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I found the article “It’s Insanity!” [August 28] to be another disappointing example of why the Reader should stop writing stories about landlord-tenant issues. As my mother used to say, if you can’t do something well, don’t do it at all. Not since Ben Joravsky did a good job of covering the issue of landlord neglect in 1990 has there been a decent in-depth article in the Reader that is fair to both sides of the issues. It’s not that there haven’t been good stories to cover. How about a story covering the mayor’s affordable housing plan, which actually netted not a single affordable unit in five years? When the Lawyers’ Committee for Better Housing released an in-depth study showing how unfair the eviction process is to tenants, there was coverage in four Chicago newspapers, but not a peep in the Reader. Finally, last year, after a long dry spell, the Reader included a piece about tenants having serious problems in their building in the Rogers Park neighborhood. Unfortunately the writer produced a badly researched article that seemed written to purposely denigrate tenant activism.
Mr. Pick quoted me as saying that I feared the case would become a poster case for landlords with abusive tenants. What I really said was that I feared that Mr. Pick’s treatment of the story would turn this anomaly into a poster case that landlords would point to when pushing changes to the protections afforded by the Residential Landlords and Tenants Ordinance.
Grant Pick replies:
