The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) is a municipal corporation that oversees public housing within the city of Chicago. The agency's Board of Commissioners is appointed by the city's mayor, and has a budget independent from that of the city of Chicago. CHA is the largest rental landlord in Chicago, with more than 50,000 households. CHA owns over 21,000 apartments (9,200 units reserved for seniors and over 11,400 units in family and other housing types). It also oversees the administration of 37,000 Section 8 vouchers. The current acting CEO of the Chicago Housing Authority is Eugene Jones, Jr.
Video Chicago Housing Authority
History
Formed in 1937 by the state of Illinois, CHA was created to clear slums which were described by most as unlivable in Chicago; also to provide affordable homes for war veterans. The housing authority came into existence after the Housing Act of 1937 was passed which was the public housing program that provided low-cost housing in the form of publicly-managed and owned multi-family housing developments. The first director of CHA was Elizabeth Wood, from 1937 until 1954. CHA first housing project to be constructed by the Public Works Administration (PWA) was the Lathrop Homes in 1937. The Francis Cabrini and William Green Homes was started in 1941 and all 3,607 units were completed by 1962, ABLA is a complex of buildings started in 1943 and completed in total in 1955, Stateway Gardens was started in 1955 and completed by 1957. Robert Taylor Homes was started in 1961 and completed by 1962, it was considered as the largest public housing development in the United States. Between 1950 and 1969, the housing authority built 11 high rise projects for public housing, which isolated the extreme poor in "superblocks" that were not easily patrolled by police vehicles. CHA created the Chicago Housing Authority Police Department (CHAPD) which was formed in 1989 and was dissolved in 1999.
Maps Chicago Housing Authority
Plan for Transformation/Plan Forward
In 2000, the CHA began its Plan For Transformation, which called for the demolition of all of its gallery high-rise buildings because they failed HUD's viability test and proposed a renovated housing portfolio totaling 25,000 units. In April 2013, CHA created Plan Forward, the next phase of redeveloping public housing in Chicago. The plan includes the rehabilitation of homes, increasing economic sales around CHA developments and providing educational, job training to residents with Section 8 vouchers. In 2015, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development criticized the Chicago Housing Authority for accumulating a cash reserve of $440 million, at a time when more than a quarter million people are on the agency's waiting list for affordable housing. The CHA actually holds an annual lottery for candidates to seek a spot on the waitlist. CHA also faced criticism for leaving a large number of units vacant (16%) and for slowing its pace of adding units.
Demographics
From its beginning until the late-1950s, most families that lived in Chicago housing projects were Italian immigrants. By the mid-1970s, 65% of the agency's housing projects were made up of African Americans. In 1975, a study showed that traditional mother and father families in CHA housing projects were almost non-existent and 93% of the households were headed by single females. In 2010, the head of households demographics were 88% African American and 12% White. The population of children in CHA decreased by 15%, from 50% in 2000 to 35% by 2010. Today on average, a Chicago public housing development is made up of: 69% African-American, 27% Latino, and 4% White and Other.
List of Chief Executive Officers
Lawsuits
Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority
In 1966, Dorothy Gautreaux and other CHA residents brought a suit against the CHA, in Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority. The suit charged racial discrimination by the housing authority for concentrating 10,000 public housing units in isolated black neighborhoods, stating that the housing authority and Housing of Urban Development (HUD) had violated the U.S. Constitution and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It was a long-running case that in 1996 resulted in the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) taking over the CHA and the Gautreaux Project in which public housing families were relocated to the suburbs. The lawsuit was noted as the nation's first major public housing desegregation lawsuit.
Other lawsuits
In May 2013, The Cabrini-Green Local Advisory Council and former residents of the Cabrini-Green housing project sued the housing authority for reneging on promises for the residents to return the neighborhood after redevelopment. The suit claimed that the housing authority at the time had only renovated a quarter of the remaining row-houses, making only a small percentage of them public housing.
In September 2015, four residents sued the housing authority over utility allowances. Residents claimed the CHA overcharged them for rent and didn't credit them for utility costs.
Developments
Housing projects
Other housing
In addition to the traditional housing projects, CHA has 51 senior housing developments, 61 scattered site housing and 15 mixed-income housing developments.
Notable residents
See also
- Hills v. Gautreaux, a 1976 Supreme Court case
- Chicago Housing Authority Police Department
- Marshall Field Garden Apartments
References
- "Chicago Housing Authority". Encyclopedia of Chicago.
- "Gautreaux". Business and Professional People for the Public Interest. Archived from the original on 2007-09-13.
- "Latest Decision on Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority". National Housing Law Project. Archived from the original on 2007-08-04.
Further reading
- Dizikes, Peter, "Chicago hope: Ambitious attempt to help the city's poor by moving them out of troubled housing projects is having mixed results, MIT study finds", MIT News, MIT News Office, March 3, 2011.
- Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing, a 2009 book by D. Bradford Hunt.
- "Understanding Chicago's High-Rise Public Housing Disaster", in Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, and Alternatives, edited by Charles Waldheim and Katerina Reudi Ray (University of Chicago Press, 2005).
- "How Did Public Housing Survive the 1950s?", Journal of Policy History, 17:2, Spring 2005, 193-216.
External links
- Chicago Housing Authority Official site
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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