Three recommendations to strengthen Chicago’s fire safey record
When city government doesn’t know about a problem it should know about, that’s bad. When city government knows about a problem and doesn’t do enough to keep that problem from becoming a horrible tragedy, that’s much worse.
At the heart of a Tribune/ Better Government Association series about fire safety in Chicago is the finding that, far too many times, city officials knew about code violations that turned apartment buildings into fire traps, but didn’t follow through quickly or comprehensively enough to safeguard tenants living there.
The inaction contributed to heartbreaking consequences, like the 2014 fire at an apartment complex in the South Side’s Roseland neighborhood that killed four of Shamaya Coleman’s children. Building inspectors had found missing smoke detectors and broken doors at the complex just six months before the blaze, and had logged more than 150 code violations during the fiveyear span before the fire. And yet, at the time of the fire, both her apartment and another unit on the floor below — the unit where the blaze began — were missing working smoke detectors.
In the years preceding the blaze, the building’s previous landlords had been cited and sued by the city numerous times. Landlords promised to fix the violations and received extensions to fix the problems. The violations never got resolved, however, and the city never followed up to ensure those hazards got rectified. “A $5 smoke detector would have got them out of there 10 minutes earlier and they would have been fine,” Rich Cooper, a now-retired Chicago Fire Department battalion chief, told the Tribune. He oversaw the crew fighting the blaze that killed Coleman’s children.
So how can the city do better? It can start by acting on these three recommendations:
after violations are found or serious complaints are made against landlords. It’s too easy for the city to cite a landlord with a code violation and then walk away and say, “Job done.” The job’s not done until fire safety violations have been fixed. Only then can an apartment building be deemed safe.
In 2017, the city dropped its requirement that the city’s Department of Buildings annually inspect all residential buildings with more than three floors.
Instead, the city would rely on complaints about unsafe conditions to its 311 hotline. A year later, the city inspector general’s office flagged a backlog of thousands of complaints piling up. The IG also looked into the building department’s adherence to a requirement that it carry out an inspection within 21 days of the filing of a serious fire safety complaint, and found that the department stuck to the requirement just a third of the time. How did the city resolve the IG’s finding? It chucked the 21-day inspection rule.
According to the National Fire Protection Association, smoke detectors reduce the risk of a death in a house fire by 55%. Tamper-proof detectors prevent tenants from removing the batteries. Thirteen states and Illinois have some form of tamper-proof smoke detector requirement. For the longest time, Chicago resisted, contending that the higher price associated with tamper-proof smoke detectors posed too much of a burden on property owners.
Earlier this year, the City Council passed an ordinance that aims to phase in tamper-proof smoke detectors. Landlords will have to install the devices when they replace old smoke alarms or when a replacement detector is needed in rental units beginning in 2022. By 2023, homeowners installing new smoke detectors must ensure those devices are tamper-proof. Makes sense, except that enforcement of the ordinance won’t kick in until 2033. Landlords get a free pass for more than a decade. That’s not even lax enforcement — it’s no enforcement.
It’s true that there are far too many negligent landlords who cut corners, who don’t blink an eye as the units they rent out turn into tinderboxes. But the whole point of code enforcement is to clamp down on landlords who endanger their tenants. Enforcement requires communication and coordination between actors in city government — the building department, the law department and even aldermen, who should see themselves as the first line of defense against problem landlords.
Too often, City Hall gives in to the building owners’ lobby. Aldermen passed a law in 2015 that set up a list of problem landlords who routinely ignored safety issues. Landlords on the list were barred from most city contracts until they fixed what was wrong at their buildings. Building owners griped about the new law, and the following year, the city stopped adding landlords to the list. Mayor Lori Lightfoot has resurrected and revamped the effort, known as the “Building Code Scofflaw List,” with the aim of going after “the most egregious offenders” by ramping up mandatory inspections of buildings owned by problem landlords.
Will it work? Douglas Pensack, a former associate director of the Illinois Tenants Union, told the Tribune/BGA investigative team that he has his doubts. “Chicago has a system for going through the motions and basically failing,” he said. “The building code is pretty strict, but it is poorly enforced … Unless there is a tragedy involved or somebody dies, no one looks back.”
The Tribune/BGA investigation ably documents the scale of tragedy involved. At least 61 people have died since 2014 in fires at buildings in which city officials knew of fire safety issues but failed to clamp down on property owners. More than 20 of those people were under 17. We still remember walking up to the charred husk of one of those buildings — the 2018 fire in Little Village that killed 10 children.
Before that fire, inspectors logged a lack of working smoke detectors in the building and adjoining coach house three times over 11 years, including seven weeks before the blaze. The deaths of those children, the deaths of Coleman’s children and the deaths of so many other fire victims should serve as more than enough incentive for City Hall to finally get serious about cracking down on bad landlords — and enforcing fire safety.