To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: CPPH_Info-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ There is 1 message in this issue. Topics in this digest: 1. Integration in Chicago area housing still deferred From: Grant ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Message: 1 Date: Thu, 30 Jan 2003 12:10:39 -0800 (PST) From: Grant Subject: Integration in Chicago area housing still deferred --- Wayne Sherwood Integration in housing still a dream deferred The Daily Northwestern Evanston IL Dan Schwerin Column January 30, 2003 Public housing is supposed to be changing. Chicago's infamous projects, where many of the city's poor and black citizens have been warehoused since the 1960s, are being erased from both the skyline and memory. The new gospel in public housing is what used to be called Section 8 and now goes by the name Housing Choice Vouchers. Funded by the federal government but administered locally, these vouchers are meant to allow low-income residents to spread out into neighborhoods, integrated both racially and economically. But so far, in both Chicago and Evanston, this is just another dream deferred. That's why several public interest legal groups filed a class-action lawsuit against the Chicago Housing Authority last week, alleging the agency is perpetuating segregation by moving its tenants out of the Projects and into the old ghettos. The CHA evicted them, gave them vouchers and sent them off to the slums on the South and West sides. "It's Urban Renewal again -- the forced mass relocation of black people," said Sharon Legenza, one of the attorneys suing the CHA. "The idea of Section 8 is to try to deconcentrate low-income families." The result has been just the opposite: ghettoization. Nearly 80 percent of the involuntarily displaced, voucher-armed families have been moved to neighborhoods that are 95 percent black and have above-average poverty. Legenza and her colleagues blame the CHA for not providing adequate support, but they also decry widespread discrimination by landlords against tenants trying to use vouchers. A report last year by the Lawyers' Committee for Better Housing found that landlords in Chicago reject tenants with vouchers outright about half the time, and even more often if the tenant happens to be a minority. Such "income-source" discrimination is illegal in Chicago, but not in Evanston, where landlords defeated an attempt this fall to prohibit the discrimination. There are 982 voucher holders in Evanston, all but 82 of whom are black, including a large percentage of single mothers. As in Chicago, they live on the South and West sides, in Evanston's traditional ghettos, where minority and poverty concentration is highest. Even in those neighborhoods, many can't find anywhere to use their vouchers at all. Ald. Ann Rainey (8th) -- whose ward is home to the majority of voucher-holders and who led the fall fight against what she called "the last way to legally discriminate in our community" -- reiterated her frustration this week: "Until there is an enforceable law that makes source of income a protected class, until there is competent housing authority staff, particularly the Housing Authority of Cook County field workers, and unless Housing Choice Voucher tenants can pass landlord screening, housing choice voucher holders have no chance of living where they choose in Evanston." So we're left with de facto segregation. The Housing Choice Voucher program may not be perfect, but it is a well-intentioned plan to improve the lives of our least privileged citizens. Unfortunately, as long as housing authorities bumble, as long as landlords discriminate and as long as City Council looks the other way, the dream of an integrated community may remain just that: a dream. Dan Schwerin is a Weinberg junior. He can be reached at d-schwerin@northwestern.edu __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/