Shriver Center Responds to a Report Released by CHA's Independent Monitor

Editor’s Note: This statement is a reprint of a letter submitted to the Chicago Tribune in response to their article (“Report Hits CHA for Losing Residents, June 22,2005 ) on a CHA report released by Independent Monitor, Rita Fry.

Implicit in the recent report by Rita Fry, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) independent monitor, is an important question: Why do redeveloped public housing units stand vacant while thousands of families wait in line to return? Fry confirms some troubling patterns, including that the CHA has lost track of many families who were displaced when their buildings were destroyed. However, the report offers an opportunity to reexamine another cause of this incongruity: CHA has set inflexible screening criteria that block many of those seeking to return to redeveloped housing. CHA’s criteria present hurdles that would be unrealistic even for many middle-income families and that are prohibitive for former public housing families to whom CHA has promised a right to return.

CHA is right to have screening criteria but wrong to make them inflexible. The Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law has long advocated work requirements that are more flexible than CHA’s rigid 30-hour rule, and for screening criteria that are actually relevant to what makes a good tenant. The road to employment is not always smooth. Acquiring a safe, habitable home is often a first step toward getting and maintaining work. Furthermore, CHA’s credit determinations should be based on a family’s rental history, not their unpaid credit card debt—a problem shared by most Americans unfortunately.

We see public housing as a work support, not solely as a reward for meeting exacting, even arbitrary goals set by a distant agency.

CHA should look to its own experience for an example of the right approach. At the Henry Horner Homes, CHA emphasized work supports rather than strict requirements. As a result, Horner works as a true mixed-income development. The successful Horner approach was touted as a model by the Government Accountability Office in 2003 and by the Chicago Neighborhood Development Association in 2005.

Last month Chief Executive Officer Terry Peterson promised that CHA was “going to keep our word,” that “[r]esidents are going to move out, but we’re going to make sure they move back.” While we applaud the promise, we urge CHA to act truly on its commitment to displaced residents as it did at Horner. Otherwise Chicago will miss the greatest opportunity that the Plan for Transformation has to offer: support for those trying to work for a living and move permanently out of poverty.

William Wilen
Director of Housing Litigation
Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law