About a week before college classes began in Boulder, Colorado, in 2016, hundreds of students and other tenants moved into their apartments and discovered two people would be living in each bedroom.

After complaints to the city, Boulder housing officials stepped in, finding the owner had illegally subdivided the rooms and that some units lacked smoke alarms and fire exits.

Officials emptied the building and crews were immediately on site making repairs. The next day, students began returning to their apartments. Within a month, the city had cited the property owner with 184 counts of building violations. By December, the landlord agreed to a $410,000 settlement, local media reported.

Housing experts have held up Boulder as a model for how cities can help protect tenants. The college town began registering landlords in the 1970s in an effort to regulate the quality of homes being rented to students. Five decades later, the system has been credited with preventing unsafe conditions and acting quickly to address problems.

In Chicago, the buildings department moves more slowly.

In August of this year, about 20 tenants of the Edison Apartments in Edgewater rallied outside the 100-year-old building to get the attention of their landlord — or the city — to improve living conditions.

Jorge Iván Soto, 26, moved in last November and said water dripped from the ceiling and seeped from the floor during his first rain storm in the apartment. Then earlier this year, chunks of paint and drywall fell onto his bed, forcing him to spend two nights in a hotel, he said.

Soto soon realized he wasn’t alone. Other tenants in the building shared stories of leaky pipes, warped floorboards, rat infestations and more, he said.

Residents of the Edison filed 84 unique complaints to the city’s buildings department between January 2020 and July 2023, according to city 311 records. City inspectors visited the property four times during that period — twice they were denied entry and twice they logged multiple violations against the owner with no clear result, according to records from the buildings department.

A judge ordered the building into receivership in late 2022, and California-based Trigild Inc. took over as property manager. In an email to Illinois Answers, a representative for Trigild said its management team has met twice with tenants to remedy issues.

Advocates at the nonprofit Metropolitan Tenants Organization, who helped Edison residents organize into a tenants’ union, say inaction from Chicago building officials and lack of communication from the landlord are symptoms of a haphazard, reactive set of safety regulations that leave tenants in danger.

“If we had a consistent cycle of building inspections and mandates for upkeep, buildings would not fall into the state of disrepair I found when I first moved in,” said Ben Payne, who moved into the Edison late last year and spoke at the rally in August.

Tenants and their advocates point to a measure sitting in a City Council committee as a potential solution: the Chicago Healthy Homes Ordinance, which would pave the way for the city to track apartment landlords and conduct periodic safety checks.

How can Chicago address building safety reform?

Advocates have long called on Chicago’s buildings department to ramp up inspections and modernize its data reporting.

The city’s building code used to require that every multifamily residential building three stories or taller be inspected annually, but the City Council scrapped the requirement in 2017 at the behest of then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

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. Several dozen inspectors were tasked with responding to more than 56,000 building-related complaints to 311 across the city in 2022, according to city records.

Chicago requires some annual checks for high-rise apartment buildings that are more than 80 feet tall, like the Edison, but those inspections are limited in scope and mostly pertain to fire safety conditions like sprinklers and emergency exit paths. The city has no policy of proactive inspections for other residential buildings.

City buildings officials have defended that complaint-driven process, saying it directs them to the properties needing the most attention.

But a 2021 investigation by the Better Government Association — the publisher of the Illinois Answers Project — and the Chicago Tribune found dozens of examples in which Chicagoans died in fires inside buildings that city officials knew were unsafe but never addressed. A followup investigation this year found that the problem persists and that patchwork regulations since put into place have done little to fix the system’s underlying issues.

Former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot dismissed the findings of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Failures Before the Fires” series.

As a candidate, Mayor Brandon Johnson expressed openness to reforms, telling Illinois Answers in March that the city should invest in inspections and proactively enforce safety codes. However, the 223-page report released by Johnson’s transition team in July didn’t mention building safety problems.

In a statement this month, Johnson spokesperson Hannah Fierle said the administration “agrees with the values and spirit of the Healthy Homes Ordinance,” which would launch a pilot inspection program in a handful of city wards.

“We look forward to working with advocates and all the agencies involved to grapple with the policy design in the future to accomplish those goals,” Fierle said. “As always, we center those most immediately impacted.”

With the mayor’s attention spread thin, prospects for building safety reform in Chicago may depend on how much pressure comes from advocacy groups and City Council.

Ald. Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez (33rd) called the Healthy Homes Ordinance a priority for the Committee on Health and Human Relations, which she chairs, but she hasn’t yet called a meeting to discuss it. The alderwoman told Illinois Answers the initiative has so far been sidelined by other legislative efforts, but she reiterated that she plans to push the initiative later during Johnson’s term.

As proposed, under the Healthy Homes Ordinance:

• A rental unit registry would be created to track building ownership and identify owners who have violations across multiple buildings.
• Every apartment building would be inspected at least every five years for safety problems like mold, missing smoke detectors, lead paint or pest infestations.
• Landlords would face repercussions depending on whether each violation is deemed life-threatening, serious, or minor.
• Tenants would be notified of the inspection 30 days beforehand and would be given an opportunity to speak directly with the inspector or submit comments.
• Each safety violation would prompt a remediation order setting a deadline for when problems need to be fixed.
• For life-threatening violations that require tenants to relocate, the landlord would be required to pay their moving costs.
• The checks would be conducted by a new team of building inspectors housed under the Chicago Department of Public Health.

The three-year pilot program would be implemented in three wards — the 20th on the South Side, the 22nd on the Southwest Side and the 49th on the Far North Side — and then potentially expanded throughout the city.

Even though the three wards are home to a fraction of the city’s tenants, creating an inspection program big enough to cover them would represent a herculean effort. After all, their combined populations eclipse that of Boulder, a much smaller and wealthier city whose program developed slowly.

Boulder as a model

The kind of regulatory system that allowed Boulder officials to swiftly rectify the student-populated apartment building’s safety problems in 2016 did not develop overnight. The town spent decades building up its registration and inspection network.