Joliet apartment house hardly the first residence established for registered sex offenders

Joliet — Why here?

That was a repeated question among Cunningham neighbors who met Wednesday night to talk about a Joliet apartment house on Cora Street that now provides homes for five registered sex offenders.

It was a question the mayor asked, too.

“This company is in Lake Zurich,” Mayor Bob O’Dekirk told the crowd, pointing to the home address for NewDay Apartments. “Why don’t they put these houses in Lake Zurich and see how the people feel about it?”

NewDay does provide apartments for registered sex offenders in Lake County, where Lake Zurich is located, according to its website. It also has housing in Kane County.

It is not the only organization that provides housing for registered sex offenders in the aftermath of court orders finding Illinois law too severely restricted where they could live and perpetuated their prison sentences beyond release dates.

The five residents in the Cora Street apartment house are a fraction of registered sex offenders finding homes through such organizations.

An attorney for NewDay did not respond to questions about how many homes the company provides for registered sex offenders and where.

But there are 700 sex offenders “placed in various locations, provided by multiple organizations,” Department of Corrections spokeswoman Naomi Puzzello said.

State restrictions on where sex offenders can live have been loosened in two ongoing lawsuits.

One, Murphy v. Rauol, is aimed at the practice of holding sex offenders in prison beyond their discharge dates because suitable housing cannot be found. The other, Barnes et al. v. Rob Jeffreys et al., challenges the state’s one-per-address statute that prohibited apartment houses such as the one on Cora Street.

“The court has entered 44 court orders finding that the statute is unconstitutional as applied to hundreds of sex offenders, permitting them to reside in locations where other sex offenders reside,” Puzzello said.

Sara Garber, an attorney for NewDay Apartments, said in an email on behalf of the company that the state’s one-per-address law was ruled unconstitutional about a year ago.

“Highly restrictive state residency laws and reluctance by landlords to provide housing for registrants leads to homelessness and instability in the community,” Garber said. “Housing providers like NewDay Apartments provide an essential public service by giving people who have been held accountable the opportunity to establish homes and live law-abiding lives.”

That, however, is a hard sell to parents with small children who live close to the apartment house in the 1000 block of Cora Street.

One neighbor close to the Cora Street building was in tears at the Cunningham meeting as she talked about finding cigarette butts in the alley behind her house.

“Someone was in the alley watching my kid, and I didn’t even know it,” she said, adding a threat to castrate any offender who comes near her child.

Another woman posed the possibility of burning down the apartment house, a suggestion that the meeting leader said would be unwise.

The comments were noticed by NewDay, and its lawyer said the company was troubled that the several city officials at the meeting did not speak up when they were made.

NewDay said the residents in the Cora Street building are under the supervision of the Department of Corrections. They attend mandatory therapy, wear GPS monitors and are visited by parole agents. NewDay has a screening process and security measures that include cameras on the premises, its lawyer said.

Neighbors, however, are distrustful of a process that led to a group home for registered sex offenders being established amid their homes without notice.

Several said they would be wary of letting their children outdoors this summer.

“The kids are getting out of school on Monday,” one woman said. “I had to explain to my 12-year-old what a sex offender is and what they do.”