Tribune: Race, poverty and fair housing: Chicago's landmark Gautreaux case winds down

Just wanted to share this with you. Housing and real estate has been a frequent topic of this blog over the years. And this is probably something you might not know much about.

A federal judge, several lawyers and representatives of the Chicago Housing Authority on Friday formalized a special date: July 31, 2024. If all goes as planned, that last Wednesday of July more than five years from now will close out one of the nation’s longest and most impactful housing discrimination cases.

Dorothy Gautreaux, an Altgeld Gardens resident and lead plaintiff when the case was filed in 1966, died two years later at age 41. But her activism had helped launch a movement extending beyond the landmark legal battle that originated in Chicago: Her cause, housing fairness, also had broadened the goals of the civil rights movement. The anti-discrimination marches of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had come to embrace equal access to housing as a national cause.

For more than 40 years and with countless twists and turns, CHA has been trying to reverse what the U.S. Supreme Court determined in its 1976 Gautreaux ruling: Federal and local housing authorities in Chicago were violating the constitutional and civil rights of public housing tenants by concentrating and isolating them in low-income neighborhoods.

Over time, the court’s ruling slowed the purposeful crowding of black tenants in concentrated high-rise developments and accelerated the distribution of housing vouchers to integrate black families into communities throughout the city and suburbs. That remains the case today.

The Supreme Court decision also spurred CHA to build and renovate thousands of units and scatter them in more prosperous areas of Chicago. And it nudged a housing revolution, led by former Mayor Richard M. Daley, that included the teardown of the notorious Cabrini-Green public housing complex and others comparable to it.

BTW, the Sun-Times also wrote about this recently.

Chatham faces problems with crime, aging residents = Changing dynamics have hurt neighborliness - alderman

BUMP'D!!! this post was originally posted on August 20. Saw that people were still commenting on this post.

From a Sun Times article in their homes section, published yesterday

Even good neighborhoods can face tough times.

The middle-class, South Side neighborhood of Chatham has long been considered a strong and secure neighborhood. But more recently, residents have been challenged by an aging population and a generational divide, says Ald. Freddrenna Lyle (6th), not to mention a tragic increase in crime in recent months.

Alderman Lyle was extensively interviewed.

Almost all of her peers have moved to other neighborhoods or suburbs, she said,
but those who have come back don't seem to have time for neighborhood events.

"Their children have homework and dance lessons and karate lessons, and we haven't been able to get that group to understand the value of CAPS [Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy]," she said.

"And we have trouble getting our young back because the seniors didn't leave, and because of the schools. If you move back here, you might have to put your child in private school. You cannot have a vibrant community without the schools."

The alderman thinks that the proliferation of magnet schools has put neighborhoods
like Chatham at a disadvantage. When she was growing up, all the children on the block went to the same school, but now they are dispersed among many schools. That means their parents don't meet at school functions.

"We have to become involved in the schools in our community," she added. When she was growing up, she could walk to school, and so could everyone else. Everyone knew one another.

"If you were somewhere else and were threatened, even the bad kids would protect you because you were from their school," she said. "Now we have children on one block who go to five different schools."

Read the rest of the article here.

What Ald. Lyle says about schools could also be applied to churches. Even though there are 80 churches within 1 mile of 79th & King, how many people actually go to them?

What do 2nd Generation Chathamites think? Why have your friends left? What have you decided to stay? What's you favorite part of the neighborhood?

Section 8 Housing -Good idea gone Bad ?

http://www.chicagonow.com/blogs/one-story-up/2009/10/response-to-joe-section-8.html#


This article asks the question "Do white families deserve the crime Section 8 tenants bring with them? ".

Do you feel that the rise in crime comes from section 8 housing?

Public housing's island

Well public housing is changing in Chicago, but apparently the city still has a long way to go as far as the Trib is concerned. Most of I'm sure are familiar with Altgeld Garden that's about 130th Street and just directly west of the Bishop Ford (or I prefer Calumet) Expressway:

For all the talk of weaving public housing residents into the fabric of the city, the Chicago Housing Authority's ambitious Plan for Transformation includes this inconvenient fact:

When the plan is complete, nearly 1 of every 10 of those families will live more than 100 blocks south of the Loop, tucked amid landfills, industrial parks and a sewage treatment plant.

Mayor Richard Daley declared eight years ago that Chicago would end "the failed policies of the past." Yet a Tribune investigation found that the city has pumped hundreds of millions of federal tax dollars into housing complexes that preserve the very policies the plan was meant to reverse.

The largest is the Altgeld-Murray Homes, a sprawling 190-acre development built on the Far South Side for black factory workers during World War II. At that development alone, the CHA plans to spend $451 million rehabbing 1,998 barracks-style apartments, with politically connected Walsh Construction doing much of the work.

Altgeld sits in one of the city's most isolated areas. The nearest supermarket is miles away. Only one bus route serves the development. And it backs up to the Little Calumet River in an area once known as "The Toxic Doughnut" because of a long history of environmental problems.

Crime is another challenge. Open drug markets thrive at Altgeld, and shootings occur frequently enough to keep residents on edge.

"You guys are an island out here, cut off from everyone else," John Ball, the local police commander, noted during a recent community meeting with residents.

Well you should have seen Obama on 60 Minutes last year. Indeed I'm sure that his work as a community organizer on that part of town has been chronicled in his books. The Tribune especially makes mention of where he worked as a community organizer in his youth.

Another question to be asked here is if Altgeld is an island unto itself how can they integrate with the rest of the community. Also there's another aspect of transformation that hasn't reached its goal as of yet:

The CHA pushed to preserve the project as part of a strategy to sell the plan to tenants and housing advocates. The agency already was razing thousands of apartments, and it had vowed to deliver 25,000 new or rehabbed homes, enough to accommodate all residents living in public housing as of Oct. 1, 1999.

When the Plan for Transformation is complete, Altgeld will make up nearly 2,000 of the 25,000 units, more than any other development.

At first the CHA said the remake of Altgeld would be finished this year. But only about a third of the units have been completed, and the deadline has been pushed back by six years to 2014.

Those who support the rehab effort at Altgeld say its two-story row houses along winding streets are fundamentally different than the infamous high-rises that once symbolized all that was wrong with public housing.

"Out here in Altgeld, we don't call it a project," said Gertte Smith, site operations director for East Lake Management, the private firm run by Daley backer Elzie Higginbottom that manages Altgeld for the CHA. "We like to think of ourselves as the housing development in the suburbs."

That image, though, is clouded by lingering environmental concerns. Some of the region's biggest sources of toxic air pollution surround Altgeld, according to the most recent federal data examined by the Tribune.

The CHA contends the area is safe for families, but the environmental problems add another hurdle to the agency's already difficult job: persuading public housing residents to move to Altgeld.

Crime figures prominently in this story and while there isn't much mention of doing anything about any environmental problems that may exist down that way. At least there is a plan in the works to work on the issue of crime:

Some fear that when Altgeld is filled up, crime will worsen. "Once it starts to be occupied, [crime] will soar right through the roof," said Whitfield, the tenants lawyer. "Has there been some magic spray that has changed everything? The gangbangers aren't going anywhere."

But the local police commander, Ball, is hoping to prevent that. In August, he met with Altgeld residents to discuss crime. Ball told them the development is not as bad as other parts of his district.Even so, he said he's planning to reopen a substation that was closed a few years ago, install more police cameras and assign a dedicated sergeant and additional officers to the development.

Residents met Ball's initiatives with suspicion and loud jeers, but he pressed his point with those who would listen.

"With all the money and all the resources that are out here now, we want to maintain this and make it stronger," he said. "Do you know how lovely this could be if we could make it work?"

From the back of the room, resident Liquita Saulter scoffed under her breath. "Pipe dream," she said.

This is a story worth your time if you're interested in the plans for public housing.