Evanston Residents Have Until May 13 To Vacate Unsafe Apartments

EVANSTON, IL — Dozens of tenants of a trio of deteriorating Evanston apartment buildings have just over a month to vacate their homes due to severe structural damage.

The buildings at 2014, 2018 and 2024 Wesley Ave. are "dangerous and unfit for occupation," according to city officials, who warned residents in February that they needed to find new housing immediately.

The balconies and stairs on the California-style apartment buildings — the only way in and out of the rental units — have been declared structurally unsafe and any repairs will require residents to be relocated, according to city officials.

The exterior metal staircases and concrete platforms, especially vulnerable to damage from freeze-thaw cycles, have been temporarily shored up with scaffolding.

The three buildings are owned by the Evanston Housing Coalition, a local nonprofit interfaith organization whose "purpose is to initiate and support efforts in neighborhoods that are actively seeking or willing to upgrade their housing and placing special emphasis on providing decent, affordable housing to persons and families of low to moderate income," according to its mission statement.

City officials said the buildings had been due for routine inspections in 2020, but the they were postponed until 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

That year, the city learned that the buildings' owner and sole maintenance contact, George Gauthier, had not actually been managing the property for an extended period of time.

Ald. Bobby Burns, who represents the 5th Ward where the buildings are located, said he has been meeting with staff and tenants since learning the structures were being neglected.

"The nonprofit that currently owns the building has clearly not maintained it. If they had, we wouldn't be in this condition," Burns said at a February housing committee meeting. "That being said, I have not found a tenant yet that has said anything negative about George, so it sounds like he was a stand-up person who did the best he could. However, the reality is that that organization did not maintain the properties over the last several years — not months."

In September 2022, the board of the housing coalition hired Housing Opportunity Development Corp., or HODC, a Skokie-based nonprofit affordable housing developer, to manage the rental properties.

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Next month's move-out deadline was first reported by the Evanston Roundtable after officials disclosed it to tenants Tuesday evening at a meeting at the Fleetwood-Jourdain Community Center. If residents are allowed to stay in such an unsafe building indefinitely "at some point the city is negligent," Burns said at the meeting.

If tenants are not "actively working on a plan to move out," city officials pledged to post a 15-day notice at the property directing the Evanston Housing Coalition to correct the code violations and evict anyone still living there if corrections are not made, according to material distributed at the meeting.

City staff and other local housing nonprofits are offering relocation assistance to residents, including money for rent based on the difference between their current subsidized rent at the Wesley building and the new monthly rent for a new apartment.

The cost of repairing the three sets of stairs and platforms ranges from $1.2 million to $1.5 million, according to the city's website, and state housing officials have declined to approve an affordable housing tax credit unless the buildings get fully rehabbed at a cost of $6 million to $10 million.

Resident Patricia Aikens, one of several residents to criticize the property's new manager at the Feb. 20 housing committee meeting. She said first began renting in the building in the early 1990s, it was in rough shape.

"When I first went there, I was in total shock because it was really bad," Aikens recalled.

"Mr. Gauthier asked me if I would just give it a chance and if I would work with them we could make the apartment and the dead end better. And that's what we did, we made it better," she said.

"We became a community. We had a tenants' organization, we had it where we would know the tenants coming in, and now here I am, 33 years later, when they brought in HODC, they were really very nasty."