Tenants in CHA's Harrison Courts Apartments complain of lack of heat amid Chicago deep freeze
As temperatures fell below zero in Chicago on Friday, dozens of tenants of a public housing complex in the East Garfield Park neighborhood said they were freezing inside their own homes due to insufficient heat.
Jimmy Murray doesn't need his freezer to make ice, he can just scrape some off the insides of his windows. He blamed it on the Chicago Housing Authority and what he said is its failure to protect him and all the other residents in his apartment building.
"I have to keep the stove on in order to … that's only how we can at least stay a little warm," he said.
A laser thermometer showed temperatures inside the Harrison Courts Apartments at the corner of Sacramento and Harrison on Friday were around 47° to 50°.
The city's heat ordinance requires landlords to heat apartments to a minimum of 68° between 8:30 a.m. and 10:30 p.m. and to a minimum of 66° between 10:30 p.m. and 8:30 a.m. from Sept. 15 to June 1.
One of the tenants is a woman named Ella, who has multiple sclerosis, and was using her stove to keep her apartment warm on Friday. Ella said she's forced to spend her day wrapped in blankets to survive.
"There ain't no damn heat in this damn apartment, no heat," she said.
Robert Perkins said he bought space heaters to keep his bedroom warm, and has his stove running too.
"My stove is on right now. I'm about to go back in, because I don't like being out with my stove on," he said.
Perkins said he and others are forced to use stoves for heat, which he knows creates a health and safety danger.
In Murray's apartment, there are even more problems. He has all kinds of other health and safety problems in his unit such as mold on the floor and standing water in his bathroom. The standing water in his bathroom measured at 58° on Friday.
Tenants also complained about a lack of security at the entrances.
"We have problems with the hallways. There are homeless people sleeping in the hallways. There's defecation on the stairs," Perkins said. "It's like no one's doing nothing about it."
A CHA spokesperson said they perform well-being checks whenever there's a weather emergency, and all the units they visited on Friday had appropriate temperatures. They said anyone in a CHA building who doesn't have sufficient heat should call their emergency services operations center at 312-542-8850, or email them at emergency@thecha.org.