As president of the Heritage House Apartments residents’ council, Irma Baker has to consider the safety and livelihood of not only herself, but of all the elderly tenants in the 200-unit building at 201 Lake St. in Oak Park.
And she’s concerned. Or more accurately, she’s been concerned.
“I want a change for the building, for the residents and for Oak Park,” said Baker, a retired phlebotomist. “For the building, I want to see a change for the cleanliness. And the safety.”
As far as Baker is concerned, there’s plenty of work to do. Allegations of everything from lax security to bedbugs and rodents to drug use and squatters have dogged the property for years and has led to allegedly hundreds of village residential code violations.
It’s time for a change, said Baker, who has lived there for 20 years.
“We’re ghetto,” she said. “I want to be safe and be confident. I didn’t move into this building to be like this.”
But there is another side to the story, according to Jeffrey Richards, president and CEO of Pacific Management Inc., which operates Heritage House.
“Some of the things we hear, we’re not,” Richards said, “We’re not slum lords. It seemed like things were working well at the property for the last year. The association is bringing up a number of issues now. I can’t tell you they are accurate.”
Building security concerns
Heritage House, which was constructed in 1978, is owned by Heritage House Associates LLC with Wellness America the managing member. It is a federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Section 8 rental subsidized property. In simple terms, Richards said, residents pay a portion of their income towards rent and HUD pays the remainder. He said there is a waiting list of about 400 people to move in.
The 14-floor building features an atrium with a skylight and two sets of entry doors, the interior of which are operated by a key fob system. Between those sets of doors is the building management office.
A library, community room and fitness center are tucked into the right side of the first floor upon entry, along with a laundry room. A security desk with a computer monitor showing feeds from cameras located within and outside the building is located near the set of elevators.
On Monday afternoon, the security desk was unoccupied, as it usually is during the day. According to Richards and Tommie Brown, a broker and onsite building manager, security arrives at 5 p.m. until 9 a.m. the following morning Monday through Friday with 24/7 security on weekends.
Why no security during roughly business hours on weekdays?
“You have maintenance walking around, you have us walking around, do you really need security?” Brown said. “We say no.”
Baker says yes.
“I don’t understand how they can say we don’t need security,” she said. “We need security for safety. I would like for us to have security around the clock.”
The reason Baker said, is that access to the building isn’t all that difficult. Anyone can walk through the street-facing front doors, then get buzzed in by a resident … or simply wait until someone enters or leaves and slip in through the inner doors.
“People do it all the time during the day,” she said.
Once in, it’s anybody’s guess where an outsider will go. Baker said once a man slept for days in the library.
“Not true,” Brown said. “And we have a camera,” gesturing to the globe-like device on the ceiling.
Baker: “Yes, it is true.”
She said she saw a man sitting in the hallway on the 10th floor between apartments 12 and 13 about six months ago, looking at his phone. She called security and called out to the man, who moved.
“I walked around the hall, I didn’t see him anymore,” she said. “I was told he was in the library, he came out of the library, he left his coat outside in the atrium, and I asked the security guy the next day, whose coat is that?
“It sat there for two days. I took the coat and put it behind the washers in the laundry room.”
Drug use is also a concern for Baker, especially marijuana, but that’s a thorny issue for Pacific Management.
“On the marijuana, once we legalized it that’s what everybody says, ‘It’s legal,’” Brown said. “But it’s not legal in a federally subsidized building.”
Richards added, “We can’t help it if your grandkids or kids come here and then go in the stairwells and start smoking weed. That’s absolutely happened. And I’m like, what do we do about that? Do we start putting cameras up in all the stairwells? It’s a tricky thing.”
Sharp focus from Trustee Taglia
Jim Taglia is an Oak Park village trustee and served in that role from 2017-23 before being reelected in 2025. Like Baker, he’s concerned and perceives that there are many problems beyond security at the property.
“People have to have a decent place to live,” he said, “the security of living in an apartment free of bedbugs, cockroaches, mice, rats. The proper heat, the proper ventilation, the ability to use hot water and use washers and dryers and use the library so someone foreign isn’t there. Those are the basics where they aren’t hitting the mark.
“Then it’s also the safety. The way this so-called security works, they are 50 feet from the door and don’t stop anybody who comes in. You have people sleeping in the hallways. If I owned that building, I assure you I would have security telling me who’s there.”
One question Taglia has is whether HUD is monitoring the property. Wednesday Journal outreach to Jacqueline Sheard, the HUD representative overseeing Heritage House, was referred to the HUD press office, which did not respond to several requests for comment.
The extent of code compliance violations from the village isn’t clear. A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from Wednesday Journal to the village in mid-May indicated that there were 32 code-compliance violations noted May 3, 2023, including issues like recaulking around bathtubs, ovens that didn’t work and kitchen faucet drips.
But the village produced no list of violations for 2024 and just one for 2025 which was for security cameras around the building that were inoperable. Neither the 2023 or 2025 lists indicated whether those violations had been corrected, The FOIA request was denied partially due to rules regarding revealing private and personal information.
Additionally, a code violation citation was issued by the village to Pacific Management in fall 2025 for failing to provide water at 110 degrees Fahrenheit to the entire building. The fine was $300, but once again, it isn’t clear whether the issue was corrected or the fine was paid.
A separate FOIA request asking for documentation of where Heritage House currently falls on the village of Oak Park’s rental licensing code tiers, which are labeled Gold, Silver, Bronze and Conditional, wasn’t responded to by press time.
“We are Gold with them,” Brown said, meaning buildings with excellent code compliance are renewed every four years. Jonathan Burch, assistant village manager for neighborhood services, could not confirm where Heritage House falls within those tiers.
Is Heritage House a safe place?
Another challenge: Baker and the residents’ council meets the first week of each month. While Brown has attended meetings in the past, she does not now due to their negativity. Richards said he started going in her place, but due to his busy schedule, can’t make all the meetings.
“I don’t think it’s healthy for Tommie to be there, and that’s the honest to God truth, because it can be very negative,” he said.
Baker has another point of view.
“She doesn’t like to answer questions,” she said. “I think she should be there and listen to what residents’ complaints are.”
Countered Richards: “The problems we’re dealing with now aren’t financial problems, they are interpersonal problems. (In December) I thought some of the bridges and some of the animosity was calming down. The next thing I knew we had somebody going before the village board.”
What does the future of Heritage House look like?
“Every trustee is aghast,” Taglia said. “We’re going to focus on this place and make it better, one way or the other. Those people need a decent place to live.”