The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) delivered its 2002 annual report last week, and it says that both the Plan for Transformation of public housing and the plan's future look good.
No homeless Chicagoans formed mobs blocking traffic anywhere last winter. Shelters took care of the 15,000 or so every night who needed beds, and total homelessness this year probably won't go beyond the predicted 160,000 people.
The rebuilding job is on schedule, CHA says, as it continues to tear down uninhabitable projects and move residents to scattered site, mixed income developments and the best senior facilities in the United States.
Still, there is dissent, and it comes from the usual suspects who claim the demolition process is moving faster than replacement housing can accommodate uprooted residents.
They say rebuilding isn't adequate, the tracking system through which CHA follows residents isn't working, city hall wants gentrified neighborhoods so middle and upper-income residents are lured to town and that we're in a crisis.
The Coalition to Protect Public Housing, a nettlesome critic of the CHA's 10-year, $1.6 billion rebuilding plan, says "Destruction of public housing is outpacing construction by rate of 10 to one."
CHA says that three years into the plan, 30 percent of units scheduled for redevelopment or rehab have been completed, 1,000 of them scattered site and 3,400 of them senior dwellings.
The public housing agency planned to complete 6193 units last year, but said that "multiple challenges" prevented it from meeting the goal. As a result, CHA fell short of its goal by 1,588 dwellings, completing only 4,605 units.
Its goal of rehabbing 1,063 scattered site units was reached, and some 2,200 "non-viable" units were demolished last year. More than 275 families moved to permanent housing, and 16 families were helped to buy their own homes.
Some 9,400 senior units are scheduled for rehab, and in what it said is a truly significant achievement, CHA reached 78 percent of its goal last year.
The annual report said CHA's Housing Choice Voucher Program helped 32,000 families rent private market housing apartments as the agency made supplementary payments to landlords that enabled low-income families to afford market-rate units.
Last month CHA's Executive Director Terry Peterson complained that Chicago Defender reports about the rebuilding plan "have been full of blatant misinformation." Mr. Peterson cited only one report, which was based on information developed by the Community Renewal Society.
CHA is attempting "something bold, ambitious and historic, and it is simply baffling that the Defender keeps missing this important national story," he said.
Peterson repeatedly says that CHA residents are Chicagoans first and that CHA's goal is greater than merely building public housing: It's to improve quality of life for residents. CHA's progress is to be saluted.
Its plan is indeed a bold one. The city and private developers are working together, creating exciting new neighborhoods, Peterson said. Many of those developers are profiting handsomely.
Yet, many advocates say residents, Chicagoans first, are entitled to reassurance to calm fears amid this massive construction job.
The next annual report would do well to address itself to them -- the needy, the fearful, the bewildered -- the very reason for the ambitious plan.
Article copyright REAL TIMES Inc.
Комментариев нет:
Отправить комментарий