CHA’s $50 million plan to renovate scattered site housing is a step in the right direction

There are 200,000 people on the Chicago Housing Authority’s wait list, hoping to get an affordable place to live.

That’s a population larger than that of Illinois’s second largest city, Aurora, where 178,000 people live.

The tremendous backlog is the result of the CHA’s historic failure to do the only job it has: Provide enough public housing for those who need it most.

But at least part of this shameful legacy might well start to get corrected under a new initiative planned by the CHA: Setting aside $50 million to renovate vacant single family homes and apartments the CHA owns under its scattered site housing program, as the Sun-Times’ David Roeder reported Monday

Of course, the devil is in the details — and the CHA’s ability to finally play against type and honor its promises.

But that aside, the agency’s willingness to take this step is a hopeful sign. The CHA board should approve the funding at its meeting next month, so the agency can get the ball moving, ASAP.

‘An aggressive target’

Called “Restoring Home,” the program would repair or gut rehab 77 buildings, creating 217 housing units, including 36 small- to mid-sized apartment buildings, according to the CHA. Plus, 41 single-family homes will be renovated and sold as affordable dwellings.

The work could be finished in 18 months if funding is approved, the CHA claims. “It’s an aggressive target,” CHA CEO Tracey Scott told Roeder.

It is. But we like the math, especially when compared to built-from-the-ground-up affordable rentals that were planned under former Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Invest South/West program.

Under that initiative, for instance, Woodlawn Social, a $48 million mixed-use development planned for 63rd Street and Ingleside Avenue, would yield 70 units of housing — a third of the amount of residences Restoring Home promises to deliver citywide and for essentially the same price.

Luckily, this town is big enough for both programs (although we’d like to see better construction numbers in the Invest South/West projects, if Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration continues them under a new name). There’s no question that the city’s affordable housing demands warrant these efforts and more.

Now’s the time for revitalizing communities

Restoring Home — along with other city initiatives — could help bring families and residents to the South and West sides, where more than 20 years of depopulation have hollowed out far too many neighborhoods.

“It’s good to see some movement from the CHA,” urban planner Teresa Cordova, a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago and director of its Great Cities Institute, told Roeder. As she noted, the aim of renovating smaller buildings “can be a great booster for neighborhoods, especially if these are in-fill projects.”

And given the scattered site program has an inventory in need of renovation in all 50 wards, Restoring Home could also help the city avoid one of the biggest mistakes of the past: over-concentrating public housing residents in Black neighborhoods that are poorer and more resource-starved.

Indeed, the path toward more equitable distribution of affordable housing seems a little smoother with the news that federal investigators found — and it should surprise no one — that City Council members have wrongly used aldermanic prerogative to keep affordable housing out of their neighborhoods.

The feds have asked the Johnson administration to enter talks for an “informal resolution” of the situation, a conclusion of a nearly five-year civil rights investigation by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. 

“The department’s investigation indicates that the city affords each of its 50 wards a local veto over proposals to build affordable housing and that many majority-white wards use the local veto to block, deter or downsize such proposals,” Lon Meltesen, regional director of HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity wrote in a letter obtained by the Sun-Times.

“As a result, new affordable housing is rarely, if ever, constructed in the majority-white wards that have the least affordable housing,” Meltesen wrote.

The big question is this: Who gets the housing when it comes online, and can the CHA develop an efficient, politics-free way of getting the keys into the hands of Chicagoans who have waited the longest for housing?

Scott says the CHA is “definitely focused at this point on trying to turn the ship around.” Let’s hope the agency succeeds, to the benefit of Chicagoans in need and the city as a whole.

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