Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot recently signed off on $1,000 rental assistance checks to two thousand Chicagoans. In the throes of an unprecedented economic crisis, with a third of American renters not able to make April rent, this alleviated the rent burden for about 0.1 percent of Chicago’s renters.

This lottery is scattershot, even cruel, and Lightfoot isn’t exactly a champion for Chicago’s working class. But her hands are tied. Legally, Illinois’s ban on municipal rent regulation bars the city from legislating any universal rent relief program. As the coronavirus-induced economic shutdown implodes the capitalist housing system, the mayor is suggesting landlords act with “grace,” unable to do more due to a rent control ban that the Illinois state legislature’s Democratic trifecta has failed to lift.

While governor J. B. Pritzker has halted eviction enforcement, evictions continue to be filed, ready to be enforced when the shelter-in-place order ends and staining tenants’ records. Tenants, unsurprisingly, are taking things into their own hands, with rent strikes beginning to spread.