Dear Friends:
I invite you to click here to read an article recently posted in Rise Magazine, an excellent publication written for and by adults in the foster care system. The article describes Editor-in-Chief Mary C. Piemonte’s recent coverage of the Chicago Housing Authority’s efforts to change rules for tenants and the leadership transition at the agency.
The Chicago Housing Authority Board of Commissioners Friday appointed one of their own as interim CEO of the agency. Carlos Ponce, 61, was selected by the Commissioners at a special board meeting early in the day. Ponce will serve on a temporary basis, said agency spokesperson Matt Aguillar: “The search is ongoing for a permanent CEO.”
Carlos Ponce. Photo courtesy of CHA.
Ponce was added to the CHA Board in 2003 by then-Mayor Richard Daley. He currently runs a management consulting firm called Resonance Management and Technology Solutions. Ponce previously was the chief human resources officer for the Chicago Public Schools, commissioner of the City of Chicago’s Department of General Services and executive director of the Hispanic American Construction Industry Association.
Ponce replaces Lewis Jordan, who resigned June 14 after being snared in a media investigation that found he used his CHA credit card to charge meals at Gold Coast restaurants and pay for items such as red light tickets. Jordan also had been under fire from public housing tenants and their allies for attempting to install a policy which would have required drug testing of all residents. After Jordan’s resignation, Board Chairman James Reynolds cancelled the effort to install the drug testing policy.
Public housing tenant leaders were pleased with Tuesday’s announcement from the Chicago Housing Authority that it has dropped plans to drug test all residents. CHA Board Chairman James Reynolds abruptly proclaimed that the Board would not try to approve the drug testing policy during the Commissioners public meeting today at the Charles A. Hayes Family Investment Center, 4859 S. Wabash Ave.
“We killed it,” he said.
Officials from the Chicago Housing Authority have been under fire recently for proposing to drug test all tenants. But for over a year, CHA pushed a new policy that would have required tenants to turn over their children’s report cards and other school information as a condition for remaining in public housing. CHA’s proposal was fiercely resisted by the tenants’ representatives and their lawyers, and the CHA eventually backed down.
“This is appalling, and is not, and never has been authorized by Federal statute, or the regulations issued by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD); nor is it contained as an exception in the CHA’s Moving to Work (MTW) Agreement,” declared Robert Whitfield, the attorney for the Central Advisory Council, the elected leaders of CHA tenants, in one of the back and forth emails to CHA General Counsel Scott Ammarell on December 8, 2010, which Residents’ Journal obtained from Whitfield.
Residents’ Journal’s video coverage of the June 1, 2011 public hearing on the Chicago Housing Authority’s plans to drug test all tenants, including seniors and those with disabilities as well as their plans to take away the tenants’ defense provision in their lease, for criminal activity committed by a family member or friend, unbeknown to them.
Low-income people from across the city held two days of protest last week against the Chicago Housing Authority’s plans to drug test of all tenants, including tenants of senior buildings. CHA residents and their allies also were protesting the agency’s efforts to limit tenants’ ability to avoid eviction.
On June 1, angry tenants and their advocates from the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization gathered in front of CHA’s downtown headquarters and said the agency’s proposed changes would violate the US Constitution’s 4th Amendment protecting citizens from unreasonable search and seizure.
Residents’ Journal’s video coverage of tenants and their advocates’, rally outside the headquarters of the Chicago Housing Authority on June 1, 2011, in protest of their plans to drug test all public housing residents, including seniors and those with disabilities.
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 are many issues that lie buried behind the walls of public housing, but this is one that I wanted to shed a little light on. Many residents in the Raymond Hilliard Homes are feeling violated by the very thought of the Chicago Housing Authority and the development’s private management firm, Holsten Realty, wanting them to submit to a drug test in order to renew or receive a lease.
Recently, a few tenants handed me a new draft lease that read, “As a precondition to renewing this lease, landlord requires that all adult members (persons 18 and older) submit a urine sample for an analysis of such sample for non prescribed, prohibited controlled substances, by a qualified laboratory selected by the landlord.” Read more »