When Irma Baker first moved into the Heritage House in 2007, she remembers community members referring to it as a “golden building.”
Now, she’s frightened to get out of her room to do her usual midnight walks due to the alleged trespassers, unkempt conditions and rodents that roam the apartment complex.
Built in the late 1970s, Heritage House, 201 Lake Street, is a 14-story, 200 unit apartment complex for housing voucher recipients aged 62 and over.
Baker has made complaints to building management, but new issues still arise, and problems that were fixed become issues again, she said.
“I would like to see the buildings get back in tip-top shape as it once has been and I know that it could be,” Baker said.
After numerous complaints from Baker and other Heritage House residents, village officials are looking to take action against the building’s management company, Pacific Management Inc., and revert it to the “golden building” that it once was.
Baker, 84, is the president of the building’s tenants association meetings, and said she and other residents keep raising issues to the building’s management but haven’t seen permanent improvements. So she began taking her complaints to Oak Park village officials.
“The village really, really has been trying to help us,” Baker said, singling out Village Board member James Taglia, who “has really been on it. Anytime I call him, he is always there to help.”
Oak Park code compliance inspector Tina Brown told the Village Board during a recent meeting that a 2023 inspection of the property turned up 533 property maintenance violations, but were all resolved by January 2024. In 2025, after inspecting a third of the units, there were only 22 violations, Brown said.
But residents say problems are popping up again.
The recent spate of issues at the complex began about a year ago, Baker said. She said she started seeing what appeared to be drug deals happening around the building, mice on the first floor and sometimes she spotted people who aren’t residents sleeping on lobby and hallway floors.
Village officials have also said residents complained about mold in their units, overflowing garbage containers and problems with the heating systems.
“The things that are happening, that shouldn’t be happening,” Baker said. “I would be less than a resident if I didn’t mention it to somebody to try to get help.”
Jeff Richards, president and CEO of Pacific Management, Inc., which oversees Heritage House and over 25 other residential buildings in Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska, said he is aware of and responded to some of the issues that residents have brought up. In the case of the mice that tend to enter the property in wintertime, he hired pest control companies to deal with it, he said.
Taglia, the Oak Park Village Board member Baker has been reporting complaints to, said Heritage House residents are unhappy and issues aren’t being resolved because he believes the management company doesn’t want to put money into better solutions.
“It’s all about money, everything goes back to money, goes back to investment, how much money they want to spend to maintain and keep up,” Taglia said. “To haul garbage, they charge per container for the pickup, so if you have fewer containers, you pay less. So it’s all about going back to the money. And that’s what this is all about, in my view, and I think that they don’t invest in those buildings.”
If someone reports an issue to the village, Taglia said, code compliance employees inspect the issue, write the issue up, sometimes levy a fine.
The issues at Heritage House are recurring, Taglia said, and are seemingly the norm.
“This is how the place operates, it goes in and out of problems,” Taglia said. “It’s kind of like a fever dream where you just think, how could this be? What’s happening here?”
Oak Park village President Vicki Scaman said village representatives have gone to Heritage House multiple times in response to resident complaints, but it hasn’t been enough.
She wants to become more involved in the tenant association meetings, saying the property managers of Heritage House are “not well intended,” and that Pacific Management, Inc. may not be able to bring the property to what it once was.
“Something more needs to happen,” she said.
Village Board members discussed taking the matter to court during a meeting earlier this month. Jonathan Burch, the assistant village manager and neighborhood services director for Oak Park, recommended a plan that would help strengthen code compliance efforts.
In that plan, once a property reaches a certain number of complaints the property would be referred to as a “nuisance property,” which would require property managers to submit a plan to the village for addressing the problems.
It would “help give the community much more certainty about what actions we’d anticipate that the property management firm or current owners of the building would be taking to address those issues,” Burch said.
Pacific Management’s contract with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for the Housing Choice Voucher Program, also known as Section 8, goes until 2029, according to Burch. If the plan from the property management doesn’t materialize, or if it doesn’t address the problems, legal actions can be taken.
Gregory Smith, Oak Park’s village attorney, said the village can take the matter to court if the property management does not follow through with fixing issues and seek a court order that would force the property owner to comply or risk being held in contempt.
Scaman said the quality of the Heritage House needs to be elevated and “taken to the next level,” but there are legalities that come first. She would like to see it get back in better shape, “ideally with a new management company” and “with no harm to the families,” she said.
Though Richards said he’s unaware of trespassing issues at Heritage House, another property run by Pacific Management, Sangamon Towers, a housing voucher complex in Springfield, is reportedly experiencing similar issues.
“That’s another larger property, but that’s the only other place where we’ve had issues, where we’ve had a lot of upset tenants,” Richards said. “But they’re not apples to apples at all. The property, Sangamon Towers, we’re dealing with significant problems with homelessness in Springfield, Illinois and downtown Springfield. It’s not the same as in Oak Park. We’ve had people that end up trying to sleep in the property. It’s been a very difficult situation to deal with and we’re working with the city and with a group of people to try and put us on better footing with that property, but no, this is not normal at all.”
As for the conditions residents of Heritage House are bringing to the attention of Oak Park officials, Richards said it’s “very disappointing that this is actually being stated.”
“We’re not slumlords. We’ve spent a lot of time, effort and money in that property over the years,” he said. “I just do not understand where this is coming from.”
chardy@chicagotribune.com
