David Greising: City Hall still hasn’t learned its lesson a year after report on deadly fire-safety failures

The Pulitzer Prizes are the most prestigious awards in American journalism. And because of the nature of the craft, they also can stand as an unofficial catalog of the catastrophes, coups, military atrocities, corporate malfeasance and the crushing inhumanity of our times.

This year alone, the Pulitzer juries awarded prizes for the coverage of the collapse of the Champlain Towers South condominium complex outside Miami; a highly toxic battery recycling plant, also in Florida; a national review of fatal traffic stops by police, and — no surprise — the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Reporters and editors celebrate when they win. For journalists, a Pulitzer is a crowning professional achievement. Yet for many, grief can taint the celebration: Their best work arose from the worst moments of someone else’s life.

I got a small taste of that complex response this week when the baiduhai and the organization I lead, the Better Government Association, received a Pulitzer for our joint report about the deadly cost of the city of Chicago’s failures to enforce fire safety. The Tribune’s Cecilia Reyes and the BGA’s Madison Hopkins earned their Pulitzers for meticulous and compassionate reporting that exposed how at least 61 people died in 42 fires in buildings where the city had knowledge of dangerous conditions but failed to act. The series was called “The Failures Before the Fires.”

All of us involved were thrilled by the accolade. But we grieve the loss of life. And we are astonished, to put it gently, that a year after that powerful report, Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the City Council haven’t properly addressed the city’s deadly shortcomings.

The mayor ordered publication of a so-called scofflaw landlord list. She also required long-lasting, tamper-proof smoke detectors — but gave landlords a full decade to install them.

Lightfoot’s landlord’s list is a hollow reform. When Hopkins and Reyes studied it for a follow-up report, they found the list would not have included 40 of the buildings spotlighted in the original story, where 57 people died in fires. It gives bureaucrats wide latitude to continue granting city contracts with problem landlords. The bureaucrats even have authority to simply remove landlords from the list.

Fixing a city’s fire safety problems is no simple task. But if Lightfoot and the City Council are serious about doing so, Reyes and Hopkins provided a road map. They scoured the country to find examples of effective firefighting efforts in other cities. And they found plenty.

At least 10 cities require registration or licensing of landlords. This helps a city such as Minneapolis to immediately inspect all the buildings owned by a landlord if chronic problems are found at just one building.

In Chicago, building inspections are triggered by resident complaints. But Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, Detroit and others don’t wait: They routinely inspect apartment buildings without such a prompt.

Los Angeles requires an inspector’s response to resident safety complaints within 72 hours. City inspectors met that deadline 94% of the time in 2020, Hopkins and Reyes learned. Chicago briefly had a 21-day deadline during Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration. After the city buildings department established a record of abject failure to meet the deadline, the requirement was revoked.

San Francisco and seven other major cities require inspectors to revisit properties to verify that code violations have been addressed. That is not required in Chicago, to fatal effect. The Tribune-BGA reporting chronicled hundreds of cases where violations were noted by inspectors, but the problems never were addressed, such as dangerous wiring, missing smoke detectors, open-flame heating and blocked exits.

The inadequate response so far to the Tribune-BGA reports is not Lightfoot’s alone. Ald. Jason Ervin, 28th, Ald. Raymond Lopez, 15th, and Ald. Gilbert Villegas, 36th, called for changes or public hearings. They at least showed concern, but like her, they let the moment pass.

Perhaps the awarding of the Pulitzer will be a reminder that a clear and present fire danger exists in Chicago. It threatens primarily people of color in underserved neighborhoods. It can be fixed. Yet fires keep happening, and people keep dying. They are preventable deaths, if only the city would take action.

Pulitzer juries do more than referee competitions between newsrooms. They make a statement about what is important to American society. With this award, the Pulitzer board has put Chicago’s fire failures on the same level as the Florida condo collapse, police shootings and the Jan. 6 insurrection.

I mentioned that Pulitzer winners experience both exhilaration and grief. What should a city at the focus of a Pulitzer-winning investigation do? Ignore it? Certainly not.

Perhaps the mayor and City Council can take this moment to embrace one other response: Resolve. They can resolve to learn the lessons of such senseless, avoidable loss, and resolve to follow the path of other cities toward reasonable, effective action that can actually save lives.

David Greising is president and CEO of the Better Government Association.

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