Relocation Leaves Some Residents Struggling

By: Brian J. Rogal To resident advocates, Lisa Taylor is an example of how the Chicago Housing Authority’s relocation plan has failed over the last seven years.

In 1997, Taylor said, she needed to get out of public housing. A resident of the West Side’s Addams-Brooks-Loomis-Abbott development, she suffered from diabetes and sickle cell anemia, and the housing conditions, her doctor warned, were making them worse.

For three months she couldn’t shut off the hot water coming out of her apartment’s kitchen tap. Mold started to spread, and paint peeled off the wall. Taylor had been working as a home health care aid, but had to quit after having several toes amputated. She started receiving Social Security Disability benefits.

A CHA official “asked me if I wanted to get up out of the projects, and I told him, ‘Yes.’” She was given a voucher to subsidize her rent.

But her new home, a three-flat apartment in the South Side’s New City neighborhood, was in an area where drug dealing is rampant. Altogether, more than 500 displaced families have settled in the New City and nearby Englewood and West Englewood community areas, records show.

The building was broken down, but Taylor’s landlord was scared to come and do the repairs, she said. And, when she asked her 14-year-old son to take out the garbage, “he said, ‘Momma, come with me.’”

Under the CHA’s current plan, only residents who were relocated after October 1, 1999, have the right to return to rehabilitated developments. But Taylor recently joined a federal class-action lawsuit, filed on Jan. 23, asking that the CHA allow her and about 2,000 other families displaced before the cutoff date to have a chance to return.

The lawsuit also asks that the Service Connector, the CHA’s program to link residents with social services, be remade to better serve current residents who may be displaced.

Families leaving public housing now receive more social service assistance from the CHA than Taylor has, but many still seem to encounter problems.

Lorraine Fleming, 44, lives on the South Side in a Stateway Gardens high-rise, where she cares for her mother and two children. She has been displaced from public housing before. She once used a voucher for an apartment, but had a dispute with her landlord over how much he was being reimbursed to cover her rent, she said. In March 2000, she ended up back at Stateway.

Fleming was set to move again this January with a new voucher after finding an apartment at 2212 E. 79th St. in the South Shore neighborhood.

But the owner was “just a slum landlord,” she said. The place had no refrigerator, and underneath new tiles, the wood was rotten. Fleming never moved in. She has started a new search.

“A lot of landlords are just doing cosmetic surgery,” said Francine Washington, Stateway’s resident leader. Residents are vulnerable because relocation “is a forced move. You don’t know what you’re doing; you just start looking, and if you find something for the right family size, you’ll go for it.”

Meghan Harte, managing director of the CHA’s resident services, which oversees relocation, said CHAC Inc., the private firm that administers the voucher program, does 70,000 pre-rental inspections a year and uses “minimal [federal] inspection standards.”

But “that’s not something we’re planning to look at,” Harte said. “We haven’t had so many complaints that would cause drastic change.”