After winning a landslide re-election campaign during which he touted his success in revamping the city’s public schools, Mayor Richard Daley is facing a deadline for figuring out how to fix another seemingly intractable trouble spot: the Chicago Housing Authority.
The CHA, which has been the federal government’s problem for the last four years, will return to city control this year. The prospect raises hope that Daley can have the same success repairing the CHA that he has had in fixing the schools.
But that, Daley said Tuesday, would require that federal legislators give him almost complete control over the agency.
“You have to. Otherwise it doesn’t work,” Daley said, when asked whether Congress must loosen restrictions on the CHA. “Look at what we did with the school board.
“If we didn’t get a relaxation on state laws and rules and regulations, we would have never changed around the Board of Education,” he said. “Nothing would have changed.”
The CHA, which had been on the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s list of troubled housing agencies since the list was created two decades ago, was in such disarray by 1995 that HUD seized control.
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But last August, HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo announced that the CHA had improved enough to be returned to city control. The city begged for time and won an eight-month transition. That period will be up in April, but city officials say the transition won’t be complete until mid-1999.
In some ways, Daley faces a similar political dynamic with the CHA as he did the schools: Republican politicians are happy to take broken bureaucracies and hand them over to a Democratic mayor. Then Daley becomes the politician forced to take on the entrenched bureaucracies, whether the Chicago Teachers Union and the old Pershing Road hierarchy at the schools or the thousands of functionaries at CHA and HUD.
The legal groundwork for local control already is in place, via a landmark public housing reform bill signed by President Clinton last year.
The new law includes a “home-rule flexibility” measure that permits municipalities to petition HUD for the right to administer public housing. The cities still would be governed by basic requirements, including restrictions on displacing residents and demolition.
“If the city wants to take over all the housing, (the mayor) can submit a plan and do it,” said a staffer on the House Banking Committee, which handled the public housing legislation.
MarySue Barrett, a former member of Daley’s inner circle who now heads the Metropolitan Planning Council and has been involved in the CHA transition effort, said the mayor needs to convince Congress that Chicago’s public housing is worthy of a bold experiment.
She likened it to the state legislature’s creation of charter schools. The city would agree to meet HUD performance standards in return for legislators throwing out red tape. That would give the mayor the financial and management flexibility necessary to make public housing an asset.
It remains to be seen just how much control–and responsibility–the mayor wants. Housing Commissioner Julia Stasch, who heads the CHA transition team, has said the mayor sees the redevelopment of public housing as a key issue in reclaiming neighborhoods.
But the potential political downside is clear: Because the majority of public housing residents are African-American, any failure to change their lot would leave him open to criticism from a community he has successfully courted in recent years.
The mayor’s commitment will be measured in part by whom he dispatches from City Hall to take over and how much political responsibility he agrees to shoulder. It appears that the mayor will name a 10-member board to oversee the CHA and choose its executive director–the exact structure that was in place before the takeover.
Joseph Shuldiner, the HUD turnaround specialist who is running the CHA, has a contract through October 2000. But it is not clear whether Daley will keep Shuldiner or seek a whole new team–a key strategy in his efforts to reform the schools, the parks and the Chicago Transit Authority.
City Hall sources have mentioned mayoral chief of staff Forrest Claypool, deputy chief of staff Terry Teele and schools chief of staff Phillip Jackson as possible replacements for Shuldiner.
Any plan to revamp public housing is likely to play well with Republicans in Congress, who are seeking a way to reinvent a system they believe does not work.
At a taping of WBBM-AM’s “At Issue” program last week, Rep. Henry Hyde (R.-Ill.) said he would support loosening federal restrictions.
“I believe over-regulation is a major stumbling block,” he said. “I would support an elimination–or at least a minimizing–on federal regulations in public housing to give the mayor a chance to do what he wants to do.”
Deregulation and greater local control were central to last year’s federal reform bill, including the home-rule flexibility measure.
“The housing authorities hated it because it was a monopoly buster,” said the banking committee staffer. “We’re looking for accountability–to make local entities take responsibility and not stick it at the federal authority.
“That’s how public housing has always been. They blame it on the feds.”