The week I moved into my first one-bedroom apartment in Rogers Park, I was excited to have a space of my own. Unfortunately, the mice that infested the building were just as excited about my arrival. Three days into my move, I unlocked my front door to find a mouse jumping at my trash can, looking for the leftover rice and beans I tossed the night before.
“OK, so I’ve got to be mindful about taking out the garbage every day,” I told myself. This probably happened because, in the enthusiasm of living alone, I neglected to realize I had to be smart about completing daily chores on my own.
I didn’t see another one until winter, and that’s when it dawned on me that I had a problem. I left my building after the sighting and sat in my car for two hours in the throes of a panic attack before I was ready to return. On my way back in, I stopped by a neighbor’s apartment, knocking fiercely, to ask if they had the same issue. “Oh, the mice?” she asked. Shawty told me the pests were big fans of her dog’s food. They jumped over her Brussels griffon daily like he was a hurdle in a track-and-field competition or a broomstick at a Black wedding. In other words, she treated her vermin as roommates. I was horrified.
Whenever I saw one, I FaceTimed my family back home in Connecticut in distress. They usually laughed. My mom and her sisters grew up with horrible rat infestations in Brooklyn, NY, and were amused by how paralyzing the situation was for me—they also had street advice on how to deal with it.
First, I submitted a maintenance request to Peak Properties, my management company, and the janitor came to set traps. Knowing I would find dead mice in my apartment unfortunately did not make me feel better. The traps caught a new mouse every few days, mostly in my bedroom or the living room, so I demanded my building seal the holes. The janitor plugged five holes under radiators and between cabinets. But the mice took that as a sign I wanted them to come in through different entryways.
I heard them in the walls as I slept. The stress the situation gave me had me maneuvering through my apartment for the next few months like I was tiptoeing through a minefield, hoping one of my unwelcome roommates wouldn’t reveal themselves to me and send me into a panic attack. After three months of the janitor coming in and out looking for new holes to seal, the problem stopped. But the anxiety that came with moving through the house followed me into my next apartment, until I bought a cat and could finally take a deep breath.
In 2022, pest control company Orkin ranked Chicago the “rattiest” city in the country for the eighth year in a row. Rodent infestations can cause enormous stress on a tenant, but the problem is exponentially worse when landlords don’t treat it as a serious problem. I was relatively lucky, but many people aren’t. Knowing this, a myriad of legal aid organizations like the Law Center for Better Housing (LCBH), Beyond Legal Aid, and the Metropolitan Tenants Organization (MTO) exist to help tenants pressure their landlords into action. Some Chicagoans have had great experiences with the help. But others still find themselves faced with indifferent owners—or even eviction—after attempts to force building management to do something.
LCBH represents tenants facing eviction or experiencing poor living conditions. The organization hopes to create safer and more comfortable spaces for people to live. The organization also supports tenants referred to LCBH by community groups throughout the city. Mice infestations—alongside rats, cockroaches, and bedbugs—are some of the more common issues they face.
“A lot of times folks are reaching out to us because there’s conditions issues that have been going on for a really long time, and they’re not getting anywhere from trying to reach out to the landlord directly,” says Sam Barth, a staff attorney at LCBH.
In Chicago, the Residential Landlord Tenant Ordinance (RLTO) lays out the general responsibilities and rights of landlords and tenants. It defines what a landlord is, what a landlord is required to do, and what a tenant should do if the landlord isn’t fixing a conditions issue.
Two key points in the RLTO require a landlord to provide access to essential services like water, electricity, gas, and heat, and to maintain the premises in a habitable condition. Regardless of what the lease says, the landlord is responsible for poor conditions and for making necessary repairs.
“If there is a pest infestation in a unit or in a building,” Barth says, “it is the landlord’s responsibility to ameliorate the issue—through pest treatments or through traps or plugging holes in the walls where pests are coming in.”
Landlords do not get leniency on mice problems simply because Chicago is a ratty city. The code even states that landlords must pay for regular trash pickup and make sure garbage isn’t overflowing from dumpsters, two actions that discourage mice and rats from approaching the property. When people contact LCBH for mice issues, it’s usually because the issue has been ongoing with a landlord’s knowledge, they aren’t receiving sufficient or proper treatment, or the tenant feels like the building owner is allowing the issue to get worse, Barth says.
How often do people go along with infestations because they feel powerless to fix them? “Anecdotally, I have the sense that it does happen quite a bit,” Barth tells the Reader. “Tenants [are] forced to pay out of pocket, or get their own traps, or try and figure out a solution on their own. What we’ll hear from tenants is, ‘I didn’t realize that the landlord was required to do this,’ or, ‘I thought I had to deal with it on my own.’”
Kiisha Smith has lived in the Chicago area for more than 30 years. Today she lives on the west side in the Lawndale community with her 10-, 15-, and 17-year-old kids. Whenever she moves, the first question Smith asks is, “When was the last time the building was exterminated?” She asks if there are major infestations with mice, bugs, and cockroaches because she wants to know what she’s getting herself into. Sometimes the owners are honest, but most times they’re not. They’ve told Smith, “Oh no, we don’t have that problem,” or even, “We had that problem a long time ago but we took care of it.” Smith often finds that the problem isn’t under control.
“Where I’m living now, the owner’s niece, who’s part of management, she told me in the beginning, ‘Oh no we don’t do bugs, we don’t do roaches, we don’t do mice,’ and, true enough, we recently learned that there are mice there,” Smith says.
In the past four years, Smith has had to bounce from property to property because of infestation issues. Her story starts in 2019 at a building in the Austin neighborhood, where management company Optimus Realty reassured her there were no infestations. After a few months living there, her family started noticing droppings on the stove and behind appliances. Next, they noticed food left on the counter, like bread, would be eaten through the packaging. “We did contact the owner. He never came out to do anything about it,” Smith says.
It progressed to the point where the Smith family couldn’t leave anything out. And after she found mice droppings in the oven, Smith decided to stop cooking. “The owner never came out to exterminate. He really didn’t care about anything. We were in an emergency situation when we [moved] in. It just seemed as though he felt like, ‘Oh they need me so I ain’t doing nothing.’”
Eventually, her family moved a mile away. “It was a beautiful place. Beautiful,” Smith says. “And again, we move in and things seem to be perfect.”
In the beginning, the family didn’t notice any of the signs. It was springtime and the Smiths spent little time at home. But sure enough, they’d leave food out and see droppings throughout the apartment. When Smith advised the owner, he sometimes didn’t respond at all. Once, he promised he’d send someone out to do something, but it never happened. Eventually, the conditions of the property got so bad, the city deemed it illegal. The owner ultimately sold the building because there were so many violations he didn’t want to pay to fix.
The issue followed her to her current apartment.
“Once you get settled in and the weather starts to change, that’s when they start to come out,” Smith says. “One owner even told me that that’s normal and to be expected. No, it’s not. Not if you actually do things that are necessary to the property. There’s ways to keep them out.”
Smith had come home at 1 AM after a celebration and went to use the bathroom. A mouse jumped from behind the toilet, scaring “the hell” out of her before disappearing into the hole through which it entered. That’s when she realized she moved into yet another rodent-infested building.
“If mice are going to be able to roam freely and you think it’s not a problem, then the mice should be the ones paying rent or a portion or something, because they have control of the unit,” Smith says. “They come and go [as they] please, they eat through your stuff. That’s disgusting.”
Tulsi McDaniels has been living in her current Pilsen apartment for three years, a unit she says is plagued by mice. She moved to the city ten years ago from Los Angeles and previously experienced infestations of roaches. But this is her first time dealing with this flavor of vermin.
McDaniels says she first saw droppings—though she wasn’t even positive they were droppings because she’d never seen them before. Then, she began to see mice in her kitchen and bedroom, and heard them squeaking incessantly in the walls. She reached out to her management company, First Western Properties, and a janitor came to distribute glue traps and foul-smelling rat poison. But as the weather grew colder, she says her situation grew worse.
It wasn’t until she submitted several maintenance requests that management decided to look for a hole in her building, according to McDaniels. “The main point to that is that I was recognizing that it was a problem and they sort of were not treating it as a problem,” she says. “It constantly feels like they are doing the bare minimum for my unit.”
She says it just didn’t feel like her space anymore. Mice in the kitchen upset her the most because she cooks a lot, and the smell of mice droppings and rat poison saturated the room. Outside her building, she says she saw unsealed trash cans and an accumulation of garbage like old TVs, strollers, and furniture on the side of her building. She recognized those were ample hiding spots for the vermin making their way into her building. “It would just make me really sad because I felt like my house was dirty, and that I was dirty when I was trying to keep the place as clean as possible,” McDaniels says.
Barth, the housing lawyer, walks me through the different ways a tenant can take action against a negligent landlord. The first step for people experiencing rodent infestations is to call 311. The operator will make a report to the city’s Department of Buildings, which will dispatch a building inspector to the property. This is one major mechanism by which landlords are held accountable for building code violations, Barth says.
If the city finds a property owner has multiple violations, it can take one of two types of actions. It could hold an administrative hearing, where a landlord could be ordered to pay a fine and make repairs to the building. The city could also file a case against the landlord in building court, a division of courtrooms in the Loop’s Daley Center where judges hear cases filed by the City of Chicago against property owners for more serious code violations.
Tenants also have the right to withhold rent, make repairs themselves and deduct the cost from their rent, or terminate a lease if the landlord doesn’t make repairs. “But it has to be done in a very specific way,” Barth says. “The ordinance is very specific of the requirements for the ways that tenants should notify a landlord.”
First, he recommends that tenants document all apartment issues, reach out to their landlord, talk to an attorney, or see what other resources are available before withholding rent. But under the RLTO, tenants can withhold rent for poor conditions after first giving proper notice to the property manager. The letter should state that the landlord has 14 days to make adequate repairs, or the tenant will start withholding a reasonable percentage of their rent until the issue is resolved. Tenants planning to hire their own plumbers or pest control companies should include in the letter that they’ll deduct the price of such services from their monthly rent.
Owner-occupied buildings with six or fewer units are exempt from most portions of the RLTO. No matter what, though, landlords are required to maintain habitable premises, and tenants can always make reasonable repairs and deduct the cost from their rent under state law.
Two city programs exist to help small landlords secure funds for repairs: one for one-to-four-unit residential properties and the other for multifamily buildings with five or more rented units. For tenants, LCBH’s automated Rentervention website (rentervention.com) can help renters draft 14-day demand letters, understand their legal rights, and learn more about the proper ways to withhold rent.
Smith and McDaniels both employed these methods to address their issues, but their results varied. Smith’s attempts to get help from legal aid and 311 have been unsuccessful. Her complaints to the city have gone unaddressed. She’s tried to purchase her own sticky traps and pest control treatment to deduct from rent, and has withheld rent altogether. But landlords have retaliated by beginning eviction processes—even though doing so is illegal under the RLTO.
Smith’s efforts to address infestation and other building issues have gotten her evicted from two places, so she feels like the court failed her. She tells the Reader that processes available for tenants are “a bunch of crap.” She also says the multiple legal aid organizations she’s gone through disappeared after she withheld rent. She approached MTO, Beyond Legal Aid, and LCBH for help in eviction court, and lawyers there told her she had an open-and-shut case since she documented issues so rigorously. But still, they’d tell her that if she didn’t settle they could no longer represent her. That upsets her.
“You wasted all my time when I could have just gotten a paid lawyer. So these legal aid firms really aren’t it,” Smith says.
Barth says that, generally, lawyers choose to settle most cases because of the “risks and unknowns of the trial.” Especially in eviction court, going to trial is a very “high risk, low reward” situation for tenants. The best case scenario at trial is often that the judge will dismiss the case because finding any amount of back rent owed could potentially result in an eviction.
Smith’s record for evictions related to withholding rent is supposed to be sealed, but getting a judge to do that has been a difficult and slow process. She’s having trouble finding new housing now because, although she’s never had rent issues before, building owners didn’t care if she was a victim in a previous housing dispute.
“Yeah, I got a history of standing up for myself, fighting for what I believe in. And so now y’all want to make it seem like it’s not OK,” Smith says. “If you want to continue to receive your income, aren’t you supposed to maintain the service or make sure the product is what it’s supposed to be?”
Optimus Realty has not responded to requests for comment.
McDaniels says her experience has been more promising. She reached out to other tenants to see if they were facing the same problem—they were—and one of her neighbors floated the idea of starting a tenants union, a proposal she eagerly accepted. And since only six people lived in the building, they had an easy time unionizing, since they only needed three people to represent half the building. MTO helped her and her neighbors organize themselves by way of monthly meetings, and together they drafted a list of demands.
The union wanted to meet with the building’s management company, but McDaniels says First Western Properties refused to sit at a table with them. Next, the crew sent a letter to their landlord, which, according to McDaniels, documented issues with the building’s conditions and included a threat to deduct rent. The union initially sought a deduction of between 15 percent and 18 percent, with the mice infestation accounting for 10 percent of that. “We were told to be super conservative with the number just in case we had to go to court about it,” McDaniels says. The group brought their first deducted rent checks to a demonstration outside First Western Properties’s office on June 5. With support from community organization Únete La Villita, the union broadcast the rally live on Instagram, led chants about tenant rights, and read and delivered their list of demands.
But McDaniels says building ownership continues to refuse to cash their checks and will not acknowledge the 14-day demand letter by phone or text. McDaniels, who pays her rent on an online portal, says she still receives a $50 late fee each month for not paying full rent, which she says the company also refuses to acknowledge.
First Western Properties strongly refutes many of these claims. Mo Dadkhah, a lawyer representing the company, said in a statement to the Reader that the building employs a janitor service that “cleans the area weekly,” and added that McDaniels’s building shares space with three others. “Other tenants and tenants of this building leave garbage outside and it is hard to determine what garbage belongs to who,” but he said building management is “removing garbage when necessary.”
“My Client has done anything and everything they can and continue to do in order to help the situation. This is NOT a negligent Landlord, this is a Landlord trying to do the right thing where Tenants are trying to find reasons to not pay,” Dadkhah said.
He told the Reader that “all rent payments received to date were deposited last month or early this month.” And, given that tenants are withholding part of their rent, Dadkhah said management first wanted to consult with an attorney before cashing checks.
Paul Tsakiris, First Western’s president and founder, says an exterminator visits the building monthly and has made additional visits to address the mice infestations. He says the exterminator in July reported that technicians did not find any activity or infestation of any insects or rodents. But, days earlier, after tenants made repeated calls to 311, the city dispatched an inspector who cited the building’s owners with more than ten violations, city records show, including failure to “exterminate rodents in building and seal openings where they gain access.”
Tsakiris says that McDaniels’s building is 130 years old and needs “a little bit more love than others.” He says the company offered to move tenants to more affordable units in its portfolio but tenants refused. “They’ll say it’s been in disrepair for years. Well, yeah, because you pointed out things. And just because we raised your rent $150 doesn’t mean you’re gonna get a brand-new apartment completely.”
Tsakiris accuses McDaniels of making “slanderous and false” complaints, and suggests, despite findings otherwise by the city, that the union is fabricating reports of mice because “they just don’t want to pay rent.” He says the union has twice rescheduled meetings with building management (the next is scheduled for later this month). Yet he also admits that the union’s demand letters also have “legitimate” requests, such as for new windows, with which the management company has complied. But after addressing one problem, Tsakiris laments, the union will “keep finding more stuff” to fix.
“We genuinely empathize and feel for people, for how expensive rent is for some people,” Tsakiris says. “But people have to understand that their rent increased a fraction of what the landlord’s expenses went up . . . We can’t negotiate with Cook County on our taxes, we can’t negotiate with the water department on our water bill.”
Today, Smith and her three kids hate staying at home. They spend most of their time at her grandparents’ house or the home of her kids’ dad. The kids hate the infestation and are allergic to the pests. If she finds mice in or around furniture, she tosses it. “It’s embarrassing. Like you don’t want to have company. You don’t want to even prepare meals,” Smith says.
She says she’s never had this problem in the suburbs and feels as though her landlords treat mice infestations as an inevitable part of renting in the city. “It’s basically ‘fuck us’ to me.” The lifelong Chicagoan is now considering moving out of state.
She recently visited a potential apartment but, during the tour, learned that the building also was in the throes of an infestation. “It was like ten damn mice on a sticky board. And [the property manager] thought that was cool.”
McDaniels and the other members of her union are glad the city intervened against First Western Properties. The company hasn’t threatened to take action, presumably because it’s “doing everything on paper,” she says. She doesn’t plan on moving out of the apartment. But she knows the problem is worse when it’s cold, so she’s bracing herself for the winter.
“I know the issues in our building will only get worse. And we have a lot of overturn in the building itself. People move in and out often,” she says. “For the new people that are not in the union, I am expecting the issues of the building to reveal themselves. If the mice issue is as bad as last year—which I think it will be—I don’t know, we’ll be in a bad place.”
