From the sniper death of 7-year-old Dantrell Davis at Cabrini-Green to the outburst of 300 shootings last March at Robert Taylor Homes, the Chicago Housing Authority’s developments have become synonymous with violent crime.
But CHA Chairman Vincent Lane on Monday provided the latest evidence that the perception of life at a CHA development and the reality of it aren’t always the same.
Lane used a City Council committee hearing, which was called so he would submit the authority’s budget, to release statistics showing serious crime has continued to decline at CHA complexes after peaking in 1991.
CHA residents are still about twice as likely as other Chicago residents to be victims of a violent crime. But the number of serious crimes, ranging from car theft to homicide, at CHA developments was 6,626 in 1993 compared with a projected 1994 total of 6,298, according to the authority’s analysis of Chicago Police Department data.
Through June 1993, 3,245 serious crimes were committed on CHA property, while the number of such crimes through June 1994 (the latest available figures) had dropped to 3,149, according to the CHA. In the peak year of 1991, 7,654 serious crimes were committed at the CHA’s 19 family developments, its scattered-site units or on other CHA property.
Homicides also have dropped significantly, from 90 in 1991 to 50 in 1993 and a projected 44 this year, judging from the 22 committed through June 30.
Lane suggested that the drop in serious crime is due at least in part to the CHA’s addition in recent years of its own police, beefed-up security forces and such preventive programs as the authority’s tenant patrol.
Monday’s hearing was prompted by the demands of Ald. Dorothy Tillman (3rd), who had insisted that Lane comply with a state law requiring the CHA to present its budget each year to the council. The law, however, does not require council approval of the budget.
The CHA had not submitted its budget, and Lane promised Tillman: “We’re putting it on our schedule for annual things to do.”
But in an effort to defend his six-year tenure at the authority-and following a spate of financial scandals that included the defrauding of the CHA employees pension fund-Lane did more than talk budget numbers. He ticked off the steps taken to improve living conditions for the city’s 86,000 public-housing residents.
Lane outlined his oft-repeated plans of tearing down some high-rises and building low-rise housing scattered across the city.
He also spoke of CHA programs to get residents to help improve their communities, but said those efforts couldn’t work unless tenants were made to feel safer.
“How can you talk about community revitalization when residents are afraid to know who their next-door neighbors are?” Lane asked Tillman, Housing Committee Chairman Ald. Ambrosio Medrano (25th) and about 60 CHA residents who crammed into a council hearing room.
“Community is neighbors getting together to solve their common problems. You can’t do that if you’re afraid to leave your apartment,” Lane added. “So we’ve invested a lot of money in public safety.”
Indeed, the reduction in crime hasn’t come cheap: The CHA has increased spending on security from $41 million in 1992 to an estimated $74 million in 1994.
That includes the cost of CHA police, CHA security, private security and other crime-fighting programs.
Tillman and Medrano also questioned Lane about the CHA’s handling of its finances, given the defrauding of the employees’ $37 million pension fund that was uncovered by the Securities and Exchange Commission and internal investigations that alleged millions more lost in private security, the purchasing department and CHA police.
“I wish I could say I could stop people from stealing,” Lane told the aldermen. But “the best we can do is put the machinery in place to catch it, stop it” and discipline those responsible.
Medrano noted that outside auditors have refused to issue an opinion on the state of the CHA’s books, which Lane said were in bad shape when he took over in 1988.
Lane responded by saying that auditors found about 40 audit exceptions in 1988 and about a dozen in the most recent audit, but he added that the authority still has a ways to go before its books are tidy enough for an auditor to issue an opinion.
“We may not be able to pull it together for another two or three years,” he said.
