I am writing in response to your editorial “Making vision a reality at CHA” (July 21). The reality today is not found in the highly touted mixed-income housing development that will set aside 20 percent-or 19 units-for low-income families in Chicago’s affluent Clybourn Corridor. This project is the exception-not the rule-at the CHA.
The reality of the CHA today is the continued and deliberate concentration of poor people in poor neighborhoods. In the Sheridan Park neighborhood of Uptown, the CHA has clustered 89 units of scattered-site housing within a five-block area. In Sheridan Park, scattered-site has become so concentrated that some complexes face each other across the street or immediately adjoin, yet the CHA recently broke ground for the addition of 19 more scattered-site units.
Sheridan Park already has five times more CHA scattered sites than any other census tract on the northeast side of Chicago. Census tract 317 (most of which is Sheridan Park) currently has 51 percent of all the scattered sites in the Uptown area, and with the 19 additional units will have 23 percent of all CHA scattered-site housing in the northeast side. The CHA soon will have located 108 scattered-site units within a five-block area in the 16 blocks that comprise census tract 317.
While most residents of Sheridan Park support scattered sites in the community, the number of these units in Sheridan Park-which have skyrocketed from 21 in 1990 to 89 verging on 108 today-increase the very problem of over concentration of low-income residents, one that scattered-site housing was suppose to rectify.
