The trouble-making tenant at the Lathrop Homes on Chicago’s North Side had a record stretching back years.
There was the guest arrested for drug possession in 1986. A year and a half later, police seized a sawed-off shotgun and cocaine from the tenant’s unit. Then in the summer of 1992 came complaints of another “unauthorized tenant” running a gang from the apartment with a pit bull at his side.
More than a year later, the tenant was still in public housing, according to a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development audit released late last week.
Such anecdotes underscore the fact that dense clusters of dilapidated high-rises are only part of the daunting challenge facing the federal housing officials who recently took over the Chicago Housing Authority.
HUD can tear down all of the high-rises it wants. But to improve living conditions for law-abiding residents, federal officials know they also must fix the authority’s equally dilapidated system of screening and evicting problem tenants.
The HUD audit, published early last year, bluntly outlined the nature and scope of the problem.
“The authority did not admit and evict tenants in a consistent manner to assure problematic tenants were not allowed into housing or were promptly removed,” it stated. “As a result, problematic residents were admitted or not evicted, which increased related maintenance and security costs.”
Legal protections, including the right to a jury trial for any tenant subject to eviction, complicate and slow efforts to get rid of tenants who chronically fail to pay rent or those who sell drugs or commit other crimes.
Even with the help of its own police eviction unit, which started two summers ago, the authority faces a backlog of hundreds of families due for eviction.
But the problems start long before eviction becomes an issue. Consider the development manager stuck with more than 15 residents who wear “home monitoring” devices because of criminal convictions. The CHA’s occupancy department didn’t tell the manager until after they were admitted to his development.
“He said he would have rejected at least some of these applicants if he knew of their criminal status,” the audit stated.
In other instances, promising measures are used only on a limited basis. Resident screening panels have been started in the CHA’s few resident-managed developments and some privately managed complexes. But they have not been expanded to the more troubled developments still managed by the authority.
Similarly, the CHA in 1990 stopped performing pre-admission housekeeping inspections and credit checks for all applicants because of a large backlog and lack of staff, even though the authority acknowledged that the inspections helped screen out potentially troublesome tenants.
Under a new vacancy reduction program, though, a pilot project awaiting approval from the new HUD bosses would restart the inspections and credit checks in eight developments.
HUD officials insist that better screening and swifter evictions are a top priority for them, saying those efforts are crucial to improving conditions at CHA.
Joseph Shuldiner, the top HUD official who is acting chairman of the CHA, has suggested the possibility of having police assist in tenant screening. But he said he was unsure if Illinois law would permit such an approach.
CHA’s new bosses are studying the problems. “We expect there to be changes, but we’re still looking at existing policies,” said HUD spokeswoman Jeanne Crowley.
One fact they will discover is that the problems involving evictions can be especially complicated. Illinois law, for example, ensures all tenants a jury trial if a landlord wants to evict them, so many CHA evictions take months while authority lawyers seek to prove their case in court.
A small number of CHA evictions-about 1 of every 10-is for drug use and other criminal violations. The rest are because residents haven’t paid their rent. But even in many rent cases, criminal activity plays a part, according to police officers who work on the CHA evictions unit.
“Why can’t they pay the rent? Because they’re spending it on drugs,” said CHA Officer Larry Harris.
During many rent evictions, police say they spot the clear signs of drug use: straws, razor blades and small mirrors with drug residue. “We call it the rent evaporator,” Harris said.
On Wednesday, the evictions unit cleared out the Cabrini-Green apartment of a woman who failed to attend drug rehab treatment. She hadn’t paid her $37-a-month rent since last July.
Before going to court, the authority will spend months trying to negotiate rent from residents because it often isn’t worth the CHA’s money to quickly seek eviction.
Say, for instance, a resident hasn’t paid $10 in rent for three months. With court filing fees, “it’s going to cost you more to get them to court just to get the $30,” said Elizabeth Silas, a CHA staff attorney overseeing evictions.
One result is backlog. Currently, about 680 eviction cases (for failure to pay rent) are in some stage of legal action. Another 60 families are awaiting eviction for drug use or other criminal violations.
Those numbers reflect a substantial improvement since the HUD audit of eviction and screening programs. For years CHA, like private landlords, relied solely on the Cook County Sheriff’s Department for evictions.
The problem was, “if they did not complete all of them, it could be several weeks before they scheduled CHA for evictions again,” Silas said.
Faced with such frustrations, the CHA sought and received approval from the Illinois attorney general’s office to form its own eviction unit, which includes about six officers led by Sgt. Joseph J. Johnson.
The unit, which started in July 1993, has doubled the number of evictions that CHA completes, from about 250 in 1993 to about 500 last year, according to Silas. Since Jan. 1, 227 forcible evictions have been completed.
But residents’ attorneys make it clear they will fight efforts to further toughen eviction policies. The Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago has challenged changes to CHA’s lease, including a provision making tenants responsible for the actions of their guests.
And despite CHA’s complaints about legal obstacles, attorneys who represent residents contend that “the vast majority of CHA tenants do not get counsel because there’s not enough legal aid out there,” said Barbara O’Brien, staff attorney with the Cabrini-Green Legal Aid Clinic.
For those who do get legal representation, one often-used defense is to cite the conditions of the unit to justify lowering the amount due.
“CHA is supposed to provide safe, decent and sanitary housing,” she said. “So if you’re able to prove that the place is so bad-that the toilet doesn’t work-she shouldn’t have to pay the entire rent.”
