Evanston landlords may be required to designate their entire buildings as either smoking or non-smoking, if a recommendation made Wednesday by the city’s Human Relations Commission is passed by the Evanston City Council.
The recommendation would force landlords — who now can choose to label their buildings smoke-free — to specify smoking policies in leases.
Commission members also recommended at a meeting Wednesday that smoking be banned in common areas of Evanston apartment buildings.
Some Evanston landlords and off-campus Northwestern students agreed that banning smoking from common areas would benefit apartment-dwellers, but most said building-wide bans would be unfair and hard to enforce.
“That’s impossible,” said Bonni Nortman, associate vice president of Northbrook-based real estate firm Arthur Goldner & Associates. “First of all, who’s going to be patrolling the building to see if people are smoking or not?”
Members of the commission said Wednesday that it could be hard to enforce a ban on smoking in common areas, which would include hallways, laundry rooms and lobbies.
But Weinberg senior Martin Mahoney said smoking in common areas isn’t too much of concern for students.
“Unless there are people craving a cigarette by their mailboxes in the lobby, it doesn’t seem like that big of an issue,” said Mahoney, a smoker who lives in an apartment on the corner of Ridge Avenue and Church Street.
The commission made its recommendation upon the request of Evanston resident Peggy Tarr, who complained of the secondhand smoke of a habitual smoker in her apartment building on Sherman Avenue.
Tarr said Thursday that she thinks banning smoking from the common areas would be a good start, but that unwanted smoke still seeps through the walls in her apartment building. She said she wants landlords to make smoking policies clear before residents sign a lease.
“When I moved in here there was no one smoking, so I wasn’t even aware of the problem,” she said. “Management must somehow let people know that the building is not smoke-free.”
Commission member Michael Cervantes agreed that the common-area smoking ban should be only a starting point.
“It seems there is a U.S.-wide relook into the issue of smoking,” he said. “I personally think we would want to go deeper than common areas and consider a broader prohibition.”
But Sheldon Kantoff, property manager of Parliament Enterprises Ltd. — which owns more than 10 Evanston apartment buildings — said making landlords create smoking policies may not be a good idea. He said he would support a smoking ban in apartment common areas, but he does not think it’s his place to clear all cigarettes from someone’s private apartment.
“I’m not in favor of taking away total freedoms from everybody,” he said.
In the commission’s recommendation, any tenant who disagreed with a landlord’s designation would be released from his or her lease without penalty. But Nortman said it was unfair to drive longtime residents out of a building.
“Someone that’s been there 20 years, that’s their home,” she said. “And if they smoke, you can’t tell them they have to leave their home.”
Although McCormick senior James Newell does not smoke, he does not support the ban, saying smoking shouldn’t affect an apartment search.
“Sometimes you don’t really have much of a choice when you’re finding apartments,” he said. “If you find a nice apartment, but you’re a smoker, it seems like a hassle.”
Evanston City Council’s Human Services Committee will consider the ban at its June 7 meeting. If Human Services advises it, the issue will go to the council for a final decision.
The Daily’s Mike Cherney contributed to this report
