Dear Friends :

We The People Media is asking people to fill out an on-line survey we developed with the Local Advisory Council resident leaders. Anyone that fills it out gets the chance to win a laptop computer or a gift card!

The survey is geared toward current CHA residents as well as former residents, but we’re looking for everybody’s opinion. Feel free to copy the link and send it out to others:

http://www.surveymethods.com/EndUser.aspx?9BBFD3CA9ADCCBCE90

 

Tenants of public housing have said throughout the Plan for Transformation that they see very little police activity in their areas, except during drug raids.

In decades past, police officers used to walk the beat, but they are little seen these days, and the public housing tenants living in CHA developments and in areas where they relocated wonder where “Officer Friendly” is, especially in light of the fact that the Chicago Housing Authority has been paying the Chicago Police Department millions of dollars annually to provide foot and car patrols.
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This week, I was honored to appear on “Chicago Newsroom,” hosted by veteran broadcaster Ken Davis, along with fellow guests Art Golab, Database Editor with the Chicago Sun-Times, and Charlie Meyerson, a regular voice on Chicago radio. We discussed the progress of new Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the ouster of Chicago Housing Authority CEO Lewis Jordan, the future of the Taste of Chicago and other issues.

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.

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On April 14, Chicago Housing Authority CEO Lewis Jordan announced the results of an “exhaustive tracking process and data analysis” that looked at where its former residents are and how they are doing.

In releasing the information, Jordan said he was aiming to correct misimpressions of agency’s progress on its 12-year-old Plan for Transformation.

“There’s a myth out there that we don’t know where our families are,” Jordan said. “We do know where these families are.”

When the CHA’s Plan for Transformation was launched in 1999, the agency pledged to demolish its high-rises, re-build mixed-income communities where the developments once stood, and allow former residents to move back. To ensure former tenants could return, CHA also pledged to keep track of them. There were approximately 25,000 residents in the family developments, scattered site housing, and senior buildings when the Plan for Transformation began, according to the CHA.

But if Jordan’s press conference was intended to dispel the notion that CHA doesn’t know where its former families are, his own numbers didn’t quite back him up. On page 3 of CHA’ report, it states that “(2,202) have not responded to CHA outreach and thus their location is unknown.”

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Tjuanne Pitchford, 36, one of the last of the two remaining families at the historical Cabrini–Green public housing site, packed his and his brother’s belongings and moved out of the last high rise building on December 7, 2010.

He is temporarily moving into the Francis Cabrini Rowhouses nearby, waiting for his Section 8 Housing Voucher to come through.

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Drawing closer to the end of an era, only one occupied high-rise building remains at the former Cabrini-Green public housing complex, located on the North Side of the city.

This past September, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) closed the last of the two Cabrini mid-rises, known as the Cabrini Extensions, and relocated all the remaining families.

CHA has promised that the departing families can have an option to return once the property is redeveloped under their massive Transformation Plan.

That same month, the 39 families living at the remaining 1230 N. Burling Street high-building—which, at its peak, held 134 families­­— had received their notices of CHA’s intention to close the high-rise as the end of Cabrini-Green draws closer.

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Click on the image to view the third episode of this season’s “RJ TV,” on August 2, 2010.

Watch Residents’ Journal Youth Project Director Quintana Woodridge’s discussion with RJ young adult reporter Jasmine Hunt about participation in the Chicago Youth Voices Network’s “Nuf SAID” project, where Hunt and other youth reporters surveyed their peers across the city of Chicago in March 2010, about issues of education, crime, violence, health and the environment, housing and homelessness, jobs and employment issues.

The two RJ reporters also discussed Hunt’s scheduled interview with 3rd Ward Ald. Pat Dowell regarding pollution, an upcoming article on school violence by another youth reporter, and they also discussed a “Youth Truth” video produced by the Nuf SAID group in July 2010.

Click on the image to view the second episode of this season’s “RJ TV,” on July 19, 2010.

Watch Residents’ Journal Youth Project Director Quintana Woodridge report the statistics, results, and plans of recent surveys our youth reporters and others in the Chicago Youth Voices Network’s “Nuf-SAID” project done in March 2010, on Chicago low-income area youth perspectives regarding crime, violence, education, health and the environment, housing and homelessness, jobs and employment issues.

Robert Taylor Homes still exists – on the Internet.

The last building in the Robert Taylor public housing development was demolished in 2006.

Just a few dozen replacement units have been built, and most of the hundreds of thousands of people who lived in Robert Taylor’s high-rises over the decades have scattered all over the globe.

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