CHICAGO — Two federal civil rights cases — which had been hailed by activists as important steps toward addressing decades of harm caused by city policies and practices — have been dropped by President Donald Trump’s housing department.

One case centered around a 2018 complaint that aldermanic privilege allows alderpeople to block affordable housing from being built in white neighborhoods. The other stemmed from a 2020 environmental complaint — sparked by a troubled North Side scrapper’s plan to move its operations to the Southeast Side — that decades of city policies have pushed polluters into Black and Brown communities.

Under former President Joe Biden, the Department of Housing and Urban Development found in the environmental case that the city’s systematic placement of polluters in

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