Time is running out for Chicago public housing residents to return

At the beginning of the Plan, resident leaders fought hard for a legal "right to return," and after many hours of negotiation, they got it. The Right of Return means that anyone who was living in public housing on October 1st, 1999 has the legal right to either come back to a new unit, rehabbed unit or to take a permanent Section 8 voucher in the neighborhood of their choice. 

It's not that CHA hasn't searched for them.

They've gotten certified letters to their last known address. The problem is that last known addresses and phone numbers are often not accurate for very long, especially when you're talking about low-income people who move often, change cell phones and don't tend to leave a forwarding address. Ten years is a long time, and a lot of people have slipped through the cracks.

Here's the breakdown of where families are now. I haven't received new numbers from CHA, so these are the stats from April. I'll update this when I get the new numbers from them.

That big purple slice - yeah, that's the people who we just can't locate.

CHA hired a company to track down these residents - Globetrotters International (No, not the basketball team, unfortunately. I bet you have 'Sweet Georgia Brown' in your head now though. You're welcome).

It seems to have worked somewhat. A few months ago, there were over 4,200 families still not found. Now, there are about 3,200 families missing. Better, but still not that great.

CHA seems to be diligently searching for these missing residents now - putting their names in newspapers, on websites, searching for leads on how to find them.

But there's one question residents have posed to me over and over: How good of a job did they do tracking them from the get-go?

Carol Steele, president at Cabrini-Green and head of the Coalition to Protect Public Housing, said she and many other resident leaders expected this would happen.

"If the Chicago Housing Authority is trying to get out of the public housing business, then frankly, they don't give a damn where people have gone to. I don't think they're looking hard enough," she said.

CHA has good reason for the time limit. The waiting list for housing is long, around 40,000 families, and with the recession, more and more people need decent, affordable housing. Legally, CHA has to hold a spot for these original residents, but if some of them don't want to come back, it could open up room for those families on the waiting list who desperately need a place to live.

It makes sense.
 
But still, I wonder.

One of the first books I read when I started the housing beat was Mary Pattillo's Black on the Block. Patillo chronicles the changes in the Kenwood-Oakland neighborhood, and there's one reflection that she made that always stuck with me. In her chapters on public housing, she talks about residents fears of their housing being torn down and not being able to afford to come back. The more affluent community members and city officials tell them they're paranoid, but then, years and years later, just what they feared came true. She writes:

The decades long fight by public housing residents to maintain a presence on Chicago's lakefront is filled with anxious fears about a dark plot against them. These fears are contradicted, denied and dismissed by public officials, as premature, unfounded and outlandish. But frequent regime and administrative change allows for institutional unaccoutability, backtracking and amnesia. In the end, residents' seemingly paranoid fears come to pass just as they predicted.

 
There may be good reason for the 90 day deadline. CHA may be doing everything it can to track down those families. But I can't help but be reminded of the cries that residents would be displaced - that they would never return to their communities where they had family and raised their children, where they belonged.

And for at least 3,200 families, that fear may have become reality.

Maybe those original residents weren't so paranoid after all.