Public housing residents moved to Section 8 homes are happier in their new places but face more maintenance problems than others in their new neighborhoods, a new national study shows.
Seventy-five percent of the residents surveyed said they were better off in the mixed residential communities than in public housing, where problems such as rats, gun violence and drugs were rampant.
The study by the Washington-based Urban Institute followed 736 households in Chicago and four other cities as they moved out of their housing developments and into subsidized houses in mostly minority and poor communities.
The shift to subsidized Section 8 housing is part of HOPE VI, a $5 billion program created in 1992 to replace dilapidated public housing complexes with new developments in mixed-income communities.
The Chicago Housing Authority’s $1.6 billion Plan for Transformation, where 25,000 public housing units are being replaced, is the most ambitious part of the federal program.
Though the Section 8 housing came off better than public housing, the subsidized homes did not compare well with others in the new neighborhoods. Thirty-nine percent of those in subsidized housing said they had at least one problem with mold, poor heating or water leaks, compared with 34 percent of private market renters, the study found.
“The comparison to other poor households is particularly troubling,” said Jennifer Comey, one of the study’s authors. “Their housing conditions have definitely improved, in some cases very much so. But it started out pretty low, so you can only go up.”
The residents surveyed lived in the now demolished Ida B. Wells housing complex on the South Side and public housing in Washington; Atlantic City; Richmond, Calif.; and Durham, N.C.
Other findings showed that the residents generally moved to mostly black or Latino neighborhoods with concentrated levels of poverty and serious crime problems, though not as extensive as in their public housing developments.
Separate academic studies in Chicago have made similar conclusions about the CHA’s 10-year effort.
