Editorial: CHA tears down walls but has long way to go

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Let’s begin by remembering how bad things were. Only then can we appreciate how much has — and has not — changed.

Less than 20 years ago, Chicago stacked up poor people like cordwood. Massive high-rise housing projects like Cabrini Green and the Taylor Homes were socially limiting and unsafe for the people who lived there, their dreams deferred. Chicago’s high-rise ghettos were the shame of the city, perpetuating and increasing racial and economic segregation. The Taylor Homes alone, which included 28 high-rises, once included half a dozen of the poorest census tracts in the entire country.

Beginning in 1999, under Mayor Richard M. Daley, the city launched a bold plan to tear down those high-rise projects and replace them with two better alternatives: Mixed-income housing to minimize the social pathologies of poverty, and rent vouchers to allow low income families to live wherever they could find an apartment or a house for the price. It was a noble plan, though skeptics said it was just a scheme to clear out the poor to make way for the wealthy. Critics predicted there would be great resistance, along class and racial lines, to voucher-holders moving into many city neighborhoods and suburbs.

How has it all turned out? Most of the giant housing projects have been torn down, which we’d call progress, but far from enough replacement housing has been built, especially of the strongly mixed-income kind. And while most suburbs have more subsidized-housing households today, people with rent vouchers are heavily concentrated in certain city neighborhoods and suburbs, which is not progress.

The clear message of these findings, as laid out in Sunday’s Sun-Times and in earlier installments of the paper’s “Beyond the Rubble” series, is that the Chicago Housing Authority must do a better job of establishing mixed-income housing all over the city, not just in poor or heavily minority neighborhoods. The CHA, as the agency’s leadership knows, must also approach its job more like a private-sector real estate agent, selling voucher holders — its customers — on the advantages of leaving their comfort zone and moving pretty much anywhere for better schools, less crime, good public transportation and the like.

If not, the ultimate goal of the CHA’s “Plan for Transformation,” which is to help people build better lives, won’t be sufficiently achieved. Destructively high concentrations of poverty will persist, to the detriment of the people the CHA aims to serve and to many Chicago neighborhoods.

According to the Sunday story, by reporters for the Sun-Times and the Better Government Association, a lopsided number of former CHA tenants who now receive rent vouchers have ended up in the same West Side and South Side neighborhoods, places with an abundance of rental properties and growing poverty. Most of the former tenants using vouchers live in just 10 neighborhoods, whether those neighborhoods are up for it or not.

The neighborhood of South Shore, for example, simply doesn’t have enough social services and other resources to handle the 972 new voucher-holders who have moved in since 2000, Ald. Leslie Hairston (5th) told the Sun-Times. She wonders how much real effort the CHA is putting into steering clients to all Chicago neighborhoods.

“I doubt that everybody who was in a housing project woke up one day, stretched their arms and said, ‘I want to move to South Shore,’” Hairston said. “To take people from one area to another is not a transformation.”

In a recent meeting with the Sun-Times Editorial Board, CHA officials said they are working to develop more mixed-income housing, with a particular focus on neighborhoods where there is little or none now. When we asked if these are “segregated areas” — mostly white and mostly not poor — CEO Eugene Jones, Jr., said he prefers to think of them as “opportunity areas.”

The agency’s job, Jones emphasized, is to provide good and safe affordable housing. If in doing so, Chicago’s notoriously high degree of racial segregation is reduced, he said, “that’s great,” but it is not the CHA’s mission.

So goes the CHA’s two-fold challenge: Develop more affordable housing, all over town, and encourage former tenants and voucher holders to think of the entire city as their city. Affordable apartments and houses are not limited to just the South and West Sides.

The CHA, has torn down walls, but its promised “transformation” has far to go.

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