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Uncertainty remains for apartment tenants displaced by December fire

Maria Gardner Lara
Candy Clemens lived in the Hillcrest apartment that caught on fire days before Christmas. Since then she and her two children have stayed with an older daughter, as they await the property owner to place them in another apartment.

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The demolition of the Hillcrest apartment building and clean-up thereafter is expected to be completed by the end of the week, but for many residents of the complex the uncertainty remains.

Candy Clemens and her children have been living out of plastic bins filled with donated items since losing their home in the apartment fire.

“We're surviving,” Clemens said. “My son and my daughter, we moved in here with my daughter again. So, it's just getting by, I guess.” she said.

Clemens and her adult daughter and teenage son had lived on the 10 hundred block of Hillcrest Drive for less than two months when the fire broke out. She was still recuperating from surgery on her neck in November. So, there were boxes that were unpacked.

“I had a photo album from when my grandma was alive and that's gone now too,” she said. “So, just not, it's kind of not fair, you know.”

She said the property owner has offered to relocate them to another apartment, but the places were smaller and in bad condition.

Finding and then moving into the apartment on Hillcrest was a big deal for the single mom and survivor of domestic violence.

“Finally, we're away from where we didn't need help anymore from my daughter or anyone,” she said. “And now, it's back to where it was only a month and a half, and now we're back to the same situation where we need help.”

Clemens said on the night of the fire, she was getting ready to head out with her daughter when they smelled smoke.

“My daughter was sniffing around, and we knocked on my son's door,” she said. “We thought maybe he put out an incense or something, but no. We looked out in the hallway and it was full of smoke.”

Their apartment and another above them on the second floor were the only occupied apartments in the building.

Images of the fire show flames engulfing a top floor unit.

DeKalb Fire Chief Mike Thomas said the cause of the fire was “accidental, undetermined.”

The same building caught on fire in 2023 while it was vacant and under renovation. City officials said the cause was accidental and due to misuse of a blowtorch by a contractor working on the property.

In the latest fire, all residents in the complex, including two with Greenbriar Road addresses, were displaced.

Martina Fleming, a resident of a building adjacent to the fire damaged property, said some of the biggest challenges residents face since the fire is the "lack of transparency from our property management, the lack of accountability."

“It's been hard,” she said. “I understand that certain things by law, quote, unquote, they don't have to do, but just the empathy is not there, the sympathy,” she said. “They don't care.”

The Sycamore native is a graduate student and resided in the apartment with her elementary age son.

She said the issue speaks to a larger problem of poor management of the properties and how the property owner values their tenants.

“It's little rent so they're taking advantage of hard-working people and just treating them any type of way,” she said. "They're hiding behind different rules and guidelines and getting away with it.”

She said even when moving into the apartment, the property managers were slow to respond to her concerns.

"It literally took them so long to even make sure my heat was working," she said.

The complex is owned by the Terraces at DeKalb LLC, which is affiliated with Windy City RE LLC, and Clear Investment Group, LLC, all based in Chicago.

During the latest city council meeting Fleming called for the city to enact stronger enforcement of the city code, which she argues the property owner has violated.

“If they're not going to uphold the code that you set in place for them to be owners,” she said, “maybe we look into different ownership or we void their rental until they're able to comply.”

In response, DeKalb Mayor Cohen Barnes said the issue is on top of mind for the city.

“So. what more can we do?” he said. “So those conversations have already started, ma'am. We'll work on it, I promise.”

Clear Investment Group LLC purchased the complex in 2022 from Hunter Properties in a bundle with 13 separate parcels for $20.7 million dollars. The DeKalb City Council awarded them one million dollars as part of the deal in return for the company’s commitment to renovate several of the buildings.

A demolition crew member for the Hillcrest apartment building said the utilities located at the basement level were secured during the tear down. This was key for residents in the adjacent buildings on Greenbriar Road who receive water and electricity from the feed in the torn down property. When tenants will be allowed to return is unclear.

WNIJ reached out to Amy Rubenstein, of the investment group, but she declined a phone interview. In a previous statement, she said, “Our goals are to get tenants back in their homes quickly and safely or to relocate tenants based on their needs.”

Recent online real estate postings show that Clear Investment Group has put its local properties, including the apartment complex on Hillcrest, up for sale.

A Chicago native, Maria earned a Master's Degree in Public Affairs Reporting from the University of Illinois Springfield . Maria is a 2022-2023 corps member for Report for America. RFA is a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues and communities. It is an initiative of The GroundTruth Project, a nonprofit journalism organization. Un residente nativo de Chicago, Maria se graduó de University of Illinois Springfield con una licenciatura superior en periodismo de gobierno.