Tag Archives: public housing

HUD investigating DuPage County Housing Authority who is also naming a new director

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In an update to a story I noted last year, HUD is conducting an investigation of the DuPage County Housing Authority.

Investigators with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Inspector General are examining the housing authority’s development of Myers Commons, a 91-unit senior housing project in Darien, the sources said.

The investigation comes after the Tribune reported last year that the housing authority’s board and executive director violated federal regulations by allowing a former board member to develop the project. The housing authority also failed to follow federal regulations by not allowing competition to develop the project, the Tribune reported.

The irony here is that this is a black mark for the county and it involves an agency that many conservatives in the county may not even want (or want it to do much).

Additionally, the agency is naming a new director:

In the latest step to improve its standing with HUD, the DuPage Housing Authority will name David Hoicka as its new executive director Thursday, Board Chairman Thomas Good said.

Hoicka has served as chief operating officer for the housing authority in El Paso, Texas, worked as an adviser to the housing ministry in Bahrain, managed the New Orleans housing authority, and worked as branch chief for Hawaii’s Housing and Community Development Corp. He has written three manuals on HUD regulations.

It would be interesting to hear more about why someone who has presided over housing authorities in decent sized cities such as El Paso and New Orleans would want to work in DuPage County. Clearly, there is this issue to clean up but DuPage County could provide some interesting challenges: it is a wealthy county with a growing population of poorer residents and a need for affordable housing. Additionally, the DuPage Housing Authority has a mixed legacy and it is trying to operate within a conservative county that at least in the past has tried to resist such efforts.

More housing vouchers now being used in the suburbs

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A new report from the Brookings Institute suggests that more housing vouchers are now being used in the suburbs. Here is a quick summary of their findings:

This study analyzes the changing location of HCV recipients within the nation’s largest metro areas in the 2000s and finds:

  • Nearly half of all HCV recipients lived in suburban areas in 2008. However, HCV recipients remained less suburbanized than the total population, the poor population, and affordable housing units generally.
  • Black HCV recipients suburbanized fastest over the 2000 to 2008 period, though white HCV recipients were still more suburbanized than their black or Latino counterparts by 2008.  Black HCV recipients’ suburbanization rate increased by nearly 5 percent over this period, while that for Latinos increased by about 1 percent.  The suburbanization rate for white HCV recipients declined slightly.
  • Within metro areas, HCV recipients moved further toward higher-income, jobs-rich suburbs between 2000 and 2008.  However, the poor and affordable housing units shifted more rapidly toward similar kinds of suburbs over that period.  By 2008 about half of suburban HCV recipients still lived in low-income suburbs.
  • Between 2000 and 2008, metro areas in the West and those experiencing large increases in suburban poverty exhibited the biggest shifts in HCV recipients to the suburbs.  Western metro areas like Stockton, Boise, and Phoenix experienced increases of 10 percentage points or more in the suburbanization rate of HCV recipients.

This shouldn’t really be a surprise as more poor people now live in suburbs than big cities. But this could help explain how some of the poor are moving to the suburbs. As the US government has moved away from funding high-rise housing projects to providing housing vouchers, more people have decided to use these in the suburbs where there may be more housing and jobs.

These findings could also bring up some interesting issues regarding how suburban communities and residents feel about the use of housing vouchers in nearby housing. I think it is safe to assume that many suburban residents would not necessarily want to live near poorer residents but the voucher program makes this a bit more anonymous. If people knew that their community was a popular site for the use of housing vouchers, what would they do?

I would also suspect that the use of these vouchers in clustered in less wealthy suburbs, not very spread out throughout the metropolitan region.

“There Are No Children Here” 20 years later

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Alex Kotlowitz’s book There Are No Children Here is a modern classic that describes the life of children within some of the poorest neighborhoods in the United States. Here is a little bit about the book and its aftermath:

“I’ve never thought about it being (a statement) about public housing,” Kotlowitz said while sitting in a cafe Friday near his home. “It could have taken place in any inner-city neighborhood.”…

Public housing now in Chicago is “not perfect, but it’s quite different from when we first started,” Popkin said, citing the transformation at Horner, the CHA’s commitment to resident services and the way that the agency is managed.

But many things remain the same. The poor are still extremely segregated, Kotlowitz said. Deadly violence still defines impoverished communities where rampant shootings are committed by a new generation of so-called cliques…

The brothers [Lafeyette and Pharoah Walton], now 36 and 33, have dealt with their share of adversity. They have both served time in prison and continue to struggle with poverty.

As Sue Popkin suggests, the book helped humanize the problems these children face. It is one thing to have stereotypes and broad ideas about what happens in poorer neighborhoods but another thing to get to know and start rooting for children who live there.

On the whole, it sounds like there is still a lot of work to do regarding public housing, poor neighborhoods, and helping children in these neighborhoods obtain a good education and reach a middle-class lifestyle. Would another, similar book help in this cause? These concerns rarely bubble up to the top of American public discussions.

US government thinking of renting foreclosed homes

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Different people have different opinions about what to do with the glut of foreclosures: perhaps convert them into multi-family units, bulldoze them, or donate them. It appears the federal government might try another route: renting them.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency said Wednesday it is seeking input from investors on how to rent roughly 250,000 homes owned by government-controlled mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration. All of the homes are foreclosures…

Converting the homes into rentals may reduce “credit losses and help stabilize neighborhoods and home values,” said Edward DeMarco, acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie and Freddie.

Homes in foreclosure sell at a 20 percent discount on average, which can hurt prices of surrounding homes.

It also might meet the growing demand for rentals. Since the housing meltdown, nearly 3 million households have become renters. At least 3 million more are expected by 2015, according to census data analyzed by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies and The Associated Press.

This sounds like it could turn into a large program with a lot of moving pieces. Would these homes essentially be converted into temporary public housing?

If done well, this could help deal with a rental problem. Even before the economic crisis, a number of metropolitan areas suffered from issues of affordable housing: there simply were not enough cheaper and good units available. Additionally, there was often a mismatch between where these homes were located and where jobs were located. Could renting these foreclosures be a viable solution?

How many communities would be interested in supporting a program like this? I could imagine some interesting battles within better-off suburbs. On one hand, as the article mentions, foreclosures tend to drag down home values. On the other hand, having the federal government actively involved as a landlord in more neighborhoods would make a lot of people nervous.

“Missionary work” selling new mixed-income neighborhoods in Chicago

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In the 1990s, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Chicago Housing Authority, and the City of Chicago developed plans to tear down the public housing high-rises in Chicago and replace them with new mixed-income neighborhoods that would include units for public housing residents as well as market-rate units. Recently, it has been difficult to sell some of these units and the neighborhoods:

“Every single Plan for Transformation (community) is in exactly the same predicament,” said Ziegenhagen, vice president of operations. “They’re looking at their pro forma and they’re looking at a huge loss. The lenders have been more willing to work things out with these developments because they invested in them knowing they were really community development, and we were all assaulted by the same economic development.”…

Even in the good times, Williams said, buyers in a development like Oakwood Shores, on the site of the former Ida B. Wells housing complex, had to be what he calls “trailblazers.”

Now, those trailblazers aren’t happy because the price cuts of 25 to 35 percent have negated their equity, while their property tax bills have increased. Newer buyers need to be trailblazers who are much better educated about just what it is they are buying into at a Plan for Transformation community, Williams said…

“If you believe in real estate, you just have to believe that you keep building a neighborhood. Otherwise, you’ll continue to have a decline in the values of the existing neighborhood. These transformation sites are hard work,” Williams said. “This is missionary work. I didn’t start out thinking this is missionary work, but that’s what I think I’m doing now.

Some of this is certainly due to a depressed housing market. However, this also sounds like it is part of the growing pains of these new mixed-income neighborhoods: even though the units might be on in desirable locations, particularly at the Cabrini-Green site, some homebuyers might be turned off by the idea of living near public housing residents or being part of a newly-formed neighborhood and having to be “trailblazers.”

It will be interesting to see down the road whether this is just a blip in the development of these neighborhoods which were supposed to be transformational or whether they hint at deeper issues that are exacerbated by this economic crisis. I assume time will help take away some of the stigma of these neighborhoods, particularly their historic connection to notorious public housing projects, but this will still be a process.

Problems at the DuPage Housing Authority

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As part of a story about corruption at the DuPage Housing Authority, the Chicago Tribune provides an update on the recent history of the organization:

But investigators have asked plenty of questions lately about how DuPage housing officials spend the $22 million in federal funds they get annually.

Since 2009, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has audited the DuPage Housing Authority three times, concluding the troubled agency violated numerous federal regulations and must pay back $10.75 million in misused tax money.

HUD has determined DuPage must repay that money to its Section 8 housing program because it didn’t allow competition for projects, failed to properly document whether many tenants were eligible to get subsidized rent, made inappropriate credit card purchases and, in some cases, overpaid benefits.

This is not a whole lot of federal money, particularly in a county with a population over 900,000 and a poverty rate of around 6% (this site has 2009 figures of a poverty rate of 6.5% and the 2008 Census had an estimate of 5.8%). But the DuPage Housing Authority has an interesting history. If I remember correctly from research I have done, the group was formed in the 1940s and had some federal money to work with. But by the early 1970s, the Housing Authority had not built any units within the county and HOPE, an organization now in Wheaton, sued the county for housing discrimination, primarily for exclusionary zoning practices. The court case, Hope v. County of DuPage (the 1983 version here), lasted for over a decade and here is a brief summary of the conclusion in a law textbook.  It is only within recent decades that the Housing Authority has developed units.

This is perhaps not too unusual considering the political conservatism of a county that has been solidly Republican since the the 1860s. But as the lawsuit from the early 1970s alleged, the county has continued to change: more immigrants and minorities have become residents, housing values went up, a number of communities limited construction of apartments, and there are a good number of lower-paying jobs in wealthier communities. Add this all up and there are affordable housing concerns within a wealthy county and this extends beyond the common suburban debate about “work-force” housing for essential government employees like teachers or policemen or providing cheaper housing for young graduates and/or older residents.

Summing up Mayor Daley’s mixed “public housing legacy”

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There wasn’t much talk about public housing before the election earlier this year to replace Mayor Daley in Chicago. (Frankly, there isn’t much talk about this at the federal level either.) But one journalist suggests that Mayor Daley left a “complex public housing legacy” for the new Mayor Emanuel:

Last month, as Richard M. Daley approached retirement, the Chicago Housing Authority released a first-of-its-kind report on residents who were forced to leave the high-rises. It concluded that the changes made life safer, more stable and more hopeful for thousands of families.

But while Daley was praised by some for abandoning the high-rise system, housing advocates say the changes have done little to break the grip of poverty.

“As an urban-development strategy, the transformation is an A. It gets a far poorer grade if it is approached as a strategy to help low-income populations to achieve social and economic stability in their lives,” said Columbia University sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh, who spent 18 months living in Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes as a graduate student in the early 1990s.

Some observers, like author Alex Kotlowitz, fear the disappearance of the high-rises means Chicago’s poverty has passed out of sight and out of mind.

Some of the media talk about public housing in Chicago has been positive: the once notorious high-rises, particularly those at the Robert Taylor Homes on the south side and the Cabrini-Green complex on the north side (see thoughts about the demolition of the last high-rise here, here, here, and here), are now gone. (It was a bit strange last week to ride the Brown Line north out of the Loop and not see any Cabrini-Green high-rises.) In the eyes of the media, the problems of concentrated poverty and crime have been reduced. The land can be put to other uses, particularly at Cabrini-Green as it is very valuable land between Lincoln Park and the Loop.

On the other hand, the concerns of people like Venkatesh and Kotlowitz will not go away. Simply destroying public housing high-rises does not deal with the larger issues: there are still large parts of Chicago where residents have reduced life chances compared to better-off parts of the city. In the article, new Mayor Rahm Emanuel is cited as saying that the goal of reducing the isolation of the public housing residents (the goal that was “short of ending poverty”) has been successful.

I can’t imagine the new mayor will or perhaps even can devote much time to this issue as the persistent problems of budgets, crime, jobs, and education need to be addressed. Still, it will be interesting to see how Emanuel addresses public housing moving forward.

CHA reports on families displaced by the Plan for Transformation

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After the recent removal of the final public housing high-rise residents in Chicago, the Chicago Housing Authority released figures Wednesday about what has happened to the displaced high-rise residents:

In the 12 years since the CHA began its Plan for Transformation, an ambitious effort to overhaul public housing, the number of families receiving CHA housing subsidies has been cut in half, with only 56 percent — or 9,388 households, excluding senior citizens — in the system, according to a study prepared by the CHA.

Only 60 of those families have rented or purchased homes in the suburbs, a finding that challenges long-held beliefs that crime had followed former residents from the high-rises into their communities…

The CHA, however, acknowledged that it has lost track of 2,202 families that once lived in CHA housing, and another 1,307 households found housing without CHA assistance.

Former residents now live in 71 of Chicago’s 77 neighborhoods, according to the report. However, the majority of them moved to neighborhoods such as Englewood, Woodlawn, Auburn Gresham, Roseland and Greater Grand Crossing, communities that already were burdened with high crime and poverty. Others moved into working-class African-American communities such as Chatham and South Shore, saturating formerly stable neighborhoods of single-family homes with renters.

Overall, this article seems to shy away from asking this question: has the removal of these high-rises led to better lives for their former residents or improved conditions for poorer neighborhoods in the city? This article doesn’t offer much positive evidence: very few have moved to the suburbs, the CHA has lost track of some families while others have dropped out of the system, and former high-rise residents encounter stereotypes when moving to new neighborhoods. The high-rises may be gone but the deeper issues are still present.

Light installation at Cabrini-Green to mark demolition of final building

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Amidst news of Target’s interest in building a store on the former site of the Cabrini-Green housing project, the Chicago Tribune reports that there is a special light installation at the last building to be demolished (and whose last resident left several months ago):

Marked for demolition beginning Wednesday is the last-standing building of the infamous Cabrini-Green public housing complex. But thanks to a light installation orchestrated by artist Jan Tichy, the structure at 1230 N. Burling St. will remain aglow with 134 white LED lights — one installed in each of its vacated apartments — for the four-week duration of its razing. The light installation was completed Monday, in time for Tichy and the Chicago Housing Authority to flip the “on” switch at 7 p.m.

Here is more information on the project from the gallery that represents Tichy:

From January to March 2011, together with over 20 students from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Tichy held two and three-day workshops with local youth at Cabrini Connections, Marwen, After School Matters Creative Writing Program at Gallery 37 and ThaBrigade Stamps – Cabrini Green Marching Band. In the workshops, students were introduced to public art and light art, and brainstorming sessions and group activities were held on the concepts of Home, Public Housing, Community and Demolition. The youth were then charged with the task of writing poems or texts that addressed the concepts above. Employing a computer program developed by SAIC students that translates sound into light, the youth performed their texts for recording, creating unique light patterns. These light patterns define each of the 134 LED lights at the high-rise. Thus, the youth’s voices literally “tell” their stories through light.

As a component of Project Cabrini Green, live-feed footage from the site will be projected at the Museum of Contemporary Art at street-level, on the corner of Pearson and Mies Van der Rohe streets behind the museum’s glass façade, thereby rendering it visible at night. A voice/light-activated model of the high-rise will accompany the installation, and the youth participant’s written texts and audio content will be available. Tricia Van Eck, Associate Curator, is the organizing curator of the installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

The youth’s texts, the audio content, and the live-feed video will also be available on the project website.

Read more about the project in the New York Times or at Project Cabrini Green.

I wonder if there are plans for a more permanent exhibit or marker of the public housing project.

Cabrini-Green site: from housing project to possible Target store

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Since the mid 1990s, the area around the Cabrini-Green housing project on the north side of Chicago has been changing (see an overview of this change here). As the high-rises have come down (with the last residents leaving just recently), new mixed-income neighborhoods as well as new commercial buildings have gone up in the area. News comes today that Target may be building a store on this site in the near future:

Target Corp., the cheap-chic discount chain, is in talks with the Chicago Housing Authority to build a store at the site of the former Cabrini-Green Housing Project.

The retailer’s proposal was brought up for consideration at a CHA board of commissioners meeting earlier this month, said Matt Aguilar, CHA spokesman. “We are in discussions and hope to help bring additional investment to the neighborhood,” Aguilar said.

Demolition of the last high rise at Cabrini-Green is scheduled to begin on Wednesday. The seven-acre complex, once among the most notorious housing projects in the nation, is just blocks away from Chicago’s glitziest shopping districts on North Michigan Avenue and close to the wealthy enclaves of the Gold Coast and Lincoln Park.

Target declined to comment on the proposal.

If Target does move forward with this, it would be the second high-profile space they have recently obtained in Chicago. (Read here about their plans for moving to State Street.)

As redevelopment of this space continues to take place, how long might it be until residents and shoppers of the area forget altogether that the Cabrini-Green complex was once there?

Another question: is a big box store in the city such as Target okay or the best move? Does it depend on which store moves in (see the long-running battle between Wal-Mart and the City of Chicago) or are big box stores okay in the city but not good in the suburbs because of their contribution to sprawl?