The Chicago renters who band together to form tenant unions — who work with community organizers to present demands and launch rent strikes, who call in top city officials, and who file lawsuits against their landlords — are unique among the thousands of renters who typically face evictions each year or struggle with life in poorly maintained buildings.

More typical are people such as James Ware, a cleaning crew supervisor at Wrigley Field, who was living with his family of six in a three-bedroom apartment in one of the city’s most trouble-ridden buildings on the West Side until he was forced to move out in May.

“Every place we’ve lived there’s some kind of incident that we had to move,” Ware said of his troubles finding a safe and affordable place to live for his family.

“I’m not going to say everything ran smooth, and we paid our rent on time every month — no, we run into things, and things happen,” he was quick to add. “But by the time the end of the lease was done, we were current, every time.”

The Ware family had problems with their $1,500-per-month apartment since they moved there in 2021, as have many other tenants in the 33-unit building — one of just eight citywide that inspectors cited for serious code violations in almost every year going back to 2007, according to an Injustice Watch investigation.

In this five-part series, Injustice Watch has documented the yearslong efforts of three groups of tenants who tried to organize — with limited success — to hold their landlords accountable. But the Wares represent the vast majority of tenants throughout Chicago left to deal with troubled buildings on their own.

Until May, Ware and his wife, a housekeeper at a South Side assisted living facility, told Injustice Watch they struggled for two years to get the landlords — Janko Properties — to address a lack of heat in the winter and myriad other problems at their 5645 W. Washington Ave. apartment in Austin.

When Injustice Watch visited the building this spring, the front gate and lobby locks of several entrances were broken, and holes in the hallway walls were sloppily filled with yellow insulation foam. Residents, several of whom said they had Section 8 vouchers, complained of rats, some “as big as dogs,” inside their apartments. The Ware family had cats and said they didn’t see rodents in their unit but had been battling cockroaches for months. The family showed evidence of water leaking from the roof through their living room ceiling, splotches of black mold-like substance around the bathroom window, and described having no heat in the prior three winters.

Matt Janko, the manager of the company that owns the building, did not respond to numerous requests for comment from Injustice Watch.

In the family’s second winter in the building, Ware said he reported the lack of heat to the city’s 311 call center — his was among tens of thousands of complaints about building code violations the city receives each year. In February 2023, a city inspector came out and saw the family was using electric heaters and the oven to warm the unit.

“He said it was comfortable in here, and there’s no problem,” Ware recalled. Fed up, Ware said he then began to withhold rent for several months to pressure his landlords to make repairs. That’s when the eviction threats started.

The city ticketed Janko for the violation but later dropped the case and didn’t pursue fines. Ware said he ultimately paid Janko back after the boiler was fixed.

“I just felt that since I was under lease, I was obligated to do that,” he said.

This past winter, when the baseboard radiators went cold again, Ware didn’t bother calling the city but tried withholding the rent yet again. An inspector documented the problem, but the city didn’t take Janko to administrative hearings or court.

“We still don’t have heat,” Ware wrote in the Jan. 3 text message to the landlord. “We have gone through this for two years now, and we have had enough.”

Ware told the landlord his family would be moving out.

Shortly after that, Janko filed an eviction case against him. After a few hearings in eviction court, the company agreed to drop the case in exchange for Ware and his family moving out, Ware said.

Finding a new place was difficult.

At the time, the family members living at the apartment were his wife of two decades, their 14-year-old daughter, and four adult children who often contributed to the family income. Still, the family had fallen behind on rent at times because of unforeseen expenses, such as funeral costs last year after the sudden death of another daughter.

As their move-out deadline approached, Ware said he had no luck finding a new place to rent for the family. Though they were in a period of stable income, Ware said his credit score had been damaged because of a recent debt consolidation.

“Most places are requiring 580, 600, 620, so they won’t even let us in the door,” he said.

Plus the eviction case, the first on his record, hadn’t yet been sealed, which further hampered his search. His situation wasn’t unique. Injustice Watch found between 2007 and 2023, more than 11,000 households were taken by landlords to eviction court in the same year as the Department of Buildings cited their buildings for serious code violations.

The seven members of the Ware family who lived at 5645 W. Washington Ave. moved out of their apartment May 15 after Janko Properties filed an eviction lawsuit against them. The family lived with no heat for two winters, and the city has cited the building for serious code violations nearly every year going back to 2007. Abel Uribe for Injustice Watch

As they moved boxes and bags of belongings out of the apartment May 15, the Ware family members were scattering. Ware and one of his daughters were headed to his mother’s house; his wife and their teenager would be staying with her mother; their remaining three adult children were splitting up between a relative, a romantic partner, and a shelter.

As he reflected on his life as a renter on the eve of the move, Ware said, “a lot of it has been like this. Personally, I wish we could get a house because I’m tired of moving.”

The Wares’ story represents the failures of a legal system rooted in protecting the rights of property owners over those of their tenants. More than 20,000 eviction cases are filed by Chicago property owners each year, premised on the tenants’ failure to hold up their end of a contractual obligation — paying rent, abiding by the landlord’s rules, or both. Even when people aren’t formally evicted, the filing often has grave consequences on their lives, impacting their health, their children, and their wallets. But as Injustice Watch found while reporting this series, property owners’ failures to hold up their end of the landlord-tenant bargain does not result in the same long-term, punishing effects, even for the owners of the nearly 2,000 buildings the city sues over code violations every year.

‘Stacked Decks’

In her recent book, “Stacked Decks,” University of Chicago sociologist Robin Bartram detailed how the city’s highly discretionary building code enforcement deepens and reinforces existing inequities in an age of shrinking government spending.

“Inspectors try to protect low-income homeowners in communities of color, especially in the wake of the foreclosure crisis,” Bartram wrote. “Yet they combine structural and cultural explanations for racial disparities in housing conditions, and they have white blind spots, meaning that they overlook how whites have benefited from the stacked deck.”

Since Chicago did away with proactive annual inspections of residential buildings three stories or taller in 2017 and shifted to a complaint-driven model, the city has been inundated with 311 requests related to building code violations every year. On average, the Department of Buildings receives more than 3,000 service requests from the 311 call center every month.

As of May, 168 inspectors handled the triage of complaints based on what seems most urgent. When inspectors arrive at a property, they grade the violations they are able to see, deciding whether to send the building owner a letter asking to make repairs, issue a ticket to go before the city’s department of administrative hearings, or refer the building to housing court.

In her research, which included months of embedded work in the Buildings Department, Bartram found those decisions are subjective and often favor landlords. Likewise, a 2018 inspector general report found the city’s lack of strategies for prioritizing complaint-based inspections resulted in potential health and safety hazards going unaddressed, especially in routinely underserved neighborhoods. It also led to backlogs of thousands of complaints alleging serious threats to life and safety.

The inspector general recommended the city develop guidance and training on most efficient methods of identifying and processing complaints, but the Buildings Department said it didn’t have to because its supervisors “average 35 years of experience” and had “firsthand knowledge” on how to process complaints.

Landlords sent to administrative hearings, which are often referred to as the city’s revenue-generating “fine machine,” find a quasi-judicial process through which they cannot be forced to comply with the law. Administrative hearing officers rarely require evidence besides photos of fixes to buildings before dropping or minimizing penalties.

Administrative hearing cases against three-quarters of the 2,654 buildings with a history of serious code violations identified by Injustice Watch have resulted in fines. Collectively, the owners of these properties have been ordered to pay the city more than $11 million for code violations since 2008, according to Chicago Department of Finance records. However, those records also show more than half of this money has not been paid.

Recalcitrant building owners can be sued in the Cook County Circuit Court, where building owners face the most serious scrutiny. But even in housing court, landlords are given a long runway to make repairs and are rarely punished for noncompliance, which Bartram found exacerbates inequality.

Housing court judges rely on city inspectors as witnesses, and their assessments of the severity of the code violations often come with a heavier cost to tenants than to landlords. When inspectors deem the code violations imminently dangerous, residents of the building risk being ordered to vacate by judicial order, launching them on a desperate search for a new home.

However, when inspectors say violations are not dangerous and hazardous, the court process against the landlord can slow to a crawl, with the property owners getting months — often years — to comply with minimum safety standards.

Housing court and eviction proceedings are sometimes happening at the same time for the same building — Injustice Watch found at least 328 buildings in which this has happened from 2009 to 2023, with the eviction cases typically taking about a month before tenants were ordered out, while the housing cases took nearly 10 times as long. Recent reforms have slowed the pace of eviction cases, drawing the ire of landlords attempting to get rid of nonpaying tenants. Housing court cases are taking longer today, too. Both court processes tend to honor the property rights of landlords while taking a punishing toll on their tenants.

Renters live with the fear and disease brought to a household by rats, the embarrassment bred by roaches, and the hives caused by bedbug bites. Renters cope with the brain-altering effects of childhood lead poisoning and the shivers of unheated rooms and tepid shower water in winter. Renters face the hassle and expense of moving, often forced to leave behind the belongings that make a home feel like it’s theirs. And renters deal with the scarlet letter of eviction cases when they seek new housing, while no such social penalty exists for scofflaw landlords who seek to acquire more properties.

A long history of failed reform

Building and land use codes have always been reactionary, often aimed at improving conditions after a tragic incident. The hundreds of deaths from the 1871 Great Chicago Fire combined with the millions in property damages left a third of the city homeless. The infamous tragedy not only defined the city but led to new building requirements for fire safety and a push for a building code to address structural integrity. The code, one of the first in the nation, was finally approved in 1875, along with a city department to administer it.

It wasn’t enough, in part because politics and corruption got in the way. Even with a new code and the updates that followed, poor immigrant dwellers continued to live in overcrowded, hastily built structures known as tenements. Reformers fought for regulations establishing occupancy standards, minimum room sizes, and window requirements. But again, they weren’t enough.

During the Great Migration, Black people who moved to Chicago looking for jobs and escaping the racist Jim Crow laws from the South were restricted to what was known as the “Black Belt,” a narrow corridor running south from the Loop along State Street, where housing conditions were among the worst in the city. Yet landlords charged increasingly high rents in overcrowded cold-water flats and other shabby dwellings because Black families couldn’t go anywhere else.

Years later, their homes were demolished to make space for better housing, which was also eventually demolished with promises of better homes.

While building conditions as a whole have improved, Chicagoans continue to live and die in unsafe buildings, while landlords are rarely held responsible. Today, there are buildings with chronic, serious building code violations in every single ward of the city, but the majority are concentrated in Black communities still suffering from racist policies and predatory real estate practices.

Those same communities also carry the heaviest burden of evictions — at the personal and the neighborhood level. While it is true some tenants simply can’t afford to pay rent, criticism of tenants rarely takes into account how bad building conditions impact tenants’ pocketbooks. In the absence of responsible landlords, tenants shoulder the costs for things such as rat traps and roach bait, bedbug sprays, ice melt, and more. In extreme cases, they pay to stay in hotel rooms when sewage backs up or when the heat fails.

The 1986 Residential Landlord and Tenant Ordinance offers Chicago renters some rights and protections. But the law was created primarily to prevent tenants from entering into bad contracts with landlords. And though it includes provisions to help tenants push for repairs, they are toothless because no government agency is tasked with protecting tenants when they try to exercise these rights.

The only recourse for tenants is to sue their landlords in the Cook County Circuit Court, which requires them to navigate a complicated system alone or hire an attorney to plead an often-losing case. A selected few get help from pro bono attorneys. But overall, those who take their landlords to court enter into a system that lacks urgency and has historically been biased toward property owners and their lawyers. Tenants often move out or are evicted before courts force landlords to take action.

Chief judge promises new court order

In an interview with Injustice Watch, Cook County Circuit Court Chief Judge Timothy Evans said he recognized tenants in eviction court without an attorney are at a disadvantage, which is why in 2020, he supported efforts to create a program designed to slow down the eviction process.

Under the program, every tenant going through eviction court today gets evaluated for emergency rental assistance and free legal and mediation services.

Presented with Injustice Watch’s findings about the disparate treatment of landlords and tenants in court, Evans said he is drafting a new general order to improve tenants’ access to court information about recalcitrant landlords.

He said the new directive — to be enacted “very soon” — will allow tenants facing evictions quick access to information about landlords being sued for code violations. It remains unclear how much impact such information would have in eviction court, where judges routinely refuse to consider building conditions as an excuse for late or withheld rent payments.

Evans said he is also working with the clerk’s office to address docketing errors, which make it appear as if thousands of housing court cases are open, even after they are closed.

Those issues have to be addressed “as soon as possible,” he said, so information given to tenants facing eviction is accurate.

“I want them to fix the problem, and then once the problem is fixed, then I can enter that order,” Evans said.

Evans and Circuit Court Judge Leonard Murray, the supervisor of the housing court section since 2016, defended the speed at which the court handles housing cases.

Tenants and tenant advocates say cases take too long in court, but Murray said there are fewer than 5,000 pending cases in housing court, and more cases are being cleared than filed every year.

Murray, who lost a bid for an appellate court seat in the March primary, said in an earlier interview it’s normal for housing cases to last between two to five years. The timeline lengthened during the Covid-19 pandemic, he said, when landlords were struggling with backlogs on materials. In his view, most of the cases deal with mom-and-pop landlords who have to make expensive repairs.

He said “no property in the city of Chicago meets the code 100%,” but as a whole, landlords today are better than in the past when newspapers were filled with stories about “slumlords.”

“I have not had many situations where I would deem someone a slum landlord,” Murray said. “There might be some bad, bad property owners, but they’re not slum landlords.”

The goal of housing court, he said, is to get landlords to fix their properties. Compliance, however, is not always easily extracted, and housing court judges have the “greatest bag of tools” to make property owners do what they should, he said.

Imposing fines is one of those tools, but a fine doesn’t cure the defect — it delays the cure, he said.

Judges can also order buildings to be kept vacant, or in the worst case, demolished. Murray said he often weighs whether the homes are suitable for occupancy with Chicago’s deficit of affordable housing units.

“While we don’t want anyone living in substandard housing, we don’t want to take away housing that meets the minimal standards either, or we’ll have a bigger homeless population than we do now,” he said.

Another tool is the appointment of “receivers,” third-party companies or nonprofits to manage buildings and make repairs under court supervision without displacing tenants. Receivers help get buildings into code compliance by seeking out contractors to make repairs, getting bids approved by the judge, and then paying the contractors. They also bill for their hours. The accounting must be approved by the housing court judges. If building owners don’t reimburse the receivers for the work, receivers can get a lien on the property, which earns 9% interest per year.

Murray called receiverships “fee shifting” because they put a building owner in danger of being forced to sell their property.

“I don’t take the receivership lightly because it involves costs, and I scrutinize what they spent and why,” Murray said. “I think it’s important to give the owner the opportunity to fix it themselves.”

Proponents of receiverships told Injustice Watch Murray’s views hinder the government’s ability to go after bad building owners, especially because Murray is the supervising judge and handles nearly all the cases in which receivers could play a significant role in bringing the property back up to code.

“He thinks [receivership] is a profit center; he doesn’t understand the good behind it,” one of the proponents said on condition of anonymity. Receivers are “trying to save housing from slumlords,” he said.

There are just four main entities in Chicago appointed to do receivership work — one private company, one city contractor designated for heating system repairs, and two nonprofits delegated to oversee properties through the Troubled Buildings Initiative. The program, led by the Department of Housing, is a public-private partnership, which has handled more than 1,200 distressed apartment buildings since 2000, including at least 247 with a history of serious code violations, Injustice Watch found.

In the last year, Murray’s influence on housing court — where hearings are organized into calls by building issue type, such as lack of heat, lead paint, or more general code violations — has grown beyond his role as a supervisor. After a medical emergency led one of the other five judges assigned to the division to take an extended leave of absence, Murray has been handling most of the cases assigned to her courtroom, presiding over three courtrooms on some days. According to records provided by Evans’ staff, Murray currently handles as many calls as the other four housing court judges combined.

Tenant proposals stalled at City Hall

Housing court reforms have not been at the forefront of advocates’ pushes for strengthening tenant protections or landlord accountability.

After scandals involving two out-of-state groups with thousands of units on the South Side, there were calls for new measures targeting slumlords from City Hall. But the momentum slowed down during the pandemic. Instead, public attention focused on eviction court, where new tenant-friendly initiatives sought to remedy inequalities, including a pilot program providing free lawyers to tenants.

The city also passed the Fair Notice Ordinance in 2020, which requires landlords to give some tenants up to 120 days’ notice before raising the rent or terminating their lease. Under the ordinance, tenants facing an eviction suit can end the case and stay in their homes if they pay the rent owed plus court filings fees.

But not all tenants facing eviction are in arrears. Landlords can file eviction suits for no reason at all, which advocates say especially impact tenants in gentrifying neighborhoods. Tenant advocates have been pushing for years for a Just Cause Ordinance to limit eviction filings to specific reasons, such as lease violations or nonpayment of rent.

At a press conference earlier this summer, Annie Howard, an organizer with the Chicago Housing Justice Coalition, said tens of thousands of Chicagoans lose their housing through no fault of their own, some due to retaliation when they call to complain about building conditions.

“This is not OK,” Howard said. “I’m so sick of tenants calling for building inspectors to come and look at moldy conditions and mice and every other thing under the sun, and then the landlord saying, ‘I don’t want to deal with you — get out of here.’”

That Just Cause Ordinance, which was opposed by the Chicago Association of Realtors, stalled in City Council last year along with a separate proposal to require the city’s health department to inspect rental homes at least once every five years.

The goal of the second ordinance, known as the Chicago Healthy Homes Ordinance, was to bring back proactive, periodic inspections to catch issues early, before they become a more serious threat to safety. It also called for a rental unit registry to list names and contact information of owners, stakeholders, or agents behind shell companies. While it is legal for landlords to use shells to protect their identity or limit their liability, the practice often obscures who bears responsibility for addressing code violations.

A third proposal on hold was introduced last year by organizers in South Shore, where low-income tenants are being displaced because of a combination of higher rents and investors gobbling up properties ahead of the opening of the Obama Presidential Center in 2026.

Their proposal, named the South Shore Housing Preservation Ordinance, also calls for the creation of a registry but would go a step further requiring landlords to report the price of the rents they charge. And it proposes a new city office within the Department of Housing to advocate, educate, and aid tenants who need emergency housing. Under this plan, the office would operate as a “pilot” for two years in South Shore before expanding to the rest of the city.

Dixon Romeo, the executive director of Not Me We, a South Shore housing advocacy organization pushing for the ordinance, said the city has a number of tenant programs and laws protecting them but no single department to handle them all holistically.

He said without it, the Law Department can be suing building owners at the same time the state  is signing off on rental assistance for their tenants, while a city agency might be advancing a development grant benefiting the landlord — a situation Injustice Watch observed play out in Woodlawn.

“Those departments aren’t talking to each other, so they don’t know,” Romeo said.

This fractured recordkeeping about real estate is endemic at every level of government, Injustice Watch found.

Landlords are required to post management information on building facades, but the signs rarely reflect the true ownership of the property. Until fall 2017, Chicago required a paper-based landlord registration form, but Judy Frydland, the former commissioner for the Department of Buildings, pushed to get rid of it on grounds it created unnecessary paperwork and didn’t help the city track down problem owners.

Today, a plethora of city, county, state, and federal agencies have different bits of information about buildings and their owners, a mosaic often forming a blurry picture. This makes it difficult, sometimes impossible, for officials who come across a problem building to quickly get a comprehensive view into its history, its ownership, or the number of properties tied to the same landlord.

For ordinary renters vetting a new apartment, it’s an even more daunting task, and it impacts their ability to assert their rights, especially when government protections fall short.

Chicago isn’t alone in trying to balance the interests of landlords against the rights of their tenants. Ideas are percolating across the country.

Detroit’s mayor has a plan to reduce blight by taxing empty land and abandoned buildings at a higher rate than other properties. The mayor contends his proposal, which needs state approval, would lead to land improvements and encourage housing development while removing incentives for landlord neglect.

Landlord licensing is another practice that exists in other big cities, many Illinois municipalities, and even unincorporated Cook County. Though these laws are sometimes aimed at punishing landlords for renting to people a community wants to keep out, such as tenants with criminal records, they can also be used to limit problem landlords’ ability to continue profiting from substandard properties.

At the national level, tenants and their advocates have been pushing the Federal Housing Finance Agency to add protections for renters in multifamily properties with owners who have taxpayer-backed mortgages through two mega lenders the agency oversees known as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

Their efforts paid off last month, when the agency announced new tenant protections to be included in multifamily loans beginning in February 2025. The new protections would require landlords to give renters a 30-day notice before increasing their rent or terminating their lease and a minimum five-day grace period for late rent. While important, tenant advocates said the requirements to provide notice are not enough. They wanted protections to ensure landlords couldn’t refuse to accept tenants with rent subsidies, low credit scores, or past evictions. Other proposals, including one recently embraced by the White House, include regulations to prevent excessive rent increases.

‘We live in a capitalist society’

All these measures face opposition from real estate industry groups, including those representing local, neighborhood-based landlords. They said these measures would increase costs and eventually drive the smallest among them out of business, making way for more large, corporate investors to take over. They argue what’s needed is enforcement of current laws and more careful, case-by-case balancing of tenants’ and landlords’ needs, not more government regulations aimed at property owners.

“It’s a dynamic problem to try to solve because we live in a capitalist society, and it’s a free market,” said Corey Oliver, who runs a family business owning five buildings and managing another 25 for other owners, mostly on the South Side. He spoke at length about his frustration of seeing criminal actors, out-of-state investors, and large corporate entities taking over neighborhoods. “We don’t want slumlords in our city.”

However, Oliver also argued for changes to help responsible landlords. Evictions taking eight to 10 months burdens businesses like his, and ultimately, he argued, hurts tenants.

“I should be able to take a risk on a tenant who is maybe not the perfect tenant on paper,” he said. “And if they don’t turn out to be the perfect tenant, I shouldn’t be out $10,000 to $15,000 trying to get them out of my unit.”

Oliver said in response to regulations, landlords become conservative when screening tenants, which harms “at-risk individuals” most.

“Nobody’s going to take a chance on them because they have an iffy background, or because their financials may not be 100% up to where they should be, or they don’t have the credit score,” he said. “Because they can’t afford to be wrong.”

Many tenant advocates dream of radical change in the way society thinks about the landlord-tenant relationship. If housing was categorized as a human right, they said, the entire system would shift in favor of the tenant. And, perhaps, then the enforcement system would act with urgency.

“We should protect tenants first, and property is secondary,” Romeo said.

Such a shift would require unlikely, monumental changes to our national laws, so many of which, from federal to municipal, are written to protect private property owners from government encroachment.

Reflecting on his experience organizing tenants in Albany Park, Arieh Venick said the government has rendered itself toothless when it comes to challenging property owners.

“They’re not willing to prevent anyone from acquiring new buildings. They’re not willing to take any measures to prevent slumlording,” he said. “No one is gonna go to jail as a result of the conditions in their building.”

Tenant advocates also suggest it is time to reconsider the mistakes of the past, such as the move away from publicly funded and owned housing in favor of privatization of the low-income housing market. In their view, the public-private partnerships, which resulted in a few-and-far-between construction of mixed income developments and the transfer of government rent subsidies into the hands of private landlords, have fallen short on promises to improve housing conditions for low-income renters.

Today, 65,000 households, roughly 10% of the city’s renters, are served through any sort of subsidy from the Chicago Housing Authority, according to the agency’s latest budget report. Meanwhile, according to the DePaul Institute for Housing Studies, the city is short 120,000 affordable housing units.

“Housing cannot be a problem that is solved by the private market — it just cannot be done,” said Noah Moskowitz, co-director of the Tenant Education Network, a Chicago-based nonprofit that trains and supports tenant associations in subsidized buildings. “It is always going to be more profitable to get as much money as you can in rent and spend as little of it as you can on investing in the quality of the house itself.”

Moskowitz acknowledges the knee-jerk reaction against public housing, especially in Chicago. But he argues public housing failed because of a lack of adequate funding. Along the way, tenants were blamed for its failure, creating a false narrative labeling low-income housing as intrinsically bad because of the people who live there.

In reality, said Lilly Lerner, the network’s other co-director, tenants have no control over failures with building-wide systems that are the responsibility of the landlord.

“Tenants don’t control the water pressure; tenants don’t control the boilers; tenants have nothing to do with the elevator and whether or not it works,” Lerner said.

Tenants also don’t have control over rent prices, especially in Illinois, where rent control measures were preemptively outlawed in 1997, and efforts to repeal the ban have stalled in Springfield.

As rents continue to increase, following a combination of higher mortgage rates, inflation, and out-of-town investors flocking the market, tensions between landlords and tenants are also on the rise. Tenants across the city are forming unions to demand their landlords properly fix code violations and stop what they call retaliatory rent increases.

Last year, a group of tenants in Pilsen said they carefully followed all legal caveats when they withheld rent to force repairs ranging from insufficient heat to ceiling leaks, mice, and holes.

The tenants said they resumed paying their full rent after the repairs were made. Still, when their leases were up for renewal, they encountered what seemed to them like blatant retaliation: Their rent increased between $350 and $725 per month. And their landlord, First Western Properties, wanted them to pay back the rent they legally withheld plus fees.

In response, the three leaders of the tenant association filed a suit in the Cook County Circuit Court alleging retaliation. The suit sought to stop the rent increases and keep the landlord from filing eviction cases against them. As proof, they said in court documents the tenants who hadn’t been part of the union got only modest rent increases or none at all. After the suit was filed, one of the tenants received a notice of “nonrenewal” stating her lease would be terminated at the end of July. The landlord isn’t legally required to give a reason.

Mo Dadkhah, an attorney representing First Western Properties, said “every reasonable request” made by the tenants was remedied. Further, Dadkhah said First Western Properties has “time and time again offered to terminate their leases if they are unhappy and allow them to move out, which they refuse to do.”

He said the company has also offered to waive the “improperly withheld rent,” if they sign a new lease at the current market rental rates. Dadkhah said the rent increases are fair and in line with Pilsen rental rates, and they reflect the company’s cost increases over time, such as property tax hikes, and building improvements.

The experience of the Pilsen tenants exemplifies the difficulties of tenants across Chicago to uphold the right to live in homes that comply with the city’s minimum safety standards. Many, including landlords and judges, ask why tenants don’t just move if conditions are so bad.

In reality, tens of thousands of tenants, especially those with lower incomes, don’t have the resources to pay to break their lease, the moving expenses, and all the fees landlords charge when signing a new lease. Many others want to remain in communities they love and among neighbors to whom they’ve grown attached.

And moving doesn’t guarantee the next building will be any better.

Republish This Story

Republish this article for free under a Creative Commons license.