Former death-roll inmate Mark Clements and his attorneys are filing a civil suit next Tuesday against the city of Chicago in the aftermath of the guilty verdict of former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge.

Mark Clements consoles the mother of incarcerated allege torture victim Marcus Wiggins, during a rally to jail former Chicago Police chief Jon Burge outside City Hall on May 24. Wiggins was allegedly tortured while in police custody at the age of 13. Photo by Mary C. Johns

“We are currently suing [for] an unspecified amount. We will most likely be filing a civil lawsuit in the federal U.S. District Court this Tuesday,” Clements told Residents’ Journal on June 29, the day after a federal jury found Burge guilty of all three counts of obstruction of justice and perjury for lying in a civil lawsuit about the torture of murder and robbery suspects in his custody in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s.

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The indictment and arrest of former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge on October 21 is yet another indication that a complete transformation of American life is underway. Along with the presidential election, the indictment of Burge, who has long been suspected of torturing and abusing suspects in the 1980s, shows that the way politics have been conducted in this country for the past 30 years is over. Or to put it in other words, a new generation is stepping up, kicking tail and taking names.

Saying that Burge “shamed his uniform and his badge,” Fitzgerald explained that he was charging Burge for lying in court in a 2003 civil case:
“For his lies about torture and abuse, we intend to hold him accountable.”
“Police are sworn to uphold the law when others break it,” Fitzgerald added. “Burge broke the law when he was supposed to uphold it.”
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Residents of public housing are constantly being told by the Chicago Housing Authority and its private housing contractors to properly manage their personal affairs in order to be lease compliant under their $1.6 billion Plan for Transformation. But is the CHA properly managing its own state of affairs?

Mismanaged CHA Contractor under Federal Indictment
On June 15, 2005, a federal grand jury indicted three employees of CHA property manager William Moorehead and Associates, including William Moorehead himself, for “allegedly fraudulently” taking nearly $1 million housing funds appropriated for “more than a dozen U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development subsidized properties, including housing units operated by the CHA between 1994 and 2002,” according to U.S. Department of Justice documents.
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Many of the residents in the Cabrini-Green public housing development are up in arms after receiving a 180-day notice from Chicago Housing Authority to vacate their buildings.

Residents in Cabrini feel that the CHA notices have been served out like pieces of cake, as if it’s something good for the low-income residents.

“The reason we served those 180 day notices is because those buildings are in the worst shape and are unsafe to live in,” Derek Hill, a CHA spokes-person said.
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Bill Wilen thinks he’s found a “smoking gun” in his current legal battle with the Chicago Housing Authority.

Wilen, an attorney with the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law who has been an advocate for residents for decades, recently received a package of documents related to the ongoing redevelopment of the Henry Horner Homes on the Near West Side. Among those documents was one that appeared strange.

The paper in question has a header that indicates it is the goals for the “Supportive Services for CHA Horner/West Haven Residents.” To translate from CHA terminology, Supportive Services, also known as “Service Connectors,” refers specifically to those private contractors whose job it is to connect residents with programs including jobs training and drug treatment.
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Former and current public housing residents who claimed to be “involuntarily displaced and segregated” filed suit against the Chicago Housing Authority on Jan 23, 2003. The lawsuit alleges that CHA “failed to provide adequate relocation assistance and effective social services to families displaced by public housing demolition,” in violation of federal law and CHA’s contractual agreements with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and with CHA resident leaders.

After previous interactions with residents who were displaced by the CHA, and after communications with current residents who participated in their housing research, attorneys of the National Center on Poverty Law, the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and Business and Professional People for the Public Interest came together to stop the public housing agency from displacing other families in the future. Read more »

I don’t know about you, but I feel as if I’m looking down the barrel of a loaded summer. In addition to the usual challenges that we face as public housing residents, it is apparent this summer, more than ever before, that we face a new challenge: the redevelopment of public housing.

This redevelopment process started over eight years ago under then-CHA Chairman Vincent Lane, with a federal program titled Hope VI, suggesting the arrival of hope for the hopeless residents of public housing. Today, the process has simply become the redevelopment of public housing and is moving at a much faster pace, offering little hope for too few residents.
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There has been a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles contesting the constitutionality of the One Strike clause. President Bill Clinton signed the Housing Opportunities Extension Act March 28, 1996. It mandated that all federally-subsidized housing enforce a zero tolerance on criminal activity. This means that there does not have to be a conviction in order to start the proceedings for eviction. It also means that public housing authorities now must enforce tougher screening criteria that will ensure that new move-ins to public housing have no criminal background.

All public housing residents are subject to the “One Strike and You’re Out” clause that is part of all new leases. Residents who continue to occupy public housing as well as new move-ins are all required to abide by the new ruling. Read more »

From a recent interview with Joseph Shuldiner, executive director of the Chicago Housing Authority:

Question: Mr. Shuldiner, Why has CHA excluded Latinos from the agency?

Answer: Of course when you look at the upper management I think you’re wrong since [the takeover] we had Ana Vargas, who has since left [as Deputy Executive Director of Finance and Administration], Andy Rodriguez, who is the head of Redevelopment, and Raphael Leon, who is president of Chicago Housing Metropolitan Corporation. So when 8 upper management people met, 3 of them were Latinos, which is a much higher percentage than the Hispanic population in public housing in Chicago. So you know I think the issue of service of course is a different one. I think the core of Latinos and combinations of these people have not been reached-out to and not been served by public housing. So this wrong over the years has made them very low users of public housing.

As you know, there is a lawsuit about that by Latinos United. And we basically, as a result of the lawsuit, are working with a variety of Latino groups to do more outreach.

With all the stuff we send to the residents, we now translate it into Spanish for residents. I know there is a lot of things to be done but I think we are trying to reach out.

I can’t speak about the board that was used before the executive advisory committee, which includes a Latino. We also have to work to see more improvement and success in the Section 8 program. And I think that is also more by desire since I think Latinos are more interested in Section 8 than public housing itself.

Question: Does this have something to do with the Latinos United suing the CHA?

Answer: Well, the suit was already here when we got here. So we never had the chance to show what we would have done without the lawsuit.

Question: I know that you have 104,000 applications back. You guys did a wonderful job with so many applications how many have you sent out by now?

Answer: 104,000 applications were submitted [for the re-opening of the Section 8 waiting list] and 82,000 were found to be complete. And the computer randomly selected 35,000. So only 35,000 of those families are on the waiting list. The rest are not and at this time the first 1,000 are being notified to come in.

I don’t know exactly how many can participate later or a couple of months from now. But we now understand that apart from that there is now a separated remedial waiting list for Latinos. So some of the Latino organizations are doing a separate outreach to Latino communities and the Latinos that potentially were excluded from applying in the past. That list is open until the end of the year. That’s a fair window of 6 months that goes until the end of the year. So for Latino families that meet certain criteria, they can continue to apply and be part of a remedial list.

Question: Do you think that scattered sites and Section 8 should have their own board?

Answer: Section 8 do in some sense because generally the C.H.A.C. is their own organization, so we don’t try to tell them how to do it. In the [Northeast scattered sites] their presidents are not just actually presidents of their development, they are presidents of the Lathrop area. So if you are president of Lathrop, that also includes scattered sites of that area, and to me if the C.A.C decided they wanted representation separately, that’s exactly what they can do.

Some changes are a little more difficult [such as Section 8] because the people are nowhere near each other. They don’t necessarily have a lot in common; they have different housing. You know [Section 8] is not owned by us. It will be of much greater difficulty to organize CHA scattered sites or Section 8 residents because they’re all over the place. Sometimes you go to a development and there is a development so you say “Let’s have an election.” There are 17,000 families all over Chicago [in Section 8]. If someone wanted to organize them, they could have their own organization.

There are other organizations that include both. The New Jersey state organization basically exists for public assisted housing but they also actually represent people in Section 8. The issue again is how you outreach to people, because they’re not conveniently located in developments. It’s not like you go to Taylor and you have 3,500 families. You go to this block and you don’t even know who the Section 8 people are and its not clear to me how much of this information we are supposed to make public. What we have to do is we have to send notices to the residents saying here is the person who wants to organize and the tenant has to make contact with them. We will not normally give the name and the addresses within the program because of privacy issues.

Carlos DeJesus’s agency, Latinos United, sued the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). This lawsuit came about because these two government agencies were not including the Latino community in their programs. The lawsuit resulted in a consent decree in 1996 after a 13-year effort.

Today, Latino families represent 27 percent of the Chicago population who are eligible for public housing yet they are only 2 percent of the current public housing population.

“In reality, what we want is for these agencies to open their doors to the Latino community as well as their programs and for them to eliminate the language barriers,” said DeJesus. Read more »