Public housing limbo

From today's Tribune:

A Tribune investigation found that almost nine years into what was billed as a 10-year program, the city has completed only 30 percent of the plan's most ambitious element—tearing down entire housing projects and replacing them with new neighborhoods where poor, working-class and wealthier families would live side by side.

In fact, of those public housing units that have been built, nearly half went up before the plan officially started in 2000.

The Chicago Housing Authority points to its success in rehabbing thousands of traditional public housing units and apartments for seniors, and says it has completed nearly 65 percent of the work called for under the overall plan. But the agency acknowledges that it can't say exactly when it will finish replacing thousands of units it has torn down.

"This isn't a race," said Lewis Jordan, the CHA's chief executive. "We are methodically moving forward."

Hundreds of additional units are under construction, and Jordan said the current goal is to complete the plan by 2015. But some insiders concede it might take another 10 years beyond that.

Former residents may be the least surprised by the situation. From the start, many predicted they would be displaced and forgotten while developers grabbed coveted swaths of city real estate for re-development and private profit.

In pushing the plan, the Daley administration, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Habitat Co., the court- appointed overseer of public housing construction, placed what amounted to a high-stakes wager:

Upscale homes in the new developments would not only raise the aspirations of public housing families but also spur the construction of badly needed housing for the poor and affordable housing for working people struggling to buy a home.

Instead, the market-rate homes have proven in some cases to be an albatross.

From the beginning, construction at the new communities moved slowly, held up by bureaucracy, politics and complex financing.

Now, the downturn in the housing market threatens to bog down the plan even further because developers are struggling to sell high-priced homes amid a glut of new construction across the city.

Read the whole thing.