The CHA's Plan for Transformation
The CHA’s Plan for Transformation guarantees every public housing family a place to live after the agency demolishes its 52 high-rises and builds mixed-income communities in their place. But the plan makes no provision for those on the waiting list.
From 1994 to 1999, 36,989 families applied for CHA housing, agency records show. In those six years, 3,754 left the list to move into CHA family units. The agency still accepts applications, which most prospective tenants fill out at the CHA Occupancy Department, 4700 S. State St. Applications are stamped with date and time, which determines their place on waiting lists organized by the number of bedrooms requested.
When applicants reach the top of the lists, they are matched with the first available apartment. Families who turn down housing offers are removed from the general waiting list, but can add their names to a secondary list for specific properties or scattered-site housing, said Gregory Russ, chief of staff for the CHA’s Operations Department. The thousands of scattered-site units are intended to help fulfill a longstanding federal court order to desegregate public housing.
Under federal law, the CHA was required to give preference to families on the list who lived in substandard housing, paid more than half their incomes toward rent, or were homeless. Congress made those requirements optional in 1998, and the agency chose to eliminate them, Russ said.
Preferences are “difficult to verify” and make “it harder to explain” to other families why they were passed over, he said.
Like the Smileys, 35-year-old Charlene Brown-Priest couldn’t wait. Last December, after an operation left her temporarily unable to work, Brown-Priest landed in a homeless shelter with her 17-year-old daughter, Kenya Brown.
The family had been living above a storefront church near 61st Street and Vernon Avenue in Woodlawn. Brown-Priest said she could barely cover the rent with her $8.25-an-hour job as a full-time security guard.
The $400 per month apartment had “no running water, no working toilets and mice running everywhere,” Brown-Priest said. Living there was “six months of hell, but it was still a place to put our heads.”
She said she added her name to the CHA waiting list in December, then squatted in a Taylor apartment with her daughter and her husband, Stanley Priest.
“This is heaven,” Kenya Brown said, standing in the sparsely furnished, but clean and newly painted, two-bedroom apartment. “We’ve got heat over here. It is so good to have a flush toilet again,” she said.
The author illustrates the “dim, rundown apartment complex,” she walks in, hand and hand with her girlfriend. Using the terms “dim,” and “rundown” portrays the apartment complex as an unsafe, unclean environment; such an environment augments the violence the author anticipates. Continuing to develop a perilous backdrop for the narrative, the author describes the night sky “as the perfect glow that surrounded [them] moments before faded into dark blues and blacks, silently watching.” Descriptions of the dark, watching sky expand upon the eerie setting of the apartment complex by using personification to give the sky a looming, ominous quality. Such a foreboding sky, as well as the dingy apartment complex portrayed by the author, amplify the narrator’s fear of violence due to her sexuality and drive her terror throughout the climax of the
is a hard, dangerous, and filthy place where it is difficult to find a job. Some relatives of the couple and themselves get a house, but find out it is a swindle.
One of the most prominent concerns of Evicted is the issue of inescapable financial instability as it relates to eviction. In the very first few pages of the book, Desmond reveals that the majority of poor renting families in America spend over 50% of their income on housing, with an even more astonishing one in four spending over 70% of their income on it (4). When families are spending the majority of their already meager income on housing alone, it is no surprise that they have little money left for savings or self-betterment programs such as a college education. Compounded with this is the fact that some welfare systems are constructed in a way that discourages long-term financial responsibility. For example, Supplemental Security Income, a program that provides monthly stipends for low-income elderly or disabled individuals, is revoked if individuals have too much money in their bank account (217). For
As per the State Housing Authority, the issue and trend of homelessness has changed particularly throughout the most recent three decades. Public homelessness first turned into an issue in the 1970's and now it is normal to see individuals congregating before sanctuaries and thinking about park seats. Soup kitchens are generally stuffed to limit. Safe houses have multiplied their ability since 1993 and they dismiss individuals consistently because of absence of cots (Kenyon 1991). During 1987, Congress passed the Stewart B. Mckinney Homeless Ass...
Housing segregation is as the taken for granted to any feature of urban life in the United States (Squires, Friedman, & Siadat, 2001). It is the application of denying minority groups, especially African Americans, equal access to housing through misinterpretation, which denies people of color finance services and opportunities to afford decent housing. Caucasians usually live in areas that are mostly white communities. However, African Americans are most likely lives in areas that are racially combines with African Americans and Hispanics. A miscommunication of property owners not giving African American groups gives an accurate description of available housing for a decent area. This book focuses on various concepts that relates to housing segregation and minority groups living apart for the majority group.
In the United States, it is practically impossible to walk down most streets without coming across a homeless person. The issue of homelessness has worsened because of the number of veterans back from our most recent wars. They have resorted to homelessness as their only refuge after being unable to maintain a stable home and/or not receiving the treatments they need. But as veteran homelessness demands more attention, especially in California, various solutions are being brought to action. The “housing-first strategy” being offered to homeless veterans and those endangered of becoming homeless, has played a major part in moving California closer to having an end to veteran homelessness in 2015.
When she moves to Portland she come across a Motel that is $ 120 week. She also is able to grab two jobs one at a nursing home for $ 7 an hour and the other is at The Maids for $ 6.65 an hour. At the nursing home her job is to feed the residents then wash the dishes after. While at The Maids her jo is to clean, dust vacuum houses. Her work is exhausting, especially the maids must continuously move at a fast pace. They are shuttled from house to house and clean the rooms as fast as they can. As an employee the maids are making $ 6.65 an hour per person, Dr. Ehrenreich figures out that The Maids actually charge customers $25 per hour. She then starts to wonder why does she only gets such a small fraction of that money. They have poor work conditions as well they are not allowed to eat or drink on the job. Dr. Ehrenreich later develops an intense rash and her boss Ted told her to work through it but it got so bad she had to rely on one of her restrictions and contact her dermatologist for a prescription. One day while cleaning a house her partner Holly hurts her ankle. Ehrenreich tells Holly that she can’t work with her ankle injured, but all Holly wants to do is call Ted. Ehrenreich takes the phone from Holly and tells Ted that she does not like the way he treats his employees but Ted tells
She decides if she could earn $7 an hour, then she could afford $500 rent. She found a place to rent 45 minutes away from work. In order to deal with the financial responsibilities, Ehrenreich took to the streets in search for another unskilled job since she did not want to use her car as a place of residence. She continues her experiment in a new environment which took her to Maine since the area is mostly a Caucasian community. When she realized that Portland was just another $6-$7 an hour town, she picked up two jobs to be practical. She began her quest for lodging at Motel 6. After several disappointments searching for a place to lie; she found a cottage for $120 a week and determined to poor cannot compete with the rich in the housing market. Ehrenreich moved to Minnesota to finish her experiment, where she hoped there would be a satisfying harmony between rent and wages. She locates an apartment from a friend lasting a short period until she finds a place to stay on her own. She found housing to be a struggle as there seems to be a shortage of houses; as a result she transitioned herself into a hotel. Her stay at the hotel proved to surpass her estimated expenses despite the fact this was her only safe
Where Boy lived high, I lived - well, not low, but in the way congenial to myself. I thought twenty-four dollars was plenty for a ready-made suit, and four dollars a criminal price for a pair of shoes. I changed my shirt twice a week and my underwear once. I had not yet developed any expensive tastes and saw nothing wrong with a good boarding-house. (Page 1...
In contrast to popular assumption, discrimination in public housing is becoming more prevalent than ever before. Testing done by the Fair Housing Center of Greater Boston has found that today people of color are discriminated against in nearly half of their efforts to buy, sell, finance, or rent property (“1968-Present Housing Discrimination). The statistics are even worse when considering colored people who have families as the testing found that they are discriminated against approximately two thirds of the time (“1968-Present Housing Discrimination”) In addition to facing great difficulty in property affairs, people of color are less likely to be offered residence in desirable locations. 86 percent of revitalized
Sidney, Mara S. 2003. Unfair Housing: How National Policy Shapes Community Action. Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas.
...nt of $764 and a staggering 43% cannot afford to purchase an average priced home ($140,422). With that being said, over 8,000 families are on waiting lists for subsidized and affordable housing. Many things can prevent someone from housing such as poor credit histories, unresolved debts, and criminal backgrounds. Without affordable child care or dependable transportation, families have a greater challenge of moving towards autonomy.
The first few nights Barbra stays at Motel 6, which had questionable hygiene (Ehrenreich, 2011, p. 53). Barbra tried many places for housing first being Glenwood Apartment which was $65 a week with a shared bathroom and kitchen, with someone described as a “character, but clean” (Ehrenreich, 2011, p. 55) but during the tour Barbra could not even see the kitchen because there was a man sleeping in it and the room she would be staying in had no window (Ehrenreich, 2011, p. 56). While cheap the place was a bust. Barbra looks at another place for $150 a week and one for $110 a week but had very little privacy while being ground floor on a busy street (Ehrenreich, 2011, p. 56). Which left her with Blue Haven Motel, which offered a cottage for $120 a week a $100 deposit including a bedroom, living area, with TV and linens included (Ehrenreich, 2011, p. 56). Barbra in this city again is doing better than some of the people she is working with. One of the young girls at her cleaning job can only afford to have a small bag of Doritos for lunch even though she is living with her boyfriend and mother (Ehrenreich, 2011, p. 78). Most of the people Barbra worked with were living with extended family while Pauline one of the older women owned her own house but all the bedrooms were full with her kids and grandkids so she slept on the couch in the living room (Ehrenreich, 2011, p.
It is often easy to castigate large cities or third world countries as failures in the field of affordable housing, yet the crisis, like an invisible cancer, manifests itself in many forms, plaguing both urban and suburban areas. Reformers have wrestled passionately with the issue for centuries, revealing the severity of the situation in an attempt for change, while politicians have only responded with band aid solutions. Unfortunately, the housing crisis easily fades from our memory, replaced by visions of homeless vets, or starving children. Metropolis magazine explains that “…though billions of dollars are spent each year on housing and development programs worldwide, ? At least 1 billion people lack adequate housing; some 100 million have none at all.? In an attempt to correct this worldwide dilemma, a United Nations conference, Habitat II, was held in Istanbul, Turkey in June of 1996. This conference was open not only to government leaders, but also to community organizers, non governmental organizations, architects and planners. “By the year 2000, half the world’s people will live in cities. By the year 2025, two thirds of the world population will be urban dwellers ? Globally, one million people move from the countryside to the city each week.? Martin Johnson, a community organizer and Princeton professor who attended Habitat II, definitively put into words the focus of the deliberations. Cities, which are currently plagued with several of the severe problems of dis-investment ?crime, violence, lack of jobs and inequality ?and more importantly, a lack of affordable and decent housing, quickly appeared in the forefront of the agenda.
The solutions to residential segregation could be classified according to the basis which include place, people and indirect approaches (Bouston, 2013). The main aim of policies based on place is to improve the amenities and housing stocks in black dominated neighborhoods as a means of encouraging the white to settle in these areas or alternatively creation of affordable options for housing in the whites’ neighborhood to encourage the white settling in such places. However the challenges to this approach is that research conducted showed that the white households still had a negative mentality towards the black neighborhoods and no matter the improvement to these neighborhoods, they still won’t move. Another challenge with the policy is that improvements to neighborhoods will consequently lead to rise in house prices making it unaffordable even to those currently living