MISSION ACCOMPLISHED?
Years late and with big gaps, Chicago Housing Authority nears end of housing ‘ transformation’
Public housing residents deserved better. That’s what Mayor Richard M. Daley said in 1999 when he launched what was touted as “the largest, most ambitious redevelopment of public housing in the United States.”
The Chicago Housing Authority’s massive “Plan for Transformation” would tear down Cabrini- Green, the Robert Taylor Homes and other high- rise housing projects that had deteriorated into what officials acknowledged was “some of the worst housing in America.”
The CHA would replace that housing by building new, mixedincome developments. At the same time, it would also fix up some of its low- rise and senior buildings and issue more Section 8 “housingchoice” vouchers, which provide poor people with subsidies to help them rent privately owned apartments or houses.
Now, 18 years after Daley proclaimed that lives would be transformed along with housing, the CHA is ready to declare victory. By the end of this year, the Plan for Transformation will be completed, the head of the city agency says. That’s
when he says its central promise — to rehabilitate or rebuild 25,000 apartments — will be fulfilled.
“At the end of 2017, we’ll reach that count,” says Eugene Jones Jr., appointed interim chief executive officer of the CHA by Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2015 and given the permanent job last year.
But there are plenty of doubters that the Plan for Transformation actually will be completed by then — among them CHA residents, aldermen, even officials with the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, which funds the city agency and pays for the housing vouchers. In particular, federal officials point out that the CHA still has to follow through on HUD- funded plans to rebuild the sites of former high- rises.
“There’s just a lot going on in Chicago, whether they get there this year or not,” says Brian Sullivan, a HUD spokesman. “The prevailing sense here is that they won’t. But we’re following developments very closely. And we’re encouraged by the direction and the commitment we’re feeling from senior leadership at CHA that we may not have been getting years ago.”
Even if the CHA does what Jones says, the completion of the Plan for Transformation will have come eight years past the original target date.
It will have taken nearly twice as long altogether as it was supposed to.
And the results will differ in key ways from what was promised, a Chicago Sun- Times examination has found, particularly regarding the amount of housing for families.
Initially, the CHA committed to replacing or rehabilitating more than 15,000 apartments for families. Seniors lived in the other 9,500 units, all of which would be rehabbed.
By the time the CHA declares it has met its commitment, 11,000 of the 25,000 apartments will be set aside for families, agency records show — nearly one- third fewer than what was promised.
That loss is in addition to 13,000 other apartments the CHA tore down and didn’t intend to replace.
Altogether, that would leave the agency with at least 17,000 fewer apartments for families than it had 20 years earlier, though that number could end up being even larger. The CHA has yet to identify more than 800 of the 1,600 apartments it says it will deliver this year, agency records show.
In the years since Daley made his promise, the CHA has asked to be freed from some of the rules it operates under, as well as to be given extra time to fulfill its promises. And HUD has allowed that.
As a result, Chicago officials have been allowed to include a range of different types of housing in what they count toward reaching their goal. That’s changed the math in those original promises, the Sun- Times found:
By the end of this year, about 42 percent of CHA units will be in family, mixed- income or scatteredsite properties. The original plan called for that number to be about 62 percent.
About 39 percent of the apartments will be set aside for seniors — up slightly from the 38 percent that was envisioned.
Another 15 percent will come through “project- based” vouchers, in which apartments in privately owned buildings are reserved for those given government rent subsidies. Those weren’t counted as replacement units in the original plan.
About 1 percent of the apartments will be for special needs residents, such as victims of domestic violence — also something not originally envisioned.
The remaining 3 percent of the units haven’t been specified.
Over time, the new math could result in fewer apartments being available for CHA tenants. That’s because most of the project- based apartments aren’t permanently set aside as public housing. Some are reserved for CHA residents for 30 years, records show. Other contracts, though, are for as little as one year.
And some of them, in for- profit buildings, are relatively costly.
Also, the CHA has counted hundreds of apartments toward its Plan for Transformation goal even though they are privately owned, were built or rehabbed before the public housing makeover even began and served low- income
tenants for years before the plan was created.
That includes 14 units in the four- story San Miguel building in Uptown. The property was rehabbed by a social services agency in 1994, and the CHA agreed in 2011 to subsidize those 14 apartments, which account for about 20 percent of the building. The CHA then added those apartments toward its Plan for Transformation tally.
The CHA also is counting 108 apartments at Anchor House in Auburn- Gresham, which has housed some voucher recipients since 1997 — two years before Daley launched the Plan for Transformation.
“If you’re counting these other units that already existed before the plan, it’s a shell game,” says Rod Wilson, executive director of the Lugenia Burns Hope Center, a Bronzeville community organization.
CHA officials say the agency is providing a vital service by preserving apartments that already were serving low- income people. And they argue that project- based vouchers are a creative way to spread affordable housing around the city. Most of the short- term contracts renew automatically, they say.
The CHA clearly has made strides in improving public housing. More than 4,000 families who were living in CHA apartments when the Plan for Transformation was launched are now in new or rehabbed public- housing units. And through partnerships with nonprofit organizations, it has helped build or preserve housing aimed at Hispanic families, veterans and domestic violence victims.
The CHA’s now- demolished projects were notorious in part for being clustered in poor, segregated areas. The new units are sprinkled across more blocks throughout the city. Still, they remain heavily in majority African- American neighborhoods. Six of the 10 neighborhoods that gained the most CHA families since 2000 are largely African-American. Two others are majority Hispanic. Not one is majority white.
More than half of the apartments for public housing families in Chicago are clustered in just seven neighborhoods: Riverdale, the Near West Side, Douglas, the Near South Side, Oakland, Grand Boulevard and West Town. In 2000, though, those same areas accounted for almost two- thirds of CHA families.
Of the city’s 77 designated com- munity areas, 27 have fewer than 10 families in CHA public housing — the same as in 2000.
Emanuel was the vice- chairman of the CHA board when the Plan for Transformation was launched. He lauds Jones’ work, saying: “Under Gene Jones’ leadership, the Chicago Housing Authority has made significant progress moving the plan forward and has pursued partnerships that will strengthen communities throughout Chicago. Development of affordable housing is happening in all areas of the city.”
The mayor credits Jones with “a variety of innovative partnerships with city agencies and the private sector, like co- locating housing and library developments and mixed- income, transitoriented development. At the same time, CHA is investing in its residents through employment placement, services and investment in resident- owned businesses.”
Still, as HUD officials note, the CHA hasn’t come close to completing federally funded plans for many of the sites of the former public housing towers. There are blocks- long stretches of vacant land along South State Street, for example, where thousands once lived in the Robert Taylor Homes, empty fields along Division Street that once were part of CabriniGreen and unused buildings along the north branch of the Chicago River where the Lathrop Homes still await redevelopment.
And the need for subsidized housing hasn’t abated. The CHA says it now has about 40,000 names on its waiting list to receive a housing voucher. That number would be higher if the agency hadn’t put a cap on it and stopped taking names. Jeanette Taylor put her name on that list in 1994. She was a young mother then, with three kids, living in a one- bedroom apartment in Bronzeville and hoping to get a bigger place. After more than a decade, the CHA offered her an apartment. But she says she didn’t take it because her 18- year- old son wouldn’t have been allowed to stay with her — he didn’t meet work requirements even though he’d just graduated from high school.
Now 42, Taylor says it’s as hard as ever to find an affordable place to live. Four kids and her mother still live with her, and she says that her pay as an education organizer for the Kenwood- Oakland Community Organization barely covers her bills, including the $ 1,000- a- month rent for their apartment in Woodlawn.
“I’ve been telling people, if you