Kiecha Lacey has a warning for other property owners in danger of losing their homes for a new road, airport or other proposed public development that involves a government agency buying private land.

“At the end of the day, when all these new infrastructure projects come along, they need to take care of residents so nobody has to go through what I’ve gone through,” Lacey said.

Lacey has been engaged in a seven-year legal fight with the state, court records showed. She now faces foreclosure and eviction because of about $8,000 in unpaid property taxes owed to Cook County for 2014.

She shared her cautionary tale about eminent domain proceedings in hopes that others might learn from her experience, she said. The state is poised to spend up to $45 billion in coming years through the Rebuild Illinois infrastructure program. Congress is considering President Joe Biden’s request for nearly $2 trillion in infrastructure spending.

Lacey, who works in public relations, is concerned about how government treats landowners when it takes private property to build public works projects.

“I don’t want this to happen to anybody else who has to deal with eminent domain,” she said.

We met in the 3000 block of 145th Place in Posen, where she lived with her then-husband and their daughter. I listened to her story over the sounds of traffic passing on the other side of a tall wall that separates a residential neighborhood from the Tri-State Tollway.

Lacey, 48, and her then-husband bought a new, three-bedroom, split-level home in the neighborhood for about $200,000 in 2005, she said.

“They were beautiful homes,” she said. “This whole subdivision is fairly new.”

Their house was the last one on the block, nearest the tollway. About three years after moving in, the Illinois Toll Highway Authority notified Lacey and several of her neighbors that the agency wanted to buy their homes, she said.

The tollway bought Lacey’s property in 2013, records showed. A new, partial interchange at Interstate 294 and 147th Street opened in 2014. The work was part of the first phase of an ongoing project to build an interchange where Interstate 294 intersects with Interstate 57.

“I was one of the last ones to stay,” she said. “The bulldozer was in back of the house.”

Bad luck and bad timing seemed to make Lacey’s situation worse. The tollway started buying land for the project around the time of the global financial crisis that began in late 2008. Many homes suddenly lost significant value. Homeowners with mortgages were under water as they owed more than their homes were worth.

Many have criticized government for ruthlessly lowballing landowners when it takes private property for the “greater good.” In late 2016, many Markham residents said they felt like they were being forced from their homes as an entire 140-acre neighborhood was wiped out south of 159th Street and east of I-294, where Amazon is building a massive fulfillment center.

The sum government pays for a home often is not enough to cover the cost of moving into another home somewhere else.

“People couldn’t go out and buy homes,” Lacey said of her former Posen neighbors. “Some people lost their jobs.”

Between 2008 and 2013, government wore people down and the neighborhood scattered, Lacey said. Some people took buyouts and found other homes on their own. Some rented homes or apartments, or moved in with family members.

As a homeowner, Lacey said she insisted she be made whole. She wanted to own another home and demanded that government help her find one.

“That’s just fair, but they didn’t want to do that,” she said. “I didn’t ask them to take the house.”

She enlisted the help of local, state and federal elected officials, she said. State Rep. Will Davis, D-Homewood, advocated on her behalf, she said. In an interview, Davis said he asked the Illinois Housing Development Authority to create a program to help relocate homeowners displaced by the Posen tollway project.

“Not everybody has the ability to just go buy another house,” Davis said. “They may need a little more than just, ‘Here’s the money, go.’ Acknowledging that, I asked why hadn’t the housing development authority been brought into the conversation.”

To Davis, it was simply a matter of asking a government agency to do its taxpayer-funded job of providing services to people.

“They’re the state’s housing arm, maybe they can offer some assistance and help some of these residents,” Davis said. “I asked why the state agency that does housing wasn’t involved and everybody just kind of shrugged their shoulders, like, ‘We don’t know, that’s just how we do things.’”

By the time the program was created, Lacey said, nearly all the Posen residents displaced by the work made other arrangements and only she and one other homeowner benefited from the program.

County records showed Lacey and her then-husband took out a $164,000 mortgage on the Posen home in 2005. Between 2006 and 2011 the mortgage was reassigned to Wells Fargo, Deutsche Bank and First Midwest Bank. Title to the home transferred to the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority April 4, 2013, records showed.

Through the program, Lacey moved into a home in Country Club Hills. The Federal National Mortgage Association, or Fannie Mae, transferred the deed for a home at on Fairoaks Drive to Lacey and a co-owner July 1, 2013, records showed.

Lacey and her daughter live in the Country Club Hills home today, she said. Her daughter is about to graduate from high school, she said. Lacey settled in and for a year she thought she had put the ordeal of eminent domain behind her. Then her story took a nightmarish turn.

Lacey bought the Country Club Hills home through a common arrangement in which she made monthly payments to cover the cost of mortgage principal and interest as well as property taxes through an escrow account. Initially, she made payments to Marquette Bank. Later, a different company bought the mortgage.

A year after moving in, Cook County notified her that taxes were past due for 2014, she said. She had made her monthly payments, she said. Someone at the bank goofed and neglected to pay the property taxes from the escrow account, she said.

The Illinois Housing Development Authority created the program that enabled Lacey to finance the purchase of the home, she said, and the housing authority is the opposing party in the lawsuit that seeks to foreclose on the Country Club Hills home. Ultimately, Lacey said she feels authority bears responsibility.

Lacey said she has held firm on principle for seven years that she upheld her end of the bargain and shouldn’t have to pay for a mistake made by someone else.

Davis said he has tried to help Lacey and has met repeatedly with Illinois Housing Development Authority representatives.

“As a government official, my general feeling is that you always try to do everything you can to help,” Davis said. “I personally don’t feel that IHDA has done everything they can to help her.”

Lacey seems like a persistent, principled person and government sometimes seems like a stubborn, uncompromising bureaucracy.

“My last conversation with IHDA, I asked, where have you failed? What didn’t you do right in this process?’ And there was no answer,” Davis said. “They’re not taking any ownership of anything that’s happened to Miss Lacey.”

Court records showed that seven years into the legal dispute, the state is moving to foreclose on the Country Club Hills home and evict Lacey. Amy Lee, communications director for the housing authority, provided a statement in response to an inquiry.

“Over the past several years, IHDA has presented multiple paths for Ms. Lacey to attempt to retain ownership of the single-family home,” Lee said. “Unfortunately, attempted paths thus far have proved unsuccessful and a foreclosure case remains open.”

Lacey’s situation feels particularly ironic, given the staggering amount of financial assistance government has made available to residents because of the pandemic, not to mention debate over eviction moratoriums. Lacey would appear ineligible for any of the billions of dollars in COVID-19 housing assistance, but faces losing her home over $8,000 in unpaid property taxes from 2014.

Government has an arrogant attitude toward people in eminent domain cases, Lacey said.

“How do you treat people like this? It’s unbelievable. All they’re doing is passing it from one person to another,” she said.

It seems like the involvement of multiple state agencies created more opportunities for finger pointing and placing blame than coordinating and providing assistance.

“At the end of the day I would think someone from the tollway would say, ‘Look, this is our fault here. We want to step in and see what can we do for you. We want to make this better.’ So instead of passing the buck along, somebody just fix it,” Lacey said.

An Illinois Tollway representative said the agency follows state law and federal guidelines regarding relocation.

“For the I-294/57 interchange project we implemented a negative equity policy specific for property owners that were facing financial issues,” press secretary Joelle McGinnis said in response to an inquiry.

Lacey said she thinks state law insufficiently addresses landowners affected by eminent domain.

“I would like the lawmakers in Springfield to take another look at that,” Lacey said. “Even if they can’t allow more money for eminent domain, at least give the people more options, better programs, more assistance when it comes to things like that.”

Ted Slowik is a columnist for the Daily Southtown.