JCUA Joins Campaign Demanding the City Lease Up of Vacant Housing Units

by Lauren Goldstein, Community and Policy Intern
(2nd year student at the University of Chicago, Social Service Administration MA program)

As winter nears, it is evermore concerning that there are currently over 68,000 low-income families and senior citizens waiting for the Chicago Housing Authority to afford them a place to call home. What’s more, CHA has failed to lease over 2000 vacant units of public housing across Chicago. These units could, and should, be providing homes to the people who desperately need them. This is why the JCUA is a member of the Chicago Housing Initiative’s “Lease-Up!” campaign.

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Lauren Goldstein

It’s that time of year again here in Chicago – the leaves are falling, the temperatures are dropping, and darkness is falling earlier and earlier. Before winter sets in, it is of grave importance that the 68,000+ low-income families and senior citizens who have been waiting for housing from the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) are afforded a place to call home. Given the CHA’s failure to properly and efficiently address the thousands of vacant units currently shuttered across the city and allow some of the 60,000 families who remain on the wait-list (as of March 2012) to lease these units, the JCUA has decided to join the Chicago Housing Initiative’s (CHI) “Lease-Up!” campaign. We firmly believe that housing is a human right, and have chosen to take a stand.

JCUA in Letter to Rahm: Keep Lathrop Homes Public

JCUA speaks up in solidarity with Lathrop Homes residents in a letter to city officials, stating: Keep Lathrop Homes 100% public housing, and lease up the hundreds of units at Lathrop that are currently vacant.

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Lathrop Homes

Sefer Hasidim (a 12th-century legal text) teaches that “if a community lacks a place of worship and a shelter for the poor, it is first obligated to build a shelter for the poor.”

Since 2010, JCUA has been working directly with residents at the Lathrop Homes public housing development, to empower the voice of the residents in the debate over the future of Lathrop Homes. The future of Lathrop Homes is critical for the following reasons:

• There are tens of thousands of families in Chicago on the waiting list for public housing.
• There are tens of thousands more who could not get on the waiting list since it was full and closed.
• Even with all this tremendous need for housing in Chicago, under 150 of Lathrop’s 900 units are currently occupied. Over 750 units of housing stand vacant in this development alone.
  

Lathrop Homes Advocates Set Teach-In and Action for April 24

Residents at a Lathrop Homes protest last year.

By Holly Krig
JCUA Community Organizer

Supporting the residents of Lathrop Homes, JCUA will host a teach-in and action in collaboration with the Chicago Housing Initiative. Lathrop Homes is a Chicago Housing Authority site in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood.

We are working directly with residents at Lathrop Homes, where CHA hopes to enact a plan similar to the mixed-income development at Cabrini’s Parkside, which has forcibly displaced hundreds of families and cost the city $11.4 million in bail-out for mostly market rate housing.

Lathrop Homes Teach-In and Action
(A collaboration of Chicago Housing Initiative, Common Ground and JCUA)
Tuesday, April 24, 10 am-noon (registration begins at 9:30)
Spertus Building, 630 S Michigan Ave., 9th floor
Contact Holly Krig: holly@jcua.org or 312-663-0960, ext 111

The Teach-In, which will help us understand the policy issues from the perspective of those who live with their impact will be followed by a public action. Folks will gather outside Spertus at noon for that portion of the day; details will be announced at the Teach-In. Contact me at JCUA before Friday if you are interested in helping to organize the action.

JCUA first came together with Lathrop Homes residents when we joined the Coalition to Protect Public Housing as CHA announced its Plan for Transformation.

Recently JCUA has joined the table again with a new formation of resident leaders called Common Ground. Once again, the timing is critical. CHA plans to announce its “recalibration” of the Plan for Transformation in June.

“Ensuring the Same for All”: Rabbi Bruce Elder on the Importance of Affordable Housing

On Friday, July 29, 2011 leaders from JCUA joined some 160 other representatives of organizations that are part of the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable at the White House for a policy briefing to exchange ideas on housing, healthcare, food justice and education. Below are two stories Rabbi Bruce Elder, JCUA’s new board president, shared on the importance of affordable housing.

Rabbi Bruce Elder (left) speaking to HUD leaders on the importance of affordable housing

Chicago, like most cities across the country, is in the midst of a housing crisis.  In 2011, a minimum-wage earner has to work 95 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, to afford a modest two-bedroom apartment in the Chicago metropolitan area, or more than two full-time jobs.

With this in mind, I want to share two stories:  One exemplifies the problem low-income people and communities are currently facing, and the second demonstrates an effective strategy to solve the dire need for affordable housing.

Lathrop Homes on Chicago’s northwest side is a 900-unit development with 730 current vacancies — a shocking fact considering that over 200,000 families applied for affordable housing when the Chicago Housing Authority opened up the waiting list last year.  Why all these vacancies? Many former residents wanted to stay in their homes, but have been displaced either as a result of the Chicago Housing Authority’s current policies or other market forces beyond their control.

Too many Chicagoans are being uprooted from their homes in public housing without adequate consideration for where they will go.

Faith Leaders Call on Washington Leaders for Renewed Public Housing Efforts

Fifty faith-based leaders, including JCUA Executive Director Jane Ramsey, gathered in Washington, D.C. July 29 to voice their concerns on the state of the nation’s public housing with Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Shaun Donovan.

At the forefront of the discussion were concerns with newly introduced HUD legislation would call for moving public housing units to the private sector. The Preservation, Enhancement, and Transformation of Rental Assistance Act of 2010 (PETRA) would be:

“A multi-year effort to transform properties with rental assistance contracts under various programs into properties with long-term, property-based sustainable rental assistance contracts that include flexibility to address capital requirements, to enhance resident choice, and to streamline and simplify the administration of rental assistance.”

-Department of Housing and Urban Development

Hud Secretary Shaun Donovan

From a Chicagoan standpoint, the words “transform” or “transformation” with regards to the issue of public housing are likely to induce thoughts of the city’s plan for transformation, which displaced thousands of families.

The thought that the proposed HUD legislation could lead to further losses of housing for vulnerable families, said Ramsey to HUD Secretary Donovan, “would be unacceptable.”

Donovan said HUD is looking to build safeguards into the legislation to prevent housing losses, but was unclear as to what those safeguards might look like.

What does seem more certain in HUD plans, however, is a shift back to making sure those displaced by public housing redevelopment are the first placed back in newly developed housing, and a shift back to one-for-one replacement of public housing– meaning that public housing units won’t be torn down until there are new units to replace them.

Both Ramsey and other leaders at the HUD meeting expressed the overall need to bring back a national commitment to housing development that will reach our society’s most vulnerable.

Learn more about JCUA’s housing work here.