Three months after they were completed, 30 new apartments on Chicago’s South Side sit empty, units in the Lake Park Crescent development that were supposed to usher in a new era in public housing.
At mixed-income developments near the Cabrini-Green Homes on the North Side, 12 more recently completed units have also been awaiting public housing residents, some for as many as eight months.
Critics say a total of 56 new public housing vacancies around the city signifies a growing problem in the Chicago Housing Authority’s $1.6 billion effort to replace its aging stock of apartments with mixed-income developments and rehabilitated apartments.
On Tuesday one group tried to force the agency to begin moving families in no later than two weeks after completion of apartments, as part of an ongoing lawsuit against the CHA. A judge gave the agency until April to reply.
Even as more new apartments become available, stringent residency requirements are making it difficult to fill the apartments in a timely fashion, critics say.
“We have a serious, persisting, likely-to-be-growing problem,” said Alexander Polikoff, attorney for the Business and Professional People for the Public Interest during a federal court hearing Tuesday. Polikoff is the lead attorney for CHA residents in a 35-year-old lawsuit to desegregate public housing in Chicago.
CHA officials argue that their hands are tied by court orders governing move-in procedures at Cabrini-Green, the Henry Horner Homes and Lake Park Crescent. More mandates would further complicate matters, they say.
About a third of the 18,000 apartments and houses in the new mixed-income developments are reserved for CHA residents, with the rest to be rented or sold to low- and middle-income families.
The placement process is a complicated one, starting with the preferences listed by the tenants before they were moved out of the old high-rises and other sites.
The procedures also include work requirements and other resident criteria that have stirred controversy as the CHA moves past the midway point of its 10-year effort.
CHA general counsel Gail Niemann said court orders and other government regulations have in the past only made redevelopment efforts more cumbersome.
At Lake Park Crescent, the CHA is caught between two requirements. A court order requires half the public housing units to be filled with families making between 50 and 80 percent of median income. A U.S. tax regulation prohibits awarding the apartments to families making more than 60 percent of the area’s median income, which is $63,800 for a family of four.
“That ends up being a very thin slice” of tenants who would be qualified, Niemann said.
