Advocates, CHA Enact New Protection Provisions for Persons with Disabilities

The Shriver Center, Access Living of Metropolitan Chicago, and the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) have designed a new “disability protocol” to ensure that persons with disabilities have access to CHA’s redeveloped mixed-income housing. The CHA has pledged to implement this protocol to exempt persons with disabilities from new work requirements that might otherwise block their access to this important supply of housing.

When the CHA began its ten-year Plan for Transformation in 1999, the agency promised that families who were displaced by the redevelopment would be offered an opportunity to return to redeveloped public housing. More recently, as previously reported in IWN (“Stringent Screening Criteria May Block Displaced Residents’ Return to ABLA,” April 2004), advocates have been concerned that the CHA’s rigid screening criteria will prohibit many families from returning. For one, families in most developments must work at least thirty hours per week in order to qualify to return. Building on lessons learned from our welfare-to-work expertise, the Shriver Center has long advocated more flexible requirements that recognize families’ individual paths out of poverty.

The CHA originally implemented a disability exemption to these work requirements. However, Shriver Center advocates worried that the exemption inadvertently excluded some individuals who do not qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), but who nonetheless have a disability that affects their ability to work thirty hours per week. Together with Access Living, the Shriver Center entered a productive dialogue with the housing authority. CHA was receptive to the advocates’ concerns, and their discussions culminated in this new screening policy.

As a result, CHA will soon begin implementing the new disability protocol when screening residents who seek to return and new applicants who are seeking affordable housing. The protocol provides a broader, more complete definition of “disability,” in addition to mechanisms for applicants to document both that they have a disability and that they are unable to work thirty hours as a result of their disability or related barriers. The protocol also acknowledges that some persons with disabilities may work, but less than thirty hours per week. These families are provided with an adjusted goal.

The Shriver Center, Access Living, and CHA have now begun working together to implement the new policy. All three groups expect that the result will be improved access for persons with disabilities to redeveloped public housing units in these mixed-income communities.

For more information, e-mail Raj Nayak.