Word: cha
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...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...
...moment, though, happy endings like this one remain few. "I'm not going to tell you we have it all figured out yet," says CHA boss Peterson, "but we are willing to tweak the system as we move forward...
...good start would be to put some of the $1.6 billion of federal dollars into improving the pool of housing available for voucher families and develop ways to place tenants around the city anonymously so they can avoid the stigma of coming from the projects. The CHA has come quite a long way, but there is still much work to be done, not so much with the poor but in the hearts and minds of their prospective neighbors...