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The CHA Plan Is Dead

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Janice Patton gave up on the Plan for Transformation a long time ago. Patton moved out of Robert Taylor Homes in 2000, the same year Mayor Richard M. Daley announced the Plan. The mayor promised that residents who moved out temporarily could return shortly, after the high-rises were demolished and replaced with new, ‘mixed-income’ communities. Patton didn’t go too far from Robert Taylor, settling in the neighborhood just south of where the development stood. Like most of those who moved out, she used a Section 8 certificate – now known as Housing Choice Voucher – to subsidize her rent in a relatively well-managed, new construction development. Unlike many of her former neighbors, Patton never expected to come back.

“I left it and kept on going,” she explained. “I thought, ‘Let me get into a good building so I don’t have to move from place to place.’”
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There’s H.O.P.E. for Gary Residents

by  Assistant Editor

RJ recently learned about a $19 million H.O.P.E. VI grant our neighbors to the south at the Gary Indiana Housing Authority received from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1999. The housing authority is using the grant to replace the Duneland Village public housing development with a new mixed income community.

So one day in late January, we drove over the slushy, potholed streets of Chicago to Gary, in hot pursuit of a story about housing being built that might be beneficial to the poor.
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Renaissance 2010: Sweeping Changes

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Ask people in low-income communities if they have heard of Renaissance 2010 and the majority would likely say they have. Ask them if they know what Renaissance 2010 is and chances are they would say they don’t. Ask if they know schools on the South and West Sides of Chicago have been closing and reopening as “small schools,” and they would most likely answer a definite “Yes.”

That, in essence, is Renaissance 2010: the closing and reopening of both grammar and high schools as “small schools” – schools within a school. The goal, according to Chicago Public Schools, is to reinvent the Chicago Public School system by the year 2010. The policy was made official at the Board of Education’s September 23 meeting according to CPS spokesperson Sandy Rodriguez, despite ongoing protests by community advocates.
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Bronzeville Community Alert

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On April 30th, several prominent people met at the Renaissance Apartments at 37th Street and Wabash Avenue to alert the public about gentrification and the Chicago Housing Authority redevelopment in the historic Bronzeville community.

At the slightly attended meeting, people spoke on behalf of their businesses, churches and homeowner associations, discussing housing for poor and low-to-moderate income level residents, crime, and the rising cost of property taxes for their homes.
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Oops, They Did It Again

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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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Report: Residents Steered to Poor Areas

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A new report finds that the Chicago Housing Authority is not making promised improvements to its “Plan for Transformation,” the ongoing, massive effort to redevelop virtually all of the city’s public housing stock.

Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociologist at Columbia University and a board member of We The People Media, discovered that the agency has largely failed to stop the flow of residents into other low-income, African American neighborhoods. In a new top-to-bottom review of the third year of the Plan for Transformation, Venkatesh found CHA has not kept its promise to care for those individuals and families who were living off the lease, the so-called squatters.
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The Shocking Truth about CHA

by  Assistant Editor

Residents in the Robert Taylor Homes are being judged as non-lease compliant due to their electric utility bills and may lose their right to return to public housing units in the new mixed-income communities which are planned to replace the current developments. CHA’s relocation contract with its residents stipulates that if a resident is not current or on a payment plan concerning their utilities, they will not receive replacement housing, a Housing Choice Voucher or have the right to return to public housing.

But the shocking truth is that CHA may itself be responsible for making many residents non-lease compliant. Back in 1998, CHA dropped the ball when it came to registering buildings in Robert Taylor Homes for electric utility service, according to an RJ investigation. Read more »

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Report Criticizes CHA Relocations

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All is apparently not well on the home front for many public housing residents who are undergoing the Chicago Housing Authority’s massive $1.6 billion plan to turn its public housing properties into mixed-income communities.

A recent independent study of the housing plan by a renowned attorney, hired by the public housing agency to do the study, discovered that some residents did not have enough time and/or opportunity to secure units in the private market using Housing Choice Vouchers, while others moved into rehabilitated units within CHA that were “substandard and decrepit.” Read more »

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National Housing Crisis

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Residents of the Chicago Housing Authority are not alone in their efforts to find housing. Recent reports by housing advocacy groups and news outlets across the United States show there is a severe shortage of housing for working and non-working, low-to-moderate-income people, including those with disabilities and HIV/AIDS. The reports find bad news for all of those who are affected by the nation’s housing crisis. But many of the groups also offer strategies that can help house Chicagoans and others who need a place to live.
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Relocation Rights Contract

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The Chicago Housing Authority announced in June that they would meet with former residents who didn’t receive the contract, which gives them the right to return to their old neighborhoods. A number of residents who moved between October 1999 and March 2001 did not receive the Relocation Rights Contract, which gives them the option of returning to a mixed-income community after they are built on the site of old developments.

Under the CHA Resident Relocation Rights contract, all residents who were lease compliant in October 1999 have a right to return to a new or rehabbed unit after redevelopment. Residents who relocated with Housing Choice Vouchers (formerly known as a Section 8 voucher or certificate) in late 1999, 2000 and early 2001 did not receive a Relocation Rights Contract because the contract was not put into effect until March 2001. Read more »

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