Illinois lawmakers and the media have spent a lot of time this year considering how taxpayers can help wealthy spectators watch even wealthier football players botch games at Soldier Field eight Sundays a year. Meanwhile the Chicago Housing Authority is proceeding with a much less scrutinized “transformation plan,” under which it will spend more than $1 billion to turn 38,000 public-housing apartments into 25,000. To do this, the agency will move residents into rent-subsidized apartments in the private market and then back into renovated CHA properties in mixed-income neighborhoods.
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At the same time the CHA is fundamentally reinventing itself–by hiring contractors to do almost everything it used to do. “In the past,” states the transformation plan, “the CHA was primarily an owner and manager of public housing. In the future, the CHA will be a facilitator of housing opportunities. It will oversee a range of housing investments and subsidy vehicles. Where appropriate, it will own housing, but it will just as likely provide financial assistance to other private and nonprofit development organizations to expand housing opportunities.” (The plan is on-line at www.thecha.org.) Already the CHA no longer manages any of its buildings–they’ve all been under private or resident management since midyear. As board member Andrew Mooney put it at a November 16 meeting, “We’re getting CHA out of the business of providing direct services and putting them in the hands of those who have expertise.” Still, the same agency that couldn’t manage its properties well must now ensure that its hired guns do so.
But we may have trouble learning whether they do. Demolishing the public housing high-rises is so popular among nonresidents that they assume the notorious problems in the high-rises can be made to vanish as easily as the bricks and mortar. Other than federal Housing and Urban Development bureaucrats and CHA residents, few people are paying attention to how well the latest promises are being–or can be–kept. In the first of a series of “fact sheets,” issued in October, the Metropolitan Planning Council’s housing director, Robin Snyderman, and housing associate, Steven Dailey II, list several concerns with the transformation plan. Theirs is a friendly critique–MPC supports the plan–and is therefore all the more revealing. In digest form, here are they four things they worry about (the full list is at www.metroplanning.org):
If the transformation plan works, the CHA will preside over a collection of integrated mixed-income communities in which poor people have a reasonable chance to better themselves and their children. If not, the agency will have demolished the high-rises–the “second ghetto” of Arnold Hirsch’s classic history–only to replace them with an equally discriminatory but less visible third ghetto.
