To improve the safety for its disabled, senior and family residents, the Chicago Housing Authority three years ago started paying $12 million annually to the Chicago Police Department (CPD) for “supplemental police services.” These services were to include foot patrols of CHA family developments and senior buildings to control continual drug sales and gang violence.

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 »