Some Chicagoans face trouble heating homes amid extreme cold snap
CHICAGO (CBS) -- The cold is taking a toll on nearly everything – including your furnace, which has probably been working overtime to keep your house heated.
If you rent your home and your heat goes out, you do have protections from the city – but you will want to know those rules before you call 311.
When the temperatures dip to single digits or even below zero - and the wind chills are well below zero - many are looking for ways to stay warm, and people often turn up their heat. But the city still doesn't require landlords to do so, despite temperatures constantly dropping.
Earlene Green is one of the people who finds her home much too cold.
"This year, we got all that wind and wind is blowing through the windows and balcony," Green said.
Ms. Green lives in the Evergreen Tower II high-rise on Cleveland Avenue in the Old Town neighborhood, and on the ninth floor, she's right near the windows and is chilly.
CBS 2's Jermont Terry employed the use of a digital thermometer gun - which gives a digital temperature of a surface. It showed temperature near Green's patio doors came in at 56 degrees.
"The winds comes through here," Green said of the patio doors.
Ms. Green is running space heaters, which she believes are keeping her apartment warmer. She also called 311.
"They came out today, and she did the temperature thing – she's 'Oh, said it's 70 degrees,'" Green said. "I said, 'Yeah, because I've got my space heaters on."
The city requires landlords to keep heat at 68 degrees during the day and 66 at night. Even when the city freezes over for days, that requirement remains.
It leaves so many to think, why are there no exceptions when temperatures drop so low?
Bill Worley said he would like to see the city make some changes when the temperatures get this low – in the form of increasing the threshold for the minimum temperature at which the landlord must keep the heat.
"It wouldn't hurt!" Worley said. "It wouldn't hurt not at all."
Worley lives in the same building as Green. He puts towels in the sash of his window to keep the air from coming out.
On Worley's apartment window, the digital thermometer gun measures 37 degrees. He has one baseboard heater for the entire unit.
And while space heaters do help, Worley does not see them as a better option. He is on a fixed income, and does not want his electric bill to go up. So where does that leave him?
"Going broke just to stay warm," Worley said.
The City of Chicago reports just under 1,300 calls to 311 about heating complaints since the start of the deep freeze Friday night – and encourages everyone who feels the temperature is too low to contact them.
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