For the past eight years, Robbie Noble has been just another neighbor in Beach Park, raising her three grandchildren and niece in a little yellow house on the edge of town.
Noble says she doesn’t mind the quiet, slow pace of life in the tiny Lake County community, even though her grandchildren-like a lot of other suburban kids-long for the excitement of the city.
“It’s like living in a different world,” Noble said.
Unlike most other Beach Park neighbors, Noble knows about that other world.
For 34 years, Noble lived in Chicago’s Henry Horner Homes until a housing assistance program enabled her to move to the suburbs.
“It’s 100 percent different,” she said. “You don’t have people living on top of each other, and all those gangbangers.”
But moving to the suburbs doesn’t always mean living the good life for thousands of other low-income families, more than half of whom find themselves packed into a few poor southern suburbs, far from jobs and opportunity.
Scattered-site housing, Chicago’s newest proposal to improve the plight of inner-city families, is nothing new in the Chicago suburbs.
Today, more than 10,000 low-in-come families are living in federally subsidized private homes in the suburbs, including more than 4,000 families in the collar counties, according to a new study released by the South Suburban Housing Center. By comparison, only about 2,500 families live in suburban public housing projects.
Some of the families have moved there from the city, seeking a better life. Some have been there all along, scarcely noticed by their richer neighbors.
But they hardly represent a dramatic incursion: Subsidized families represent only one of about 1,800 families in the suburbs.
And the numbers may seem even lower to many traditional suburbanites, largely because so many of the low-income families live in places like Harvey and Chicago Heights and Evanston-not in Orland Park and Lake Bluff and Glen Ellyn.
Not only are low-income families clustered in certain areas, but the distribution of minority families can vary widely by region.
According to the study, Lake County has 2,200 such units, a third occupied by blacks. Du Page County has 1,100 units, half occupied by blacks. But in McHenry County, only 749 subsidized housing units exist, 96 percent of them serving white families or white elderly residents.
By comparison, nearly 4,000 subsidized black families live in the south Cook County suburbs. That level of concentration has left thousands of families stuck in low-income neighborhoods far from good jobs, good schools and wider opportunity, despite their participation in programs designed to help them.
But for other families that once had little hope of escaping inner-city violence and poverty, the possibility of moving out is becoming a reality. And that suggests that a new plan by Chicago Housing Authority head Vincent Lane and U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros to relocate more families, although controversial and far from easy, may be the best hope yet for improving their lives.
“If people are given the opportunity to take advantage of opportunities, they do it,” said John Lukehart, assistant director of Chicago’s Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities.
Scattered-site housing got its first big boost in the Chicago suburbs in 1974, when the federal Section 8 housing certificate program began. That program allows approved low-income families to rent housing of their choice in the private market and pay 30 percent of their income toward the rent. The federal government then pays the rest, up to the fair market rent for that area.
Today, Section 8 housing accounts for the vast majority of scattered-site housing in the suburbs, where true public housing projects, owned by government bodies, remain relatively rare and widely opposed.
Where it does exist in the suburbs, public housing has consisted mainly of apartment towers reserved for white elderly residents. And very few of them have been built since the early 1970s, when Section 8 came along.
An exception is Highland Park, which in 1980 built a low-income housing complex designed to serve seniors. Today, the town’s more than 150 apartments and town homes have been opened to a wide variety of low-income residents.
“The city realized that you have to make accommodations for people who cannot afford the more affluent homes here, but who might work and live here,” said Serena Gordon, the village’s manager of low-income properties. “I think the variety makes it a much richer community.”
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But such open attitudes are rare in the suburbs, where most public housing complexes-and even many apartment buildings-are viewed as a pathway for blight to enter town. In many places, zoning ordinances specifically prohibit small, affordable homes or apartments. In others, the land is so expensive that no home built on it could be considered affordable.
The same difficulties exist in Chicago. The Habitat Co., the court-appointed agency responsible for development of scattered-site housing for the Chicago Housing Authority, has been criticized for not building such housing on the city’s predominantly white Northwest and Southwest Sides.
But vacant land in those areas is hard to find, and where it is available it is costly, often six to 10 times higher priced than the agency can afford, said Phil Hickman, senior vice president and director of scattered-site housing for Habitat.
As a result, Habitat-which cannot build new housing in primarily black areas-has turned to Hispanic areas, and has been heavily criticized for plans to build 404 new units of low-income housing around Humboldt Park. Altogether, its low-income buildings are spread over 37 of the city’s 77 community areas. But the great majority of subsidized families in Chicago remain in Chicago Housing Authority high-rises.
Political opposition to scattered-site housing also has been a problem, in the city and suburbs. White residents, particularly those from the Southwest Side and southwest suburbs who have fled racially changing neighborhoods in their lifetime, fear bringing low-income black families into their neighborhoods could cause renewed flight, though researchers say that is very unlikely.
And plenty of black political leaders in Chicago fear scattering inner-city blacks to new homes could break up black voting blocs and dilute black voting strength.
Such problems of cost and politics, experts say, make any plans to build new government-owned public housing difficult in the city and almost certain to fail in the suburbs. Buying existing homes may be a better option, they say, but still not a perfect one.
The best way to move more inner-city families into the suburbs and better city neighborhoods, they suggest, will probably be to expand the Section 8 housing program, which Charles Orlebeke, director of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Urban Planning and Policy, calls “a remarkably successful program.”
Giving a family a long-term Section 8 subsidy costs less than half of what building an apartment for them would cost, he notes, and takes advantage of existing housing stocks.
That’s not to say Section 8 has been a total success, however. According to the new south suburban study, 63 percent of Section 8 families in suburban Cook County live in the south suburbs, an area that lacks jobs. And nearly a quarter of those families are concentrated in a few small, nearly all-black, areas in Harvey and Chicago Heights.
Section 8 families are similarly concentrated in the collar counties. Nearly 60 percent of Lake County’s Section 8 families live in four towns: Zion, Mundelein, Round Lake Beach and North Chicago. And a third of DuPage County’s Section 8 families live in three towns: Woodridge, Addison and Carol Stream.
Why the concentration? For the most part, it’s not because apartments are too high-priced elsewhere. More than 30 percent of two-bedroom apartments in the northwest suburbs meet the Section 8 guidelines, and 14 percent of those in the southwest suburbs. Even 11 percent of the apartments in the North Shore suburbs qualify, according to the south suburban study.
But what about discrimination in those areas? There’s no doubt that occurs, according to James Rosenbaum, who has tracked participants in the Gautreaux Project, a Chicago program that helps black Section 8 inner-city residents relocate to suburbs that are less than 30 percent black.
Many families who go through the program do experience harassment or discrimination in their new home-but only in the first few months, said Rosenbaum, of Northwestern University’s Center for Urban Affairs.
“If people have the strength to put up with it, it goes away,” he said. And interestingly enough, his study shows that most families who report harassment also report other white neighbors rallying to their aid, offering friendship, invitations to dinner, advice on the best places to shop and so on.
For those families who stick it out through the problems, the rewards are impressive. Their children are only a quarter as likely to drop out of school as the children of their counterparts who move from the inner city to other black areas of Chicago. The suburban graduates are also twice as likely to go to college, and much more likely to go to a four-year college than a junior college.
Even those who don’t go to college are much more likely to get not only a job but to get a good job, with higher pay and more benefits, Rosenbaum said.
And it’s those smaller successes, he said, that deserve most of the attention.
“It’s not just the super successes we should focus on,” he said. “Some kids we studied didn’t go to college, weren’t stellar students. But when they compared their lives in the suburbs making Cs and working at a blue-collar job to what they thought they thought they would have been in the city, they said if they hadn’t moved they’d probably be in gangs, on drugs, pregnant, dead. The alternatives are a whole lot worse.”
Housing experts say counseling is the key to breaking up concentrations of Section 8 housing and moving toward a true scattered-site system. Although some families always will be reluctant to make long-distance moves because of family and community ties, plenty of others would take the chance, particularly if they knew it would give them a better chance at a job, and if they got enough help to make the move a success.
“I moved here to be near family, but family ties wouldn’t keep me here,” said Donell Dean, 54, who has lived for two years in a $105-a-month subsidized apartment in Chicago Heights’ immaculate brick public housing towers on East End Avenue.
Since the move from Seattle, Dean hasn’t been able to find a job. He’s trained as a nurse’s assistant but job opportunities are “slim, very slim” in Chicago Heights. A quiet man, he’d jump at a chance to relocate to a place with better job opportunities.
“I think it’s a good idea, moving people out,” he said of Lane’s proposal for more scattered-site housing. “It would make sense.”