One year ago, HUD took on the massive job of running the Chicago Housing Authority. Despite a few signs of progress, the agency has struggled to overcome the entrenched problems at CHA and has fallen well short of its goal to bring some real change by now.
Up early and eager for work, more than 100 Chicago Housing Authority residents packed the bleachers of the Robert Taylor Boys and Girls Club one May morning.
Many arrived wearing new boots, as instructed, and some were so excited they swarmed anyone who held a clipboard and looked official.
And why shouldn’t they be excited? The new CHA administration was promising janitorial jobs in a prototype program of tenant-owned businesses–part of a bigger plan to transform public housing by giving residents a glimpse of a different way of life and hope that they might someday leave the cinder-block apartments.
But the enthusiasm quickly withered. After a couple of hours, the residents were told that the paperwork wasn’t ready. Sorry for the wasted morning; come back next week.
“They’d want to dock us if we didn’t show up,” said one Taylor resident, Terry Blevins, 29, shaking his head. “How you going to make the program work if they don’t show up?”
Blevins’ frustration at the unfilled promise serves as a metaphor for the authority one year after the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development dramatically took it over.
A good idea–putting residents to work–is marred by weak execution. CHA residents are left waiting and wondering when real change will come to a system that has been a symbol of everything wrong with public housing in America.
Early on, HUD officials didn’t predict miracles but insisted residents and taxpayers would notice significant change within a year. Just last month, HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros was telling reporters in Washington how “economically integrated communities are coming to life” in places like Cabrini-Green. But so far, there’s mainly been demolition.
In fact, the takeover has been a yearlong study in how entrenched the CHA’s problems are. It is a story of new promise undermined by old realities: miserably designed buildings left decrepit for decades, gangs as old as HUD itself and an often-undependable work force trimmed nearly 15 percent by recent congressional cutbacks.
“The national system of public housing is on trial in Chicago,” Cisneros declared shortly after the takeover.
But interviews with CHA residents and officials, as well as with people outside the agency, make it clear that a year of federal control has shown that the great expectations raised by HUD may be torpedoed by a mix of unforeseen difficulties and problems more intractable than federal officials ever imagined.
Cisneros has repeated his promises–sometimes claiming premature credit–ever since former CHA chief Vincent Lane and his board resigned, a last defiant move after word got out that Mayor Richard Daley had given Cisneros the green light to clean house.
Lane was ousted largely because he was seen as a man with lots of vision and shoddy execution. His replacement, Joseph Shuldiner, was the top HUD public housing official, the bureaucrat with a golden resume who local observers doubted had sufficient foresight to effectively lead the agency.
As it turned out, as CHA’s executive director, Shuldiner has had plenty of vision, but he remains frustrated by a system that stubbornly resists improvement.
Indeed, HUD officials have found that installing their own leadership is far easier than making concrete change–no surprise, perhaps, to those who have seen Uncle Sam mess up welfare and other social programs in the past.
Listen to Cabrini resident Pamela Howard tell of her family’s recent experience with the authority’s newly improved, but still far from efficient, maintenance system.
Howard was quite pleased when she immediately got through on a new 800-number and placed a work order to fix her leaky, clogged sink. Several days later, a CHA worker arrived at her door, work order in hand.
But it was to repair her ceiling, which was just fine.
The CHA worker had the capability to fix her sink. In one of those farcical brushes with bureaucracy, though, Howard was told that only the order for the ceiling could be filled. Howard had to call again, and eventually she got her sink fixed.
Perhaps in the past a worker never would have come to fix her sink or ceiling. But taxpayers and residents of the CHA’s sprawling 40,000-unit system might be forgiven for remaining skeptical despite Cisneros’ statements that his agency would transform these poor excuses for housing into something livable–and that the agency would cede back local control of the CHA by the end of 1995.
“When (HUD) stepped in, it was like a thousand and one promises. And when you make promises and don’t follow through, it makes things worse,” said K.SO, 28, a Cabrini resident for 18 years who edits Voices of Cabrini, a neighborhood newspaper.
“The only way that Cabrini is going to work is for people from this area who have made it to come back and make a difference. You need somebody who can relate.”
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The CHA team led by Shuldiner, formerly Cisneros’ top aide for public housing, has sought to address the agency’s most vexing and important challenges: providing more job opportunities for residents, making CHA buildings safer and bringing order to a wasteful, ineffective bureaucracy.
But their efforts have been slowed in part by the desire to avoid problems and minimize upheaval for current residents:
– A program to employ tenants in resident-owned businesses has been slow to get off the ground, partly to ensure that public-aid recipients are registered under new welfare-reform programs that encourage a mix of work and assistance. The idea is to cut the CHA’s 90 percent unemployment rate, but some worry resident leaders’ control of the jobs could create patronage problems.
– In an effort to improve safety while cutting security costs that peaked last year at $74 million, the authority is eliminating hundreds of private security guards and relying more on redeployed CHA police and guards, as well as tenant patrols. But in its zeal to save money, the authority may be endangering tenant patrols who could face retaliation if they interrupt the business of powerful drug-dealing gangs.
– A chaotic work-order process has been replaced by a central, computerized system built around an 800-number meant to speed fixups and hold workers accountable. Unfortunately, as many as half of CHA families don’t have phones. And even when they do find one, they still must deal with a sometimes inefficient maintenance staff depleted by layoffs.
Taylor resident Kyle Greer said a CHA worker installed a new sink for her sister a couple of months ago. As he was leaving, “the guy said, `I forgot something,’ ” recalled Greer, 35. “We found out the other day what it was: He forgot to put putty around the fittings, and it’s leaking.”
The year-old administration certainly has spurred change in some instances. Resident leaders at Darrow Homes are working with the new CHA management team on a plan for the four-high-rise complex on the South Side that could set a model for future redevelopment efforts.
It also jump-started the languishing makeovers of Cabrini-Green and Henry Horner Homes, where the worst buildings have been razed. At Horner, such hazardous conditions as exposed wiring and defective electrical devices are being addressed for the first, possibly the only, time in years, if ever.
Yet more than a year after a federal judge approved an agreement to redevelop Horner, not one unit to replace three demolished buildings has been constructed, though contracts have been awarded to do so. The rebuilding process has been delayed by the process of relocating affected residents and ensuring that problem tenants are screened out so old problems aren’t re-created.
“We’re on 13 months and counting with nothing built,” said Bill Wilen, an attorney representing Horner residents who is one of the authority’s harshest critics. “The proof of (CHA’s) performance is the construction of the replacement housing.”
In the beginning, it took the new administration several months just to get a handle on the scope of problems it inherited, including budget accounting that had little relation to how and where money was spent. Last week, the CHA announced that internal audits of its operations led to changes that saved the agency an estimated $2 million in the last year.
Citing such efforts, Shuldiner said he believes the CHA’s biggest accomplishment of the last year was “beginning to create some credibility for the housing authority, that people are willing to be our partners …It’s not just a hopeless entity.”
But he acknowledged: “Obviously we have a long way to go.”
Certainly living in many CHA buildings remains a test of endurance. A recent visit to a building at Darrow Homes found a poorly functioning elevator. Taking the pitch-black stairwell required holding on to the railing, but a young passerby warned: “Excuse me. You don’t want to use the handrail–people are spitting and peeing on them.”
While the authority’s long-term goal must be to convert public housing into the way station it was intended to be, it still must improve living conditions for the thousands who will remain for years.
Though some residents contend that crime has worsened under the new security strategy, preliminary CHA figures suggest ) the agency has trimmed serious crime in some developments, particularly Dearborn Homes on the South Side.
The battle to improve safety starts in places like the red-brick building at 911 N. Hudson Ave. in Cabrini, where a tiny room filled with a wood-top desk and three beige folding chairs serves as tenant patrol headquarters.
Patrol members, mainly women in navy blue jackets with yellow lettering, use the room as a meeting place that provides a sense of community and security.
“This is where we take care of business,” explained Elaine Nalls, 48, co-captain of the building’s tenant patrol, which has operated since 1993.
The CHA’s new safety program makes such patrols a more integral part of a slimmer security force. “We don’t expect them to be police officers, that’s not their job,” said CHA Police Chief George Murray. “But they play a vital role in interacting with their fellow residents and assisting in the prevention of crime.”
Still, the CHA’s community policing model will mean greater responsibility for tenant patrols. They will be asked to watch buildings during the day to offset the departure of contract guards, though increases in CHA police and security personnel may improve overall safety.
Tenant patrol members will watch their buildings during the day, backed up to “roving” CHA police, Murray said. Many of the lobby security booths–home to the much-maligned contract guards–are being removed, according to Joseph Smith, a CHA administrator who oversees the tenant patrols.
Nalls, a divorced mother of four who moved into Cabrini in 1994, said she is concerned about the role tenant patrol members will be expected to play. “We should have more people involved, but we should not have more responsibility,” she said.
“We should have more people involved, but we should not have more responsibility,” she said.
In the meantime, efforts to get jobs for residents have taken on urgency as Congress and HUD have started to change rules to encourage residents to work, while the State of Illinois plans to cut off aid to recipients who refuse to try to find employment.
Resident council leaders, often partnering with private firms, are signing contracts with the CHA to employ hundreds of residents as custodians, exterminators and other workers. The man leading the initiative is Ron Carter, a former Los Angeles Laker basketball player who tries to nudge residents along the road to self-sufficiency with a mix of stern lectures and warm-hearted cheerleading.
One recent morning he was making his pitch to a room full of female residents at Robert Taylor who must seek work or eventually lose their state public-aid checks. He told them that the answers to the CHA’s problems can’t be found in its headquarters, at 626 W. Jackson Blvd.
“You all are the solution,” he said, his lanky frame towering over the young women.
Afterward, he bristled at the suggestion that businesses controlled by elected resident leaders are creating a new patronage system in a city synonymous with the practice. Carter said he sees the ventures as a way to “challenge the marketplace for leadership” in public housing, where “the most capable leaders . . . are likely in the gangs.”
He figures that giving the local advisory council presidencies control of jobs is a good hook to pull gang leaders to a more productive way of making money.
His hope is that the “young man who leads a gang of 20 young men can become the president of a landscaping company. And those same 20 young men can be out riding lawn movers instead of (robbing) people and selling rocks.”
Apart from employing tenants, the resident-owned businesses provide a political payoff for the CHA administration. They must win over residents as allies in the battles ahead over razing the worst buildings instead of fixing them, and moving at least some residents to largely white neighborhoods in the city and suburbs.
But gaining the trust of residents means not breaking promises–as on the day CHA left Taylor residents waiting at the Boys and Girls Club for the jobs that had been dangled in front of them.
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A week later, about a dozen residents returned, only to be told that the “tentative” start date for work had been pushed back again, this time to Tuesday morning.
Angry, but still enthused about working, residents were willing to give the CHA the benefit of the doubt–something their new bosses weren’t about to give them.
A letter, from Taylor resident leader Mildred Dennis, warned: “If you do not attend, you will not be able to work. … There will not be a 2nd chance to make this up. Please be on time . . .”