BY KATHERINE E. WALZ
You’ve probably seen the flurry of news coverage about Chicago Housing Authority (CHA)
Housing Choice Voucher households living in luxury apartments in downtown
Chicago.
This story insinuates that but for these 298 households living in
predominately white, low-poverty neighborhoods, the remaining 45,000 households
in the CHA voucher program would not be living in poor, racially segregated
parts of the City of Chicago.
This is just flat wrong, and this attack on
families with vouchers who to seek to live in better, more integrated
neighborhoods is unwarranted.
The Housing Choice Voucher
Program is one of the government's main federal housing assistance programs,
giving more than 2 million very low-income households, including
families, senior citizens and people with disabilities, vouchers to cover a
portion of their rent in the private market. Vouchers are one of the best means
of relocating families to more racially integrated, lower poverty
neighborhoods. Less than 1% of the CHA's vouchers have exception rents, and
only a fraction of those vouchers have rents in excess of 200% of the fair
market rent. Those rents will be ending soon because, more than a year ago, CHA
reduced the exception rents to 150% of the fair market rent.
So the Better Government
Association (BGA) and the Sun-Times published a story that was
not only not news, it’s old news. Former U.S.
Rep. Aaron Schock made the “super voucher” controversy his final salvo before
stepping down. Crains Chicago Business covered that story, highlighting some of the
exception rents paid by the CHA in high-opportunity areas of the City of
Chicago. Had the BGA and Sun-Times read that story, they would
have also found a response from the Shriver Center and Access Living refuting
much of what Schock had alleged two years ago.
The much bigger story here is
the pervasive pattern of residential segregation in the City of Chicago, where
households of color primarily reside in communities with little opportunity for
themselves and their families. Voucher holders, the majority of whom are
African-American, are likewise clustered in high-poverty, racially segregated
neighborhoods. A story about that, and the real reasons behind it, would have
resulted more realistic assessment of the current state of the voucher program
in Chicago. The Chicago Tribune’s documentation of the limited time voucher holders are
given to find a unit, which likely leads to voucher holders taking any
unit where a landlord will take the voucher, is one example of such a story.
The Sun-Times/BGA
piece also completely botched why the CHA has to offer households with vouchers
the chance to live in better neighborhoods. It’s not to waste taxpayer
dollars—it’s to comply with civil rights laws. Housing authorities like the CHA
have a duty
to affirmatively further fair housing, which means they must
develop programs to overcome impediments to fair housing choice for protected
classes, such as racial minorities, persons with disabilities, and families
with children (all three groups making up a significant percentage of the
CHA’s current voucher population). The City of Chicago has
that same legal obligation. For that reason, the city should not to react to
this story or direct the CHA to further reduce any opportunity for voucher
households to live in more integrated neighborhoods.
There is a cost associated
both with allowing and attempting to end residential segregation. TheSun-Times/BGA
piece chose to focus on the cost to taxpayers of the 298 households (out of
more than 45,000) who use their vouchers to secure an accessible unit, locate
to a safe community, or get into a good school district. These are often
predominately white neighborhoods in Chicago where rents are higher and
landlord discrimination is pervasive. The cost to society of ignoring
segregation and wagging our fingers at those policies intended to overcome it,
however, is much higher. Children who grow up in poor, racially concentrated
communities are more likely to face physical and mental health issues, have low
educational attainment, and struggle with unemployment throughout their lives.
Former Rep. Schock chose not
to take the opportunity to correct his misunderstanding. But theSun-Times and
the BGA should do just that. At a minimum, both institutions should stop
further propagating this message.
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