Avoiding a World of Trouble

By: Shawn AlleeTracey Hendrix can now breathe a little easier. After a nearly five-month search and a two-month wait to move in, this March she finally settled into an apartment suitable for her and her two sons, ages 14 and 2.

“I look everywhere because I like nice things,” she said from the new apartment in the West Side’s Austin neighborhood. “I look for schools. I look to see who’s standing on the corner. I look at what it looks like in the daytime, what it looks like at night.”

To pay rent for her three-bedroom unit, Hendrix, 36, uses a federal voucher. Under the program, Hendrix pays her landlord 30 percent of her income from disability payments, about $79 a month, for the $1,150-a-month apartment. The government pays the rest.

Hendrix, a single parent, is training to be an insurance agent and hopes to get on her feet and support her family. Without the voucher program, they could have ended up in a homeless shelter, she said. She is grateful to have a decent home, but added that the voucher program has been frustrating at times.

Among the worst of those frustrations, she said, is the discrimination she faced when searching for an apartment. “Some of [the landlords] kind of popped up and said, ‘Are you on Section 8?’ A few times I said, ‘Yes, I am.’ ‘Oh, well, I don’t take Section 8.’ And some of them don’t even give you a chance to say nothing else; they just say that and they hang up.”

Hendrix said she felt humiliated when a former landlord “went ballistic,” telling her neighbors that she was on Section 8 and that he was going to kick her family out of the unit. She filed a complaint with the Chicago Commission on Human Relations, but the landlord was never punished, she said, so she questions how well tenants are protected.

“I don’t know that [the commission] would be that helpful, first of all, because they’re too slow,” she said. The investigation “took over a year, almost two years.”

“You only have a certain amount of time,” added Hendrix, who has used vouchers for four moves since 1997. “And if you don’t utilize that time wisely, you end up getting an apartment in a bad neighborhood, and the landlord puts band-aids on the place to make it look like it’s up to standards, but it’s not.”

Still, Hendrix fears what others like her might face if the appellate court rules against the city.

“If I go look at a place, I like to take my family so that they get to meet all of us and see us for who we are,” said Hendrix. “If they were able to turn us down based on the fact that we were on Section 8, it would be very hard for us to find a place because they would completely use that against us.”

Without such last-ditch legal protections, Hendrix said, “We’d be in a world of trouble.”