In the
United States Court of Appeals
For the Seventh Circuit
____________________
No. 16‐3677
AFFORDABLE RECOVERY HOUSING,
Plaintiff‐Appellant,
v.
CITY OF BLUE ISLAND, and JIM KLINKER, in his official
capacity as Blue Island Fire Chief,
Defendants‐Appellees.
____________________
Appeal from the United States District Court for the
Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.
No. 12 C 4241 — Robert M. Dow, Jr., Judge.
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ARGUED APRIL 19, 2017 — DECIDED JUNE 21, 2017
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Before BAUER, POSNER, and HAMILTON, Circuit Judges.
POSNER, Circuit Judge. Blue Island is a town of some
24,000 residents, slightly south of Chicago. A Catholic order
of nuns called the Mantellate Sisters of Mary has since the
1950s owned a group of five buildings in the town, one a
convent for the nuns, one a church, and the other three orig‐
inally constituting the Mother of Sorrows High School, a
boarding school that closed many years ago, whereupon the
2 No. 16‐3677
buildings were leased to a local school district, which used
the site as a public high school until 2009. The following year
the founders of Affordable Recovery Housing—an enter‐
prise that wanted to use the convent and high school build‐
ings as a faith‐based recovery home that would provide
support services, overnight lodging, meals and recreation,
job training, medical and dental referrals, religious outreach,
and other services to adult men fighting drug and/or alcohol
addiction—persuaded the Mantellate Sisters to allow the en‐
terprise to do those things because the few remaining nuns
would continue to occupy part of the convent building and
the Sisters would obtain rental income. And because most of
the property would no longer be vacant, vandalism would
no longer be a problem, as it had been.
In February 2011, the mayor approving, Affordable
moved 14 of its staff members into the buildings. But the fol‐
lowing year Blue Island’s fire chief decided that before using
the buildings as residential facilities Affordable had to install
a sprinkler system in the rooms in which the men in the re‐
covery program would be sleeping. The City Council ap‐
proved the fire chief’s decision.
Compliance would have been an expensive proposi‐
tion—indeed Affordable could not have afforded to install a
sprinkler system before it had any recovery patients, as they
were an essential source of revenue (indirectly from public
agencies—the patients or most of them would have been in‐
digent). It had already moved in 73 of these men even
though it had not obtained from Blue Island the special‐use
permit it needed to operate its facility in an area zoned Sin‐
gle Family Residential. So instead of installing a sprinkler
system or expelling the residents Affordable filed this suit
No. 16‐3677 3
against Blue Island and the town’s fire chief, seeking to en‐
join the eviction order based on Affordable’s failure to install
a sprinkler system and to obtain a judgment that the safety
code did not require such a system. Its thinking was that if
not required to install sprinklers it wouldn’t have to expel
the residents, for if sprinklers were not required this would
imply that their absence was unlikely to endanger the resi‐
dents.
But the district judge refused to issue a preliminary in‐
junction, and so the residents had to leave. Indeed many of
them had already left under the threat of eviction. Afforda‐
ble tells us without contradiction that the gap in services
caused it to lose touch with its former residents, four of
whom suffered fatal overdoses after leaving Affordable’s
premises. But later Affordable obtained a license from the
Illinois Department of Human Services that designated the
buildings a recovery house, leading Affordable to move the
district court for partial summary judgment on the ground
that the enterprise was now governed by the state’s safety
regulations for recovery houses—regulations that didn’t re‐
quire sprinkler systems in buildings fewer than four stories
high, as Affordable’s are.
The district judge granted partial summary judgment in
favor of Affordable on the ground that the omission of a
sprinkler requirement in the state regulations governing re‐
covery homes preempted the inconsistent municipal rule.
But though Affordable now can operate a residential recov‐
ery house without installing a sprinkler system, it appeals
the district judge’s determination that it failed to prevail on
claims that it made based on the Illinois Religious Freedom
Restoration Act and related statutes. Had it prevailed on
4 No. 16‐3677
those claims it would have been entitled to damages and at‐
torneys’ fees rather than just the right to dispense with
sprinkler systems.
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act provides that
“government may not substantially burden a person’s exer‐
cise of religion … unless it demonstrates that application of
the burden to the person (i) is in furtherance of a compelling
governmental interest and (ii) is the least restrictive means of
furthering that compelling government interest.” 775 ILCS
35/15. Affordable considers helping men recover from drug
and/or alcohol abuse to be an exemplar of Christian charity,
and argues that being forced to expel 73 residents infringed
its exercise of religion. Yet there is no evidence that the ex‐
pulsion, which turned out to be temporary when the appli‐
cable state law was discovered, was attributable to anything
other than an honest concern with possible fire hazards to
the residents.
Moreover, the expulsion was a consequence of Afforda‐
ble’s disregard of the sprinkler requirement. Affordable
could have avoided the expulsion by researching the state
and local regulations applicable to group recovery housing
before beginning its project. Nothing compelled it to rush
headlong into business; it chose to take that risk. The Act
permits exceptions from otherwise generally applicable laws
for persons whose religious exercise is substantially bur‐
dened by those laws. But Affordable doesn’t argue that the
sprinkler requirement would have substantially burdened
its religious exercise even if it had complied with the re‐
quirement from the beginning. Consider: had the beds that
Affordable’s residents slept on been stolen rather than do‐
nated, Blue Island would not have substantially burdened
No. 16‐3677 5
Affordable’s religious exercise by seizing and removing the
stolen property.
The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons
Act (a federal statute) establishes the same legal standard as
the Illinois Act but applies only to a zoning or landmarking
law. 42 U.S.C. § 2000cc‐5(5). Even if Blue Island’s fire‐safety
code could be considered a zoning law because of its poten‐
tial to exclude a building or other land use from a particular
area, we know that Affordable is not being excluded from
Blue Island or even required to install a sprinkler system.
The Fair Housing Amendments Act forbids “mak[ing]
unavailable or deny[ing] a dwelling to any buyer or renter
because of a handicap of … a person residing in or intending
to reside in that dwelling.” 42 U.S.C. § 3604(f)(1). But Af‐
fordable of course was not trying to exclude handicapped
persons from its facilities, and Blue Island’s exclusion when
it forced the 73 residents to leaves was quickly undone when
Affordable discovered the supervening state law regarding
sprinkler systems.
Affordable not having prevailed on any claims that allow
for fee‐shifting from the loser to the winner of a lawsuit, the
“American Rule,” requiring each party to bear the expense
of its lawyers, governs, barring Affordable’s money claims.
The judgment of the district court is
AFFIRMED.