Chicago took a step toward beefing up its safety oversight of apartment buildings on Wednesday following years of criticism that the city’s patchwork of reactive building inspections has cost the lives of vulnerable tenants and fallen behind standards being set by peer cities.
City officials are blessing efforts to build and publish a registry of who owns every apartment complex in the city, one of two goals set to be studied by the working group envisioned in the ordinance that passed the City Council unanimously on Wednesday. However, its other policy objective — regular, proactive safety inspections for all rental units in the city — remains elusive.
The Chicago Department of Buildings relies on a few dozen city inspectors to chase down tens of thousands of building violation complaints every year, with uneven and delayed consequences for landlords who are found at fault. The flawed system was the subject of a 2021 joint investigation between the Better Government Association and the Chicago Tribune, when reporters documented dozens of fire deaths in which inspectors had recorded violations but the city failed to follow up.
Two years later, despite a fledgling effort to shame bad landlords with a public “scofflaw list,” a follow-up investigation found that little had changed, with preventable fire deaths continuing to occur in buildings that had either evaded inspection or were clocked with violations that went nowhere.
Tenants’ advocacy groups under the banner of the Healthy Homes Coalition have since pushed the city to modernize regulations to emulate cities like Los Angeles and Minneapolis, which mandate regular inspections of apartment buildings for basic safety violations. Those efforts culminated in a 2022 proposal in the City Council that would have created a limited pilot for regular inspections.
The ordinance, sponsored by Ald. Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez (33rd), faced opposition from officials in Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration who repeatedly dismissed the feasibility of proactive inspections.
Rodriguez-Sanchez, who is now chair of the council’s Committee on Health and Human Relations and an ally of Mayor Brandon Johnson, returned last year with a softer proposal. The latest ordinance directs the health committee and city departments to convene a working group to chart possible paths forward on a rental registry and proactive building inspection system.
“This project has a lot of moving parts and a lot of layers that need to be ironed in order for us to be able to have something solid and effective,” Rodriguez-Sanchez said in an interview last week. “You’re also going against a culture that has functioned in a very specific way for a long time, and now you’re telling them that they have to do things differently. That is not going to just happen.”
The working group will have six months to meet, host community outreach meetings and ultimately develop a report with a “suggested framework for the city to implement a city-wide proactive and regular rental inspection process and rental registry,” according to the ordinance.
Chicago’s building code used to require an annual inspection for every multifamily residential building three stories or taller, but the City Council scrapped the requirement in 2017 at the behest of then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel amid spotty enforcement.
Under the existing system, building inspectors are assigned stacks of complaints every day and told to follow up on as many properties as time permits. Inspectors can easily become overwhelmed; a 2018 audit by a city watchdog office found a backlog of more than 5,000 unresolved complaints dating back as many as five years.
An effort to modernize the software used by building inspectors and streamline their work has been delayed multiple times. Officials declined this month to set a benchmark for when they hope to complete it.
A spokesperson for the Chicago Department of Buildings emailed a statement that expressed support for the creation of a rental registry but stopped short of endorsing proactive building inspections, instead gesturing toward the planned data migration.
The department “has continued advancing our modernization efforts through technological and code improvements that provide the infrastructure necessary to reimagine our enforcement process,” the statement read.
Past buildings commissioners have swatted down efforts to stand up a proactive inspection system, arguing that complaints help direct the city’s limited inspectors to the most serious violators.
But relying on tenants to complain about their landlords risks leaving behind some of the city’s most vulnerable renters, according to Sam Barth, a supervising attorney with the Chicago-based Law Center for Better Housing and a member of the Healthy Homes Coalition.
“Not everyone knows to call 311,” Barth said. “Or, they know and they’re afraid to, because there are real risks of the landlord being called … there are legitimate fears of retaliation.”
Any effort to add funding or hire new inspectors for proactive enforcement will likely face fierce headwinds amid the city’s ongoing budget woes, but Barth expressed optimism that a citywide registry could be “budget-neutral” by relying on fees or fines on non-compliant landlords.
Advocates said they hope to examine other cities as models for how to build a more accountable system. The city of Denver, for example, sidestepped the hiring of new inspectors by requiring landlords to order regular safety checks by certified third-party contractors as part of a new policy launched in 2021. More than 27,000 landlords there have since passed safety inspections, according to a city spokesperson.
Any proposal that adds a new expense for Chicago building owners would likely face backlash from real estate groups if it emerges from the working group’s recommendations. Michael Mini, executive vice president of the Chicagoland Apartment Association, said new regulations designed to protect renters could wind up counterproductive if they impose new costs that landlords inevitably pass on to their tenants.
Mini will be following the working group to see what they propose, but he’s skeptical of how the city would manage proactive inspections, he said.
“With the sheer volume of units out there, how are they going to undertake this?” Mini said. “If we’re going to do a comprehensive inspection of that many units, it just seems like a pretty tall goal.”
