Oak Park, Illinois Home Listing Mostly Giant Rant Against Officials

Like I’ve said before, sometimes I worry that this week will be the week I can’t find a Wednesday WTF. However, a reader who lives in my house alerted me to a tweet about a Zillow listing in Oak Park, Illinois, that definitely has so many of the hallmarks of a WTF.

Well, this is a hell of a listing description pic.twitter.com/75lziRmPtY

— AJ LaTrace (@ajlatrace) August 10, 2018

I knew there had to be more to this listing, and since I’ve kind of won an award for digging up stuff, I decided I would expend minimal effort to try to figure out what was up.

I stress the word minimal, because my dudes, I have been chasing the news so hard the past two weeks that I think it may be chasing me now.

At any rate, my first order of business was to look up the listing. As you can see from the tweet, only a screenshot was up, likely because the person sharing felt certain the actual listing would be deleted before long.

But no, it has not, much to my surprise. (UPDATE: Zillow just reached out to us on Twitter shortly after 1 p.m. today to let us know they’ve updated the listing, and have apparently removed the lengthy screed. Lucky for you, we already quoted it below.)

Whoever created this listing (more on that in a minute), has no love for the Village of Oak Park, or its officials. Note also that the listing cannot be found on Realtor.com, Trulia, Redfin, etc. Only Zillow. 

The listing reads:

“This house and the lot have been contaminated by the neighboring retail establishment (currently a nail salon & upstairs residence — both against code). The neighbor’s sanitary sewer line connects directly to this home’s grey water / catch basin line, causing mutiple backups of raw human sewage to come into the home’s basement and bathrooms. The Village of Oak Park refuses to enforce health, plumbing, safety and zoning codes against this neighboring property, owned by Jack Strand, untilrecently, head of the Oak Park Village Board of New Development. The corruption in Oak Park is rampant. Dozens of people know about this gross violation but refuse to step forward and enforce IL State and Oak Park plumbing and health codes. The former plumbing inspector of Oak Park, Andrew Theisse, now IL State Plumbing Health inspector wrote a letter that the situation is fully code compliant, as a FAVOR to Stephen Witt, former head of Building & Property in Oak Park. Mr. Theisse has NEVER inspected. The house is unsellable and the current owners have been forced into bankruptcy because of plumbing costs to evacuate the sewage and sanitize the basement multiple times over the past 7 years. Oak Park is the most corrupt village in Illinois — ask any attorney because NONE of them will take on Oak Park. The mob is alive an well here and NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON in Oak Park has the guts to stand up and do what is right.”

Ok, first off, ew. Raw. Human. Sewage.

Secondly, I think we all know that this wasn’t written by a Realtor. This was written by someone plenty het up and ready to vent a spleen or five.

So my Google fingers also led me to this story from 2011 in the Patch about the home in the listing, where the complaints by the owner sound an awful lot like the complaints of whoever wrote this listing.

In it, the homeowner, Sherri Lasko says she bought the home in 2001, but in 2011 discovered that an underground sewer pipe that she shares with a neighboring building empties into her home’s exterior catch basin.

“Flushed waste accumulates in the basin, then rises until it meets another pipe, which Lasko said leads to her basement,” the story written by Casey Cora explained. Lasko asked the village to step in and force the landlord of that neighboring property to make a change so the raw sewage (ew) wouldn’t sit on her property, but instead the village said it was up to code.

Then she threatened to cap off the neighbor’s sewer pipe, which would potentially force any build-up back into the other building.

“That property is owned by Jack Strand, a longtime local real estate businessman and the director of the Downtown Oak Park business group’s board of directors,” the story said. “The building used to be Strand’s office but is now rented to a tuxedo rental shop. Strand did not return calls seeking comment for this story.”

Yes, that’s probably the Jack Strand mentioned in the listing.

Anywho, Lasko ultimately decided against capping the line because a plumber explained that the backup could also go into her house, which is not something I’m guessing she thought would be cool.

Anyway, the village said at the time that it doesn’t get involved in spats between neighbors.

In 2014, a story on the Better Government Association website revealed that Strand had sued Lasko after she had work done (she got a permit from the city to cap off the line), “because the cement that filled the pipe blocked his access to the main sewer line – meaning he then was at risk of a sewer back-up in his building.”

A little bit more digging revealed that four years later, in 2015, Lasko still hadn’t found resolution for the issue, and had started an online petition.

“I wish I could tell you that even one person in Oak Park took this seriously and was committed to an honest evaluation of my situation,” Lasko said in the petition. “The truth is, things have gotten much worse. My neighbor leased his property to a nail salon business and they are poised to open any day.”

“I have been appealing to the Village — not only to enforce existing plumbing and health code to protect my home and family, but even to enforce multiple zoning codes which are being brazenly violated by my neighbor and his tenant,” she continued. “These too have compounded the situation and devalued this property to the point where even if the sewers were separated, my home would not be worth anything more than the property value.”

In 2016, it appears that Lasko filed for bankruptcy in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Northern District of Illinois, according to a query I ran on Pacer.gov. Documents from that query had Lasko’s name, and the address of the Oak Park home listed in numerous stories and in the Zillow listing. Curiously, Strand was also listed as a creditor.

The Zillow listing indicates the home is a foreclosure, which is consistent with the documents found in the bankruptcy filing.

It’s unknown what exactly is going on with this house now, other than this listing that was first put up 6,255 days (according to Zillow) ago. If you’re doing the math, 6,255 divided by 365 is something like 17 years, which is a helluva long time for a rant to be dangling out there.

I feel for this lady, who clearly was frustrated at every turn by what seems to be a giant clustercuss.

But I also had to chuckle a bit at the listing, because after all that talk of how bad the Village of Oak Park was, and how corrupt things were, and how much there was raw sewage, there’s this:

“WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THE HOME: Location! Easy walk to: great restaurants, shopping, Green line, Blue line, Metra, 5 min to 290, downtown Oak Park, River Forest & Forest Park/Madison Ave. Zen-like courtyard/garden. Elegant, comfortable, and GREAT for entertaining in or out.”