Word: cha
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Razing the projects and dispersing the poor is better for everybody, claim Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) officials, who have grandly named their program the Plan for Transformation. Even as the 40-year-old towers fall and the wrecking ball does its work, private developers are moving in and have started to revitalize the site with supermarkets, coffee shops, video stores and town houses. And who could argue with the proposition that children lifted out of dangerous projects and placed in racially and economically diverse neighborhoods are better off when the people they pass on their block are M.B.A.s and Ph.D.s...
...while the CHA can point to some success stories, the Cabrini-Green exodus has not played out as smoothly as many of the former tenants had hoped, leaving them in conditions hardly better than those they left. For the relocations have come amid the worst affordable-housing crunch in recent memory. During the economic boom of the 1990s, as middle-class buyers purchased condominiums at a record pace, Chicago lost about 52,000 rental units. As more properties were converted to private ownership, the rates for remaining rentals climbed, pricing out people at the lower end of the market...
...worse. Already 48,000 families are on the waiting list for public housing, and 38,000 more are wait-listed to receive subsidized rent payments known as Housing Choice vouchers. Over the next few years an additional 4,000 voucher-bearing families are expected to hit the market. The CHA's rapid rate of demolition is worsening the problem; so far 7,300 units have been demolished, but only 699 have been built, forcing tenants in and out of temporary housing as they vie for permanent shelter in a desperate game of musical chairs. At Cabrini a total...
...impossible to integrate poor families into economically diverse parts of the city. On the city's South Shore, which is undergoing an economic rebound, some neighborhoods are organizing against a possible influx of the poor, who they fear will lower property values. Nearly 80% of families relocated by the CHA in the past three years wound up in neighborhoods that are almost entirely black, with household incomes averaging $15,000 or less a year. Berryman says she would prefer not to move into a mixed-income neighborhood. "The first time something goes wrong in the neighborhood, I know they...
Sharonda Harper is one of the CHA's success stories. After leaving Cabrini in 1996 and shuttling through two shabby apartments on the city's gritty South Side, Harper, 26, received a phone call from the CHA inviting her to attend a housing meeting. (Not every relocated tenant is so lucky; Harper's aunt happens to work for the CHA.) She put her name in a lottery, passed a drug test and now sits in a clean three-bedroom apartment in a new cluster of town houses within sight of the remaining condemned Cabrini towers. When the town houses...