Monday’s double-dose of good news about the Chicago Housing Authority must not be allowed to distract that agency-or the community it serves-from a wider vision of the future of public housing in the region.
It’s all well and good that federal housing officials have decided to fully fund CHA’s request for $30 million to renovate more than 1,600 vacant apartments, most of them located in the agency’s battered high-rises.
And it’s fine that CHA has struck a compromise with Hispanic politicians and neighborhood groups that would reduce by 110 the number of “scattered-site” townhouses to be built on the Near Northwest Side.
Trouble is, the deplorable state of public housing in Chicago will not be remedied until there are far fewer bleak high-rises and far more scattered-site alternatives.
So CHA Chairman Vince Lane and chief operating officer Graham Grady must take extreme care in deciding where to spend that $30 million. There needs to be a master plan identifying which high-rises are to be renewed and which are to be phased out in favor of scattered sites or portable rent subsidies.
The shorter the list of saved high-rises, the better. What’s to be gained from slapping up new drywall and thermo-pane windows in buildings whose social and economic isolation is so complete that the cancer of despair reasserts itself before the paint dries?
As for the Northwest Side, there may come a day when Hispanic residents of Humboldt Park, West Town and Logan Square will wish they had those 110 units which their politicians-plucking at the city’s black/brown discord-so effectively opposed.
Progressive factions within the Hispanic community are pushing for more low-rise public housing. They understand that half the new units must go to neighborhood residents, and that middle-class gentrification moving northward along the Milwaukee Avenue axis makes it crucial that affordable housing be guaranteed for as many low-income residents as possible.
None of these concerns rated much attention as Monday’s double “good news” was announced.
But unless the CHA, and the community at large, keeps its eye on the big picture, the news may prove to be not so good after all.
