For the last 4 years, a former resident of Robert Taylor Homes, Mary Sistruck, a young single mother of six, has been moved around from slum to slum after receiving a Housing Choice Voucher  formerly known as a Section 8.

I wrote about her in Residents’ Journal’s February 2001 edition. Sistruck once lived in the “Hole,” a notorious cluster of buildings that once towered over the State Street Corridor at 53rd Street. Sistruck described herself as “moving around like cattle” since she received the Housing Choice Voucher. Her children have attended six different schools since her first move. Read more »

Under threat of being forced to leave their homes, residents in Stateway Gardens and Rockwell Gardens are fighting the City of Chicago’s efforts to condemn their buildings.

Residents of Stateway Gardens recently won their effort to stop the vacate order for two buildings in that South Side community.

There are many buildings in CHA developments which are in need of immediate and serious repairs, so much so that the City of Chicago recently filed building code violation suits against buildings in several developments in circuit court and won. The city complained that some of the residential housing units were in such a horrendous state of repairs that the residents’ health, welfare and safety were in danger. The city cases were based upon the official building inspection reports that were submitted by the inspectors of the city Building Department. Read more »

The CHAC Inc.’s Section 8 Housing Program is a rental assistance program which allows income-eligible households to rent housing on the private market.

The Section 8 program has given residents inside and outside of CHA a chance to move into more peaceful and cleaner surroundings. The only initiatives are bringing in documents and finding your own apartment. Some residents have found their dream apartment while others have come face to face with a living nightmare.

For instance, four properties on the North Side were terminated from the Section 8 program as of July 13. That’s $618,000 per year in federal funds that was issued to the slumlords for years but finally stopped by CHA and HUD. People were living in deplorable conditions.

CHAC Inc., the private company that manages the Section 8 program for CHA, stopped approving new Section 8 leases for those properties in February 1997, after a number of failed inspections. CHAC’s reports indicated serious code violations at the buildings, not to mention police calls surrounding gang and drug activity, roach and vermin infestation, broken appliances and fixtures and failed emergency items such as exposed wiring, gas and wire leaks.

Despite their warnings, when CHAC returned for follow-up inspections, they found little change.

Ald. Patrick O’Connor (40), in whose ward contains some of the properties, said at a July 8th press conference, “Let’s not allow bad landlords to continue to have good tenants to live in squalor. We will build places for people to live in but we should not allow people to live in squalor.”

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