Pregnant Wife And I Forced To Evacuate Our Building
We rent a condo in an older wood-truss building in Chicago - it was converted from a factory 20 years ago and has large timber columns throughout. In January this year a column failed causing one unit tier to be evacuated. In the time since, an engineering company was brought in to assess the structural integrity of the other columns in the building. Last week they found a second column that posed a risk and evacuated another unit tier. This week they found a third and evacuated the rest of the building. My wife and I were given a few hours to vacate from an official order posted by the city. Timelines have been vague so far, the official correspondence from the building board stated to expect to be away from home for “four to six weeks or longer” until repairs are made and the city lifts the order. Our renters insurance covered 2 nights in a hotel but denied any further coverage, stating that the structural failures seem to not be caused by any one event and are instead due to a lack of proper maintenance over time. My wife is 35 weeks pregnant so we are now preparing to have our first baby away from home. The owner of our condo (our landlord) has been great during this process, waived May’s rent payment and also refunded our security deposit - that money was put towards a monthly rental unit in a nearby building as proximity to doctors and hospital were a priority. If the time away trickles into the “six weeks or longer” part of the estimate, we could be looking at serious money to extend our monthly rental which costs significantly more that our standard rent payment. Do we have any legal recourse to recoup some of the money we’ve lost? My wife does not receive any paid maternity leave through an employer, we’ve saved a nice chunk to be able to cover us for three months so she could have a nice long leave with our newborn but we’ve now had to dip into those savings and fear my wife’s leave will need to be cut short so she can go back to work.
Edited to add location
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