CHA should track every housing code violation, big or small

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First came slums.

That’s what people called the vast swaths of rotted-out housing for Chicago’s poor that, more than a century ago, stirred to action social reformers from Jane Addams to George Pullman. Surely, they said, the city could do better.

Then came public housing, which was better. In government-owned housing, such as the high-rises of Cabrini-Green, the heat kicked on faithfully when the weather grew cold. But public housing concentrated and segregated the urban poor, in part by racist design, magnifying pathologies of poverty and limiting opportunities. Children didn’t just grow up in Cabrini-Green; they were said to have “survived.”

Now there is Section 8 housing, which is better still. But as a series of reports in the Sun-Times in recent weeks has made clear, simply giving poor people federal rent vouchers to live where they choose, while a commendable strategy, is falling short of its lofty goals.

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Most of the Chicago Housing Authority’s 44,000 voucher tenants continue to live on the south and west sides where the biggest public housing projects once stood. They continue to lives in places of high crime, deep poverty and inadequate schools. And the CHA’s fast-expanding voucher program has fueled the growth of a private industry — housing for the poor — that is ripe for exploitation.

The CHA’s response, from the outset, has been to steer families eligible for vouchers to houses and apartments all across the city. The CHA offers guidance to clients about where they might live, encouraging them to think outside their comfort zone, and approves higher rents to make more neighborhoods affordable.

While we have criticized the CHA’s excesses in this area — recently pointing out, for example, that the agency gave a single woman $2,500 a month to live in a choice downtown condo — there is no denying Chicago must break down geographic walls between the haves and the have-nots. Every family, regardless of income, deserves a safe and decent place to live.

A responsible affordable housing program, that is to say, is about more than putting roofs over people’s heads. As former Mayor Richard M. Daley once said, defending the CHA voucher program: “I said we’re going to rebuild their souls. Not give them an apartment, not give them a home, but you rebuild their souls.”

Since 2,000, according to a joint investigation by the Sun-Times and the Better Government Association, the number of people living in buildings owned by the CHA has plummeted by 40 percent, while the number of people living in privately owned apartments and houses with help from CHA vouchers has increased by 40 percent.

Four of every 10 voucher tenants live in buildings that have had at least one code violation in the past ten years, including violations for no heat, rats and structural problems. The CHA receives an average of 570 complaints a month from its voucher holders.

The Chicago Department of Buildings, at least in those cases cited in the Sun-Times report, appears to act on the complaints it receives. Repairs are made or legal action is taken. But the Building Department notifies the CHA of a code violation only when it is so serious that tenants must be evacuated, which is obviously not notification enough.

The CHA — and its contracted private managers —should be alerted by the city to every code violation, regardless of how minor. In this digital era, there is no reason that can’t be done. How else can the CHA best track bad landlords?

A Sun-Times and BGA report on Sunday described a small gold rush of investors looking to strike it rich in Chicago’s fast-growing housing market for voucher-holders. Private landlords are being paid $560 million a year for voucher households. They are putting new money into old neighborhoods. They are buying up buildings by the dozens, sometimes by the block.

The challenge for the CHA is to reward the best landlords and ice out the slumlords. The challenge is to make subsidized housing a reality throughout the city, not just in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods.

The CHA, as Daley said, really is in the business of saving souls.

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