restricted, according to workers, so they can't have friends and relatives easily visit.

"For all practical purposes, they're prisoners there," said Kleina.

HOPE's outreach director, Florentina Rendon, said some workers have complained to her about working conditions and hours, something that is outside HOPE's purview.

She and Kleina are looking to hear from other fair housing or immigrant rights groups in contact with workers at other racetracks, hoping their lawsuit will make it easier for other racetrack workers to demand better treatment. "A lot of people think they just have to make sacrifices and tolerate it quietly, that this is what America is," said Rendon. "They don't know who to go to. I tell them you don't need to tolerate these conditions, you have rights."

Kari Lydersen is a staff writer for the Washington Post in Chicago.