We have been renting in our unit for five years, but we could not tolerate the conditions any…read morelonger. Wesley Realty does not cover utilities, but does dictate what devices you may have in your home(in order to make sure you're paying their washing machines), and the heating they provide will only be meaningfully 'on' when temperatures are below 0 - before that point, expect your radiator to be slightly warm, but that's all they'll do. Our water pressure was low for months, and when they 'fixed' it, it still becomes a trickle if other people in the building are using water at the same time. For the entire time we've been here, we have power outages if we try to cook food, and sometimes we have power outages just sitting in a room with less than a handful of devices plugged in. The maintenance personnel(one guy, exactly one guy, who complains and delays if called after hours) tries to find ways to blame these issues on the tenant. We were chastised for thinking that we could have devices plugged in multiple rooms, as if that's unreasonable because 'the building is old' so we should know that we can't...have lights? We were reminded over and over, 'don't plug so many things in!' even when all we had on were lights and a single toaster, or lights and a computer.
Two years ago, during one of our outages, a ComEd guy was luckily in the area, and he took a look at our fuse box before the maintenance guy could. ComEd guy told us that it looked like our unit was drawing less than half the voltage it is supposed to, and he pointed out that our fusebox looked as though it was threaded into other fuse boxes. If this is true, it would be stealing electricity, it would explain our frequent outages, and it's obviously illegal. When I mentioned the ComEd guy's findings to the maintenance guy(I actually thought this was a good idea), they padlocked the fuse box, ignored everything I said and continued saying that we're using too many devices and that's the 'official' explanation for our frequent outages. To be clear, it's not legal to keep a tenant out of their fuse box in Chicago. We pointed that out to them, and they ignored that too.
To keep us quiet, they're now thinking about putting a fuse box *in* the unit...which would let us fix it when it blows, yeah, but it would also help them cover it up if they really are taking electricity from the box downstairs, which they're keeping locked.
We're moving out in a month, so we're finally done putting up with this shit. We have been living in one room at a time, plugging in only a handful of devices, taking extra care to unplug/turn things off EVERY time we cook, and every time the power goes out we have to hear it again from their grumpy overworked maintenance 'team' of one.
I filed a BBB complaint, in case this electricity issue really does end up being criminality instead of incompetence and refusal to maintain.