Editor’s note: This is the second story examining government home buyouts. Read part one, which focuses on Illinois’ program, here.

WOODBRIDGE TOWNSHIP, N.J. – In an area once dotted with single family homes, a one-mile gravel path weaves through wetlands, thousands of native plants and rain gardens. 

The New Jersey Turnpike quietly whirs in the background of the 30-acre restoration park, located on the edge of a neighborhood in the manufacturing and warehousing town of about 100,000, less than an hour from New York City. 

In 2012, Superstorm Sandy swept through and damaged hundreds of homes. That year, officials from Woodbridge worked with the state to buy and demolish 171 single-family homes through a program called Blue Acres. 

After the homes were torn down and most families moved away, ecologists from Rutgers University designed the restoration area to absorb rainfall and flood waters from the three waterways that bound the park from the north, south and east. 

The park – and how the state helped residents move out of a floodplain – is a blueprint for other states and communities facing recurrent flooding, climate experts say.  

“​​One of the reasons that [Blue Acres] is pointed to so often is that because it is big and prominent and well funded,” said A.R. Siders, a climate researcher at the University of Delaware. “It is also able to do things that are creative.” 

The state recently launched a pilot program to address a key concern after homeowners agree to a buyout: where they go next. 

For decades, local, state and federal governments have worked with residents to buy their properties, tear down structures and turn the land into open space in order to mitigate flooding. Buyouts are a common practice in New Jersey, which faces coastal flooding in addition to riverine and urban flooding. It’s also happening in Illinois, where flooding is the state’s most prominent natural disaster, according to state experts. 

Illinois’ buyout program has benefited thousands of residents, particularly when their options are limited. But the program faces inconsistent funding and is known for taking too long to get residents much-needed cash to move away. When they are able to leave, there’s no guarantee they’ll be able to afford to move to a flood-free area. 

Read More: For Many Illinoisans in Flood-Prone Areas, Buyouts Are the Only Way Out

Blue Acres and New Jersey face similar problems, but they have the funding and resources to make it a more proactive, adaptive program, experts told Illinois Answers. 

“It’s difficult to even define what success means in terms of a buyout,” said Anna Weber, a policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C. 

But “there are a lot of really useful lessons that we can apply from Blue Acres to other programs,” she said. “There is a lot of deliberate learning and applying of lessons within the Blue Acres program … and there’s a lot of opportunities to learn from the experiences of that program in other places around the country.”

Blue Acres’ Model

Since 1995, Blue Acres has purchased about 1,100 homes, the majority acquired after Superstorm Sandy in 2012, said Courtney Wald-Wittkop, who runs the program at the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. The year after Sandy, the federal government allocated $300 million to acquire and demolish homes.

In addition to federal funding, every year since 2020 Blue Acres has received a portion of the state’s corporate business tax, thanks to voters who approved a constitutional amendment dedicating funds to environmental, conservation and preservation programs. 

The yearly amount varies based on the revenue collected. In 2023, Blue Acres received $10 million, which will be spent over a few years, Wald-Wittkop said. 

New Jersey’s state-based funding source “allows the program to be much more nimble and flexible, in some ways, than programs that are specifically relying, for example, on FEMA funding sources,” Weber said. 

That consistent funding allows Blue Acres to move quickly on a sale so homeowners don’t have to wait for federal funding, Wald-Wittkop said. FEMA-funded buyouts take a median of more than five years, according to a study by the NRDC. 

Blue Acres aims to complete sales within six to 12 months, Wald-Wittkop said, but factors such as funding availability, title complications and the homeowner’s responsiveness can slow the process. The homeowner can also appeal the appraised value, which can add time.

Siders, who studied Blue Acres as a part of her research on climate change adaptation policies, said it has been “able to overcome challenges that are really common in buyout programs.” For example, Blue Acres brought together civil engineers and real estate experts to speed up home evaluations, and it helped homeowners “who were underwater on their mortgages to be able to be eligible for the program, which normally they would not be.”   

Blue Acres also assigns residents a case manager.

“The Blue Acres program has had a big focus on the resident experience in the form of case management, as well as what we might call wraparound services,” Weber said.  Those services could include help working with the bank, finding a new home or assisting with the moving process – all things not included in federally funded acquisitions, she said.

Wald-Wittkop said case managers understand the needs of the homeowners, which helps speed up the process. She pointed to feedback from case managers, who noticed that some homeowners were hiring attorneys to handle simple closings, which was causing delays. Because of their input, program officials recommended the state use a title company to close on some properties on behalf of the homeowner, making the process more efficient. 

Illinois’ Flood Hazard Mitigation Program, in comparison, does not provide case managers. It is one of two buyout programs in the state and is funded by state legislature allocation, which often runs dry. The other program is federally funded only after natural disaster declarations.  

The Flood Hazard Mitigation Program in the Illinois Department of Natural Resources has one staff member, who works with another state agency to close on the homes. Blue Acres, on the other hand, has about 19 full-time positions, Wald-Wittkop said, and is part of the Office of Climate Resilience, which has about 40 staff.  

Read More From This Series:

• Flooding: Illinois’ Most Threatening Natural Disaster
• Chatham Flooding Mitigation Program Flounders, But Oak Park Sees Success 
• ‘Green Alleys’ Prevent Flooding, But Vulnerable Neighborhoods Must Wait

Addressing the Lack of Affordable Housing

A common challenge with buyout programs is that residents are often left to find new – and hopefully affordable – housing on their own, Siders said. 

The focus is often on getting people out of their homes, but not necessarily on where they go next. Buyout programs are very rarely tied to discussions about where new housing is being built, how much new housing is being built and affordability, she said. 

“There’s kind of a disconnect there,” she said. 

New Jersey is aiming to address this disconnect with a pilot program that will build affordable housing for Blue Acres participants and first-time homebuyers. 

Launched in October 2023, the Smart Move Program seeks to “keep residents in New Jersey with affordable housing and put them in a safer location than where they currently were,” said Jim Mooney, who runs the program at the Department of Community Affairs. 

After Hurricane Ida in 2021, the state invited local governments in 12 counties most affected by the storm to submit a development plan for an affordable housing project. 

The development has to be outside the 500-year floodplain, contain at least six single-family housing units and serve mixed-income households. The department encouraged applicants to come up with innovative and resilient development ideas, Mooney said, like buildings with heat-absorbing glass or solar panels.

Two municipalities applied, and the department plans to announce awards in August, with the goal to begin construction in December, Mooney said.  

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development put $50 million into Smart Move, he said, and each project is eligible for up to $15 million. 

Once the developments are built, Blue Acres participants and first-time homebuyers can apply for down payment assistance to purchase a home there. Blue Acres participants will be prioritized, Mooney said. 

He’s hoping that it’s a “blueprint we can use for future programs.” 

How Woodbridge Transformed the Land

After Sandy tore through the Watson-Crampton neighborhood of Woodbridge in 2012, “almost everybody agreed that it was time to get out,” Woodbridge Township Mayor John McCormac told the Illinois Answers Project. 

The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection acted quickly, McCormac said, “so much that I think a lot of people started seeing houses coming down around them, and started thinking, ‘Why am I not doing this if my neighbors are doing it?’” 

The state covers the entire cost of the buyout – including property appraisals, closings, environmental reviews and demolitions – but the local government can supplement with its own funding. 

Woodbridge put $200,000 of its municipal funding into the buyout project, according to the mayor’s spokesperson, to help residents who needed assistance and to buy bank-owned homes, which are not eligible for buyouts. The town limited financial assistance to $20,000 for families who needed help with a new down payment or other moving costs. 

Woodbridge has a strong tax base, McCormac said, which allows them to invest more in projects that smaller local governments may not be able to. “We have a very strong financial situation, strong surpluses,” he said. 

Funding for the restoration area came from several sources: an additional $220,000 from Woodbridge, $25,000 from the New Jersey Corporate Wetlands Restoration Partnership, and $608,000 from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and Rutgers. 

The township also paid a contractor $300,000 to install a one-mile trail, the mayor’s spokesperson said. 

With most buyout programs, including in Illinois, the land acquired by the government often becomes open space without any utility.

“Woodbridge was incredibly proactive,” in deciding what to do with the spaces where homes were torn down, said Brooke Maslo, an ecologist at Rutgers University whose team led the restoration project.

The project was the first time Rutgers worked with a community to restore open space, and Maslo said they’re now trying to expand the model across New Jersey. 

While the properties were being demolished, Woodbridge officials asked Maslo’s team to devise a plan for the land. Rutgers began with an ecological survey to assess vegetation, habitat type and existing infrastructure. The ecologists also looked at socio-economic factors, such as property values, population and amenities. 

Because the area is bordered by three waterways, it’s susceptible to flooding. To minimize impact, the park features engineered solutions like rain gardens and expanded wetlands, said Tom Flynn, the town’s floodplain manager. 

Rain gardens are designed to capture the first half an inch of rainfall, Flynn said, but “they’re not designed to mitigate against your Sandy’s, your Ida’s, your major storm events.”

The wetlands act as a natural sponge that absorbs water. The vegetation surrounding the wetlands slows the speed of flood water and spreads the water more evenly across the floodplain, reducing flood heights. 

Wetlands can save significant amounts of damage, according to a 2017 study in Scientific Reports. The study found that coastal wetlands in the northeastern U.S. reduced flood heights and avoided an estimated $625 million in damages from Sandy. 

While the restoration area hasn’t been severely damaged by flooding since Sandy, the homeowners who chose to stay in the neighborhood still face the risk of flooding, Flynn said, and they are subject to stricter flood protection regulations, like elevating the house when undergoing other substantial renovations. 

“If they’re going to stay here, we want to ensure that they’re safe,” he said. 

Last year, Maslo and her team published a primer on creating flood-resilient landscapes that they are distributing to municipalities. It compiles over eight years of research and learnings from Woodbridge Township and other projects, which she hopes will empower more communities to take on restoration projects. 

“We keep moving in this direction,” she said, “it’s going to be wildly successful.” 

Tracey Scott said it’s not her fault.

The Chicago Housing Authority CEO on Wednesday touted the agency’s efforts to help thousands of people find affordable places to live — and blamed its well-documented failures on “historic challenges” that predated her four-year tenure.

“I’ve heard you,” Scott said to critics during a meeting of the City Council’s Committee on Housing and Real Estate, her first City Hall appearance in more than a year. “We have been addressing historic challenges. … We have much to celebrate, but there is much more work to do.”

Some alderpeople and almost all members of the public who spoke at the meeting agreed with that last part.

Scott faced withering criticism and calls to resign from residents and even a member of the CHA’s governing board. They said the agency has let its properties deteriorate while failing to build additional homes during a citywide affordable housing crisis. Several resident leaders ripped Scott for rarely visiting CHA properties.

“Tracey Scott, you seem to have forgotten that you are a guest here at CHA — you have outstayed your welcome,” said Francine Washington, speaking directly to Scott. 

Washington, a longtime CHA resident, has served on the CHA board since 2014.

“Miss Tracey Scott may be smart, but she has contempt for the residents,” Washington said. “Miss Scott, everybody’s complaining. They’re talking about what they need. The bottom line: She has to go.”

Alds. Gilbert Villegas (36th) and Byron Sigcho-Lopez (25th), the housing committee chair, had called the hearing partly in response to reporting from the Illinois Answers Project and Block Club Chicago that found hundreds of homes in the CHA’s scattered-site program are sitting empty, often for years.

While the homes go unused, agency officials said more than 120,000 people are on the CHA’s own waiting lists.

Some of the CHA’s vacant properties have become magnets for crime, including one in West Humboldt Park that’s used as a drug stash house.

Villegas cited those findings again during the hearing Wednesday.

“This is unconscionable,” Villegas said. “The status quo is not working and we need answers … This is not just a housing issue. This is a crime issue. This cannot stand.”

Villegas noted that his family had lived in the CHA’s Lathrop Homes for eight years when he was growing up. Their time in public housing helped his family get ahead, he said.

“I worry others aren’t getting the same opportunities,” Villegas said.

But Scott highlighted the CHA’s Restore Home initiative, a pledge to spend up to $50 million in 2024 to rehab dozens of vacant properties. 

Over the past four months, the CHA has finished fixing up five apartment buildings and three houses, Scott said.

Despite that modest start to the program, a number of alderpeople accepted Scott’s argument that the CHA is making progress on preserving and constructing more housing.

Though residents and neighbors have been “very unhappy with CHA historically,” officials seem to be making “some big improvements on some core areas,” said Ald. Maria Hadden (49th).

Still, Hadden suggested CHA officials provide more data to back up their testimony.

“It would be good to see the numbers,” Hadden said.

Ald. Jessie Fuentes (26th) noted the CHA had turned over 23 acres of its property to the billionaire-owned Chicago Fire soccer team — one of a series of deals the agency made to sell off vacant land even as it struggled to build new housing.

“The CHA has given away land through dispositions like the soccer facility,” Fuentes said. “What [other] dispositions are in the queue?”

Scott said the Fire agreement was “a rare opportunity.” Though she previously opened the door to additional deals, Scott told alderpeople, “We do not have plans right now to do any dispositions for [things like] a soccer facility.”

The CEO also told the committee the CHA plans to accelerate its pace of housing construction and launch a “customer call center” so residents, applicants and others “can get in touch with us.”

While most alderpeople gave Scott the benefit of the doubt, CHA residents and neighbors were far less charitable during the public testimony part of the meeting. Residents spoke of coping with roaches, mold, and sewage and plumbing problems in their apartments. 

“I have had people who have died from elevators not working, firemen not getting there in time, we drink brown water because the galvanized piping has not been changed since 1970,” said Lindsay Graves, a resident leader at the Vivian Carter Apartments in Englewood. “I would say it’s time for change at the head of CHA — we need something much better than this.”

Les Kniskern has lived kitty-corner from a scattered-site home in Montclare for more than 13 years. The home has been empty and unused that entire time — except when it was infested with raccoons. He suggested the CHA was squandering money from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.

“How has this been an effective or responsible use of the HUD funds, sitting on it for more than 13 years until it’s unusable?” Kniskern said.

The CHA is formally an independent government body with its own board responsible for providing oversight. But last month, alderpeople advanced a measure to increase oversight of the agency, and Scott agreed to testify before the housing committee.

“That is important not only for council members but more importantly for residents,” Sigcho-Lopez (25th) said at the time. “I think it’s important that we have checks and balances and accountability in every delegate agency.”

In October, the city’s top environmental official told City Council members that Chicago is “laser-focused on collaboration and bold solutions” to help homeowners battle flooding problems. 

Angela Tovar then pointed council members to the program RainReady, created in Chatham to provide grants to homeowners in the South Side neighborhood to install flood-control devices on their properties that can significantly reduce susceptibility to flooding. 

RainReady is the brainchild of a local environmental nonprofit group the Center for Neighborhood Technology. The program has had several iterations in Chatham since its development more than 10 years ago by CNT and a group of residents.

RainReady works, according to homeowners — including residents in west suburban Oak Park who benefited from the low-cost flood prevention fixes including rain gardens, backflow valves and cisterns. It is so successful that there is a waiting list, officials said. 

But it didn’t get the chance to work for most Chatham residents, the Illinois Answers Project learned. Despite Tovar’s assertions and the city’s promise to launch it in 2019, RainReady has yet to get off the ground. The few Chatham residents who did receive RainReady grants worked directly with CNT prior to 2019. 

The different outcomes potentially highlight the difficulty of administering the RainReady program at a larger scale.  

While CNT walked away from the city’s project in 2021 — citing a lack of “staff capacity” in an email to Sean Wiedel, then an assistant commissioner at CDOT in charge of citywide services — the nonprofit group found a way to work with government agencies outside of Chicago on similar projects.  A CNT official suggested that Chicago presents unique challenges.  

The village of Oak Park made the project work on a smaller scale. Data shows that its RainReady program that ran between 2017 and 2021, administered by CNT, left neighbors satisfied with the results. 

“People were looking for solutions. And this is one of the things that we were trying to … provide,” said Oak Park Neighborhood Services Manager Jeff Prior. 

Despite its success, the future of RainReady is unclear in both communities. The village is looking for a new administrator for the program and is uncertain whether grants will be awarded this year, despite opening applications in March.  

The city also is searching for a new partner to run its RainReady program. Until it finds one, Chatham will benefit from other programs that the water department has implemented, said Brendan Schreiber, chief engineer of sewers at DWM. Those include Green Alleys and Space to Grow, Tovar said in a statement.  

“They’re getting resources that we spread across all 50 wards,” Schreiber said.  

Read More From This Series:

• Flooding: Illinois’ Most Threatening Natural Disaster
• ‘Green Alleys’ Prevent Flooding, But Vulnerable Neighborhoods Must Wait
• For Many Illinoisans, Buyouts Are the Only Way Out

Why Chatham Floods 

Chatham is flat, low-lying and sandwiched between two of the city’s big reservoirs that collect rainwater, making it one of the last neighborhoods to empty into a sewer system that can often already be full. 

A confluence of topography, aging infrastructure and limited funding have made the neighborhood — known for its distinct architecture and history of Black art and culture — a point of struggle for the longtime residents who’ve invested in it.  

In a 2017 analysis of flood insurance data by CNT, Chatham was ranked highest in insurance payouts for flood damage. One-fourth of residents affected by flooding surveyed by CNT reported flooding damages cost them at least $20,000.  And in 2023, Chicago’s 8th Ward — where most of Chatham is located — had the fourth highest number of 311 calls for flooding in the city.  

Ora Jackson has lived in the historic community for 47 years. She still remembers the first time her basement flooded several years ago after a day of heavy rainfall. Her grandson, who had converted the basement into an apartment, called her from upstairs in a panic.  

She rushed to the basement to find him standing on his mattress surrounded by water. He was terrified to wade his way to the stairs, fearing he could be electrocuted.  

“It was frightening because I’d never seen anything like that before,” said Jackson, who told Illinois Answers she had no clue how severe the flooding problem in her duplex would grow over the years.  

After enduring multiple floods in her duplex — and continually replacing rugs and furniture and paying out of pocket to repair damages — Jackson finally found some relief when she joined the resident steering committee for RainReady in 2014 and received a grant. 

“We were just desperate for anything,” said Jackson, who got her downspout disconnected and a rain barrel installed through the program. “It was an education for everybody.”

Harriet Festing, an environmental activist who worked for CNT when RainReady was designed, said she was shocked to hear widespread “horror stories” of flood damage were in Chatham. 

“People couldn’t live in their homes anymore because the mold was so bad,” she said.  

RainReady’s early steps in Chatham were successful, Festing said, because the program tackled urban flooding by focusing on small measures that could direct rainwater away from homes to reduce or avoid the basement seepage that resulted from water pooling around the home. 

Long-time Chatham resident Lori Burns received a free inspection through that early program. She paid for the installation of a rain garden and backflow valve at her home and another garden at her mother’s home in Calumet Heights.    

The results: the basements at her two properties never flooded again, she said.  

Burns, 50, called the result “fantastic” in an interview with Illinois Answers. 

“And that’s why we thought we were going to be able to expand again. Really bring it to the city and say, ‘Look, we have proof of concept,’” said Burns, who was among the group of residents working with CNT to develop the program in 2014.  

But the city’s program sputtered and Chatham residents in recent years faced some of the most significant flooding damage in years.   

“We needed for it to work, so that 2023 didn’t have to be as bad as it was,” said Burns.  

For Oak Park resident Nicole Chavas the flooding wasn’t as bad. 

Chavas said that when her neighbors were struggling with flooding in July, the RainReady-subsidized rain garden helped prevent water basement seepage in her Victorian home. In contrast, she and her husband found their basement flooded with rainwater after a torrential storm in 2020.

Chavas says that the rain garden along with other flood prevention devices the couple installed on their own make them more prepared for serious rain.  

“It was all like doing what it was supposed to be doing and that was a really rewarding feeling,” said Chavas. 

The village is susceptible to flooding for many of the same reasons that Chatham is – including aging infrastructure and low-lying topography. 

Bill McKenna, the village engineer and co-director of the Public Works Department, said that after spending several years studying flooding patterns in the community, the city determined that a home-based solution program would work best.  

 Testing resident interest, Oak Park launched a pilot program in 2016 that granted $1,300 each to 10 homeowners in the village. In 2017, the village expanded the program to include 30 homes and concluded the pilot in 2019. 

“By doing those projects on private property … we can relieve the burden on the village’s sewer system and reduce the likelihood and severity of sewer backups in people’s basements,” McKenna said. 

What Happened to RainReady Chatham? 

The city’s plans floundered for years in bureaucratic back-and-forth and delays due to the pandemic, records show.  

Years of negotiations and bureaucracy slowed RainReady’s implementation to such an extent that not a single Chatham resident of the 40 planned participating households received grants from the program, according to records from the city. 

The city’s water and transportation departments in August 2016 began negotiating an agreement with the MWRD to test a pilot program in Chatham, due to outreach  by CNT and residents.

In 2019, the city’s Water and Transportation departments struck a deal with the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District to funnel $600,000 from the city and the MWRD into a pilot expanding the program. The City Council and MWRD’s board of commissioners signed off on the agreement and it went into effect that year. 

The plan included a $400,000 commitment from MWRD and $200,000 from the city. CNT would administer the program and be reimbursed by the city for any costs associated with running the program.  

Under the agreement, the program participants would receive assessments to determine the appropriate flood control devices for their homes. Those devices included rain gardens, which use native plants to collect and absorb rainwater runoff from roofs, driveways, and other surfaces, and backflow valves which prevent sewage from backing into basements when the system is at capacity.  

The program empowered CNT and its contractors to coordinate inspections and installations. CNT was also responsible for surveying participating households for feedback over time.   

Invoices from CNT acquired through a Freedom of Information Act Request show that CDOT paid CNT at least $36,000 for work related to the program between October 2019 and May 2020. 

After progress on pilot study halted due to the pandemic, the three agencies agreed to revamp the program and extend its deadline to the end of 2022. But shortly after the amendment passed, CNT’s then-CEO Robert Dean, told the city in an email that it could no longer continue as program administrator. 

“CNT no longer has the staff capacity to administer construction related programs of this nature. We remain strong supporters of the concept… but playing the role described in the above agreements is no longer within our organization’s skills set,” the email read. 

Illinois Answers asked CNT why the organization no longer has the capacity to run the program in Chatham but is still doing so in other neighborhoods. 

“We continue to talk to [the city] on a regular basis to try to explore ways to make things happen,” said Ryan Scherzinger, a project manager at CNT overseeing the $6 million RainReady project recently funded by Cook County for six suburbs in the Calumet City Corridor. “Working with the city… has its challenges. I’m not sure that we’ve cracked that nut, so to speak.”  

Still, Tovar boasted about the program’s future in that October meeting and told aldermen that the city is energized to “protect our most vulnerable Chicagoans.”

A November memo from Tovar to a City Council committee shows that $800,000 was budgeted for the RainReady Chatham program. Nothing had been spent. 

Reporting on equity issues by the BGA is supported by Joel M. Friedman, president of the Alvin H. Baum Family Fund.

DIETERICH, Ill. – Every day, Berdeena Leturno checks her email for an update on when the state of Illinois will finally pay her $80,000. 

It’s been over two months since she signed the paperwork to sell her flood-damaged home as part of a buyout program, and over a year and a half since the creek across the street rose so high that it filled her home with water. 

Now, she’s waiting to close and get the check for her old house – a white-paneled ranch where she and her husband raised their four kids, spent nearly 20 years and planned to retire. 

The family moved out in January of last year and have been struggling to afford two mortgages since, she said. They paid a little over $155,000 for their new property, using the money her husband had saved for when he retired as a mechanic. 

“We are drowning in debt because of this flood,” said Leturno, 58, a retired nurse who now works as an elementary school teacher. 

The buyout has taken too long, she said, but it was their only option. “I was desperate. I wanted to get out of there.” 

For many Illinois residents who live in flood-prone areas, government buyouts provide an option when there is no other way out. Buyouts are intended to mitigate future flood risk by removing buildings that repeatedly flood and turning the land into open space. 

In Illinois, there are two buyout programs: one run by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and funded through state legislative allocation, and another run by the Illinois Emergency Management Agency and funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. 

Buyouts offer people in distress significant help, but they often come with long wait times and bureaucratic complications. And they often don’t prevent people from moving into other flood-prone areas, experts who evaluate these programs told the Illinois Answers Project.  

Buyouts also don’t relieve residents of the social, emotional and economic toll of losing a home to a flood, local government leaders say. Some residents don’t want to leave their community. Others want to leave but can’t afford to, even with the state’s help. And those left behind are forced to live among vacant lots and with the fear of future flooding. 

Read More From This Series:

• Flooding is Illinois’ Most Threatening Natural Disaster. Are We Prepared?
• ‘Green Alleys’ Prevent Flooding, But Vulnerable Neighborhoods Must Wait in Line

Despite its limitations, the state’s buyout program has prevented future damage and made people safer, said Ron Davis, who runs the program at the Department of Natural Resources. Buyouts also save significant amounts of money. The National Institute of Building Sciences estimates that federal flood buyouts save $7 for every $1 spent. 

If buyouts didn’t exist, “a lot of times these people would have nothing,” Davis said. For homeowners who can’t sell their property on the private market, their options are limited: stay in a damaged house and risk future flooding, or abandon the property and forfeit any future equity from a sale. 

“I would never try to claim that we’ve solved the problem in Illinois,” he said, “but we have made a big difference in it.”

How Buyouts Became a Solution 

In 1937, the Ohio River flooded Shawneetown, a shipping community on the southeastern border of Illinois. After it was flooded with nearly 25 feet of water, the federal government moved the community in one of the first relocations of an entire town. 

The government continued one-off relocations until buyouts became more of a “regular program” for both IDNR and IEMA in the 1980s, said French Wetmore, who ran IDNR’s program at the time and now owns a floodplain management consulting firm. The program picked up after a flood in 1981, Wetmore said, and the agency relocated three communities: Peoria, Thebes and Kampsville. 

After the Great Flood of 1993, which inundated 75 towns and killed 50 people in the Midwest, local leaders and the federal government relocated Valmeyer, a town in southwestern Illinois on the Mississippi River. After the town’s levees failed, floodwaters damaged 90% of the town’s structures, and local leaders decided to move 24 homes and the town’s business district to higher ground about 2 miles east. It’s one of the most well-known examples of community relocation, Wetmore said. 

Since 1981, IDNR has bought out roughly 900 properties, Davis said. The agency received $10 million for buyouts in the most recent state budget, which it’s allocating to projects in eight communities: Dieterich, DePue, Downers Grove, East St. Louis, Ottawa, Freeport, Roanoke and Romeoville.

IEMA’s buyout program picked up in 1993, and the agency has purchased 3,295 properties since then, according to the agency’s spokesperson. 

How Buyouts Work

Davis said he sometimes visits communities after flood events to let them know about the buyout program, but communities also seek his help. 

The process requires local government involvement. Homeowners can’t apply directly to the state – the local government has to submit an application to IDNR, he said, because the ownership of the land is transferred to the local government. 

After the local government submits an application to IDNR, Davis conducts a review to make sure the purchase is cost effective and demolition would be safe for the surrounding habitat. The community’s chief elected official must approve the agreement. 

The local government then has the property appraised. If the owner believes the suggested value is too low, they can hire an appraiser, and IDNR will take that appraisal into consideration. 

IDNR conducts the final review and also considers what other assistance the homeowner has received, such as flood insurance or FEMA assistance, before making the final offer.

Once the owner accepts the offer, the attorney general must sign off on the buyout before IDNR schedules a closing and a demolition is booked. 

Local governments pay for the buyouts and then are reimbursed 100% by IDNR, Davis added. FEMA grants require the local government to pay for 25% of the buyouts. 

While the state-funded program has fewer resources, it avoids some of the bureaucratic slowdowns that come with federal funding. An IDNR buyout can take about a year, Davis said, although it can take more than five years for larger projects if the community doesn’t have the initial funds to buy properties. FEMA-funded buyouts have an average wait time of more than five years, according to a report by the National Resources Defense Council. 

Some city officials say IDNR’s application process is more straightforward than many federal programs. 

“It was one of the easiest grant applications I’ve ever done,” said Brittny Gipson, economic development coordinator for the Village of Dieterich, where IDNR is working to buy out nine homes and an apartment building for $1.4 million. With federal grants, there are “more hoops to jump through,” she said. 

She noted that it’s been a long process because other areas flooded in 2022 and IDNR had to wait until the following year to get more funding. 

But IDNR had experienced, responsive staff members to answer questions along the way, Gipson added. “It felt like they actually, truly wanted to help,” she said. “I’ve never had grant staff email and call me back the same day, and they always did.” 

In Watseka, a city of roughly 4,600 people that sits at the convergence of the Iroquois River and Sugar Creek, local government leaders have been working with IDNR to buy out about 120 homes since 2018. That year in February, hundreds of homes were damaged in the fourth large-scale flood to hit the city in the last 10 years, according to FEMA. 

The city’s mayor, John Allhands, met with Davis at IDNR to work out a buyout project, and the following year, IDNR allocated over $5 million to purchase and tear down the structures and make the land open space. 

As of March, IDNR has closed on 74 homes, Allhands said. There are no plans yet for what the open space will become, he added, although there have been talks of using it for recreation like disc golf. 

Allhands said one concern he has with the buyout project is population loss, which means less tax dollars to pay for services like the police and fire department. 

But while he would love to retain residents, he said, “I don’t want to see them stay here and suffer every time.”

“I sat in on some of the initial closings, and you could see a burden being taken off these folks’ shoulders,” he added . “…But then you see the traditions, the memories, and all that, and it’s kind of melancholy, bittersweet.”

Buyouts Can ‘Exacerbate Inequities’

In July 2022, major rainfall inundated East St. Louis, a low-lying city of about 18,000 in the floodplain of the Mississippi River. In one six-hour period, roughly 7 ½ inches of rain fell, according to the National Weather Service. 

The ensuing flood resulted in “heart-wrenching” damage, said East St. Louis City Manager Robert Betts, who was part of the rescue effort. Residents had to be rescued in row boats and he found some people standing on top of their dressers. 

“It was anybody’s worst nightmare,” Betts said, “having to lose everything you own in the world.”

Emergency management agencies came together to respond, and Betts connected with IDNR to work out a buyout project. The agency allocated $2.25 million in its fiscal year 2024 budget to buy out 39 homes and fund other flood mitigation projects in the county, according to data from Davis. 

The buyout application should be approved in the next few weeks, Davis said, and the project will begin then. Davis said there’s interest in using the future open space for water detention or wetlands.

But Betts said residents are frustrated that it’s taken nearly two years to get answers about what’s next for their homes, and some don’t want to leave the homes they have worked for years to pay off. 

For many people in East St. Louis, their home is all they have, Betts said. Over 30% of the population lives below the poverty line, and the median household income is just above $28,000.

The situation reflects another complication with buyouts: For many low-income residents, moving – even with the government’s help – is not feasible. 

Because buyouts are based on home values, they “exacerbate inequities in social vulnerability and wealth,” said Dan Abramson, associate professor of urban design and planning at the University of Washington. 

People with lower valued homes often can only afford to move to other vulnerable locations, Abramson said. “It’s not necessarily solving the vulnerability problem with respect to the hazard, and it creates greater instability for and precarity for people who don’t have high-value homes.” 

Abramson added the buyout program isn’t structured to help residents carefully select a new home, so they may end up back in a flood-prone area, which is a “huge blind spot.”

Betts said most East St. Louis residents who take the buyout will likely move to surrounding communities like Cahokia Heights, Fairview Heights, Belleville and Collinsville, many of which still are at risk of flooding. His goal is to try to retain the residents in East St. Louis, and the city is looking to identify ways to build more affordable housing. 

He added that communities of color tend to be in higher flood risk areas due to a history of discriminatory housing policies. 

An analysis by real estate company Redfin found that formerly redlined neighborhoods face higher flood risk. Redlining was a 1930s-era discriminatory practice that deemed neighborhoods where Black residents lived risky for mortgage lending. Neighborhoods where Black residents lived were likely to be coded red or yellow, while neighborhoods where white residents lived were likely to be coded blue or green. The practice made it impossible for Black residents to qualify for mortgages. 

In Chicago, 12.6% of homes in red- and yellow-lined areas face high flood risk today compared with 7.9% of homes in green and blue-lined neighborhoods, Redfin found. 

Buyouts are “tied to the systematic issues we have in this country of dealing with poor people and people of color in these harmful areas,” said Jonathan Remo, an associate professor of geography and environmental resources at Southern Illinois University. “It’s not really the programs, it’s the bigger picture of how the economic system works.”

How Buyouts Can Be Improved

Three climate policy experts told the Illinois Answers Project that buyouts can be improved in a few ways: better land development decisions, more funding and staffing, and a holistic approach to the process of moving communities. 

With increased rainfall and flooding, buyouts will remain inevitable, but better development decisions should be made to prevent future buyouts from happening, said Anna Weber, a policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C. 

“We always say that the best buyout, the most successful one, is one that never has to happen,” she said. 

When a buyout does have to happen, steady funding sources and more staff can help make the process smoother, said A.R. Siders, an assistant professor at the University of Delaware who studies climate change adaptation.

“One of the biggest things states can do is have a consistent pot of money, a consistent source of funding, that is available for buyouts year after year after year,” Siders said.

For Illinois’ state-funded buyout program, Davis is the only person on staff in the Flood Hazard Mitigation Program. The Realty and Environment Planning Office handles closing paperwork and other tasks related to property sales, he said. 

Some experts say buyouts shouldn’t be the answer in the first place. Shirley Laska, professor emerita at the University of New Orleans and co-founder of the Lowlander Center, a nonprofit that helps communities in Louisiana adapt to climate change, said that relocation can have a damaging effect on culture and community. About half the groups the Lowlander Center works with are Indigenous, she said. Her organization aims to help communities stay in place and build up more resilience to flooding, so they can preserve their culture.

Government agencies need to take into account the important social role that communities play, Laska said. 

“If you dismiss the culture, the connection, the support systems … you do harm,” she said. “… Just physically moving their bodies so they’re not hit by flooding just isn’t enough.”

Leturno, whose closing is finally scheduled, said she feels the emotional weight of relocating. She misses her neighbors and her old house, even though they’re just down the street. 

“I do have a lot of memories at the other house that we can’t take with us,” she said. “They’ll just live in our hearts.” 

But the health of her family is what’s most important to her, she said. 

Even though the buyout has taken too long, Leturno said she’s grateful the state could help. 

“Life goes on. You’ve got to take what you can get done and move on.” 

Editing for this story was made possible by a grant from The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation to the Illinois Answers Project.

More than 100 residents of Chicago’s Austin neighborhood called 311 in August  2023 to report flooding in their basements or on the streets after a storm dumped nearly 4 inches of rain on their neighborhood, city records show.

Hura Hillman was not one of them.

With a first floor that’s a few feet higher than the neighbors, the one-and-a-half-story bungalow where Hillman lives with his 80-year-old mother, Bernice, had one advantage over their neighbors.

But Hillman’s home got another boost from a special type of alley the city had installed a year earlier behind the house.

A “green alley.”

When it rains, the green alley behind the home in the 5400 block of Race Street acts like a sponge and a runway for rainwater, letting some water seep into the ground while the rest gathers into a grooved channel and streams into a manhole that connects to local sewers. Its underground trench system can absorb thousands of gallons of rainwater every hour.

The special infrastructure does have its limits.

A month before the August 2023 storm, when a far worse deluge dropped more than 7 inches of rain over a single day on the West Side last summer, sewage water seeped into the basement of the Hillman household.

“It flooded bad,” said Hillman, 55. “The hardest part was trying to keep the water away from the furnace.”

The new pavement behind Race is one of the roughly 400 green alleys city workers have built around Chicago since 2001 to help neighborhoods handle storm water runoff better and prevent surrounding basements from flooding.

Wherever they are implemented, the green alleys have proven popular, welcomed by neighbors like Hillman who had grown tired of the crumbling pavement the projects typically replace. Experts say the permeable alleys and other forms of “green infrastructure” that break up pavement to let rainwater soak into the earth are becoming increasingly needed as climate change makes storms more erratic and damaging.

But more than two decades after the first green alley was installed, an Illinois Answers Project analysis of their locations shows they’ve been heavily concentrated in some of the Chicago neighborhoods least prone to flooding. Neighborhoods like Austin are left to wait in line amid a city construction process that prioritizes ward map boundaries before residents’ needs.

Green alleys are expensive — converting one block of an alley can cost up to $500,000 — and the city funds the construction of only several dozen a year, with the end result being denser, more affluent wards receiving more benefit from the program than poorer wards that are more spread out.

A solution in search of funding

It was the early 2000s when the Chicago Department of the Environment began turning its attention in earnest to climate change and its risks to the city, according to Suzanne Malec-McKenna, who began working for the department in 1993.

The department funded a pilot program that paid for four alley replacements between 2001 and 2006, leading to the publication of a “Green Alley Handbook” in 2010 that showed how the permeable surfaces could be used with other green fixtures, like rain gardens and green roofs, to sop up rainwater and take pressure off the city’s sewer system. 

By that time, the program had shown its value, said Malec-McKenna, who led the department as commissioner from 2007 until Mayor Rahm Emanuel took office in 2011 and moved to dissolve the agency.

“We were looking for any opportunity for permeable surfaces to start gathering our rainwater,” Malec-McKenna said. She noted that Chicago has nearly 2,000 miles of alleys, more than any other U.S. city. But unlike Chicago’s streets, most alleys have no sewer drains.

“The green alleys were really part of [the city’s plan for] how we manage stormwater at the residential level,” she said.

The program soon ran into a problem: each green alley project’s deep landscaping work and coordination with nearby sewer mains made it far more expensive than a typical repavement job.

By the time Mayor Rahm Emanuel dismantled the Department of the Environment in 2012, green alley construction had no dedicated funding source. Increasingly, the only way neighbors could see one built was by asking their alderperson to dip into their annual “menu” fund for infrastructure. 

Relying on those menu funds for the green alleys puts each council member in a bind, according to Far North Side Ald. Andre Vasquez (40th). Each alderperson is allocated $1.5 million in menu funds per year and must balance special projects against bread-and-butter infrastructure needs like street resurfacing and sidewalk repairs.

“Doing the green alleys really does help when you have that permeated pavement,” Vasquez said, adding that a long list of his residents have asked for them. “The challenge is, it costs anywhere from $250,000 to half a million dollars for one block, so we have to tell our neighbors that, at best, we can do two or three a year.”

Each green alley takes at least three weeks to build, according to Erica Schroeder, a spokesperson for the Chicago Department of Transportation. Construction involves excavating 7 feet beneath the surface and installing a 5-by-4-foot trench filled with “porous stones and a perforated pipe” to channel the water, Schroeder said. 

In 2021, city leaders set aside a portion of the Chicago Works capital plan to boost green alley construction. Since then, the Chicago Department of Transportation has invited each of the city’s 50 alderpeople to select one green alley project per year, not including any projects they fund through the menu program.

Thanks to the new policy, the city averaged nearly 30 new green alleys each year between 2021 and 2023, up from an average of 24 per year between 2007 and 2020, according to transportation department records. The department has fallen short of 50 new alleys per year because of “variables throughout the design, engineering, utility coordination, and construction processes,” Schroeder said.

It’s not nearly enough to meet the need, Vasquez said.

“We definitely need more money for green alleys, whether it’s state, federal — whatever it means for infrastructure to get that done,” he said. “Because it’s clear we don’t have many solutions for [flood control in] alleys. And this is one that’s effective.”

A typical city-installed green alley can divert more than 3,700 gallons of rainwater from the sewers every hour, Schroeder said.

Similar green alleys built by the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District are built to hold at least 30,000 gallons of rainwater each — approximately 1 inch’s worth of rainfall in a typical location, officials from that agency said.

Most green alleys on the North, Northwest sides

Amid the overwhelming demand for green infrastructure, Vasquez said he was surprised to hear that as of December 2023, his ward had the second-most green alleys of any ward in the city, with 23. 

Green alley construction has skewed heavily toward the city’s North and Northwest Side. Out of the 10 Chicago wards that have the most green alleys, nine either border the downtown area or are on the North Side, like Vasquez’s 40th Ward.

Fewer than one-third of the roughly 400 green alleys built through 2023 were sited in one of Chicago’s South or West side wards, city records show. Those same wards accounted for nearly three out of every five flood-related 311 complaints filed with the city last year.

Ald. Monique Scott’s 24th Ward, which includes most of the North Lawndale neighborhood on the city’s West Side, was among the hardest hit by last year’s storms. As of last December, the 24th Ward had just five green alleys.

“I’m in a community where we get a lot of flooding,” Scott said in an interview last month. “I wish we could have [green alleys] in all of my 49 miles of alleyways.”

Scott has more urgent infrastructure needs for her ward than many of her colleagues do, she said — not only because of the 24th Ward’s geographic size, but also because of its historic lack of public and private investment. That means her ward is being left behind by the city’s policy of allocating the same amount of infrastructure money — and the same single new green alley per year — to each of the city’s 50 wards.

During a City Council committee hearing held to discuss flooding issues last October, Scott called on city officials to look for funding sources for the green alley program outside of menu dollars. In response, transportation department engineer Anne Zhang pointed to the capital plan that pays for each ward to add one new alley per year but said the department “can explore other sources of funding to expand the program.”

The department has not since identified any other funding sources, a spokesperson said.

The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago funds its own green alley program, but its spending is targeted to suburban Cook County. Out of 33 green alley projects undertaken by the district through 2023, just one has been in Chicago, according to a district spokesperson.

‘There’s nothing strategic about it’

The aldermanic menu program, which has funded most of Chicago’s green alleys to date, has been widely criticized as inequitable by design.

A 2017 audit of the menu program by the Chicago inspector general found that the flat annual sum allocated to each ward “bears no relationship to the actual infrastructure needs of each ward,” resulting in “significant ward-to-ward funding disparities.”

Those disparities help explain why relatively few green alleys have been built in the neighborhoods that need them most, said Joe Ferguson, who served as the city’s inspector general from 2009 to 2021.

“Menu goes a lot further in a number of the affluent wards because … they’re geographically smaller, which means they have less residential street surface,” said Ferguson, who is now president of the nonpartisan Civic Federation. “They also have fewer alleys. So it absolutely makes sense as a matter of simple math that we would see more green alleys in those higher-density wards, which tend to be the more affluent wards.”

City leaders rebuffed the 2017 audit and have since defended Chicago’s practice of giving each ward an equal amount of resources. 

“We’re very happy with those investments,” Chicago Department of Transportation Commissioner Tom Carney told Illinois Answers about the green alley program last month. “The change that it has [brought] for the residents is amazing, and it’ll last 40 years. It’s the right way to address flooding in an alley.”

Carney acknowledged that a “need exists citywide” for more green alleys but said allocating an equal number to each ward is how the department can ensure they’re built “all over.”

Read More in This Series:

For Many Illinoisans in Flood-Prone Areas, Buyouts are the Only Way Out

Flooding is Illinois’ Most Threatening Natural Disaster. Are We Prepared?

Malec-McKenna, the last commissioner of the Chicago Department of the Environment, disagrees.

“There’s nothing strategic about it,” Malec-McKenna said. “In areas where there’s particular flooding — that’s where a lot of our green infrastructure should be absolutely prioritized.”

During the original implementation of the green alley program 20 years ago, the Department of the Environment was responsible for coordinating across city agencies to decide where green alleys and other anti-flooding infrastructure should be built, Malec-McKenna said.

The Chicago Department of Water Management analyzes 311 complaints to decide how to prioritize sewer main replacements, according to a senior department official. But the water department does not coordinate on the placement of green alleys, which is exclusively overseen by the transportation department.

“The DOE was never a massive organization,” Malec-McKenna said. “But what we were able to do was to help bring together the research, look at the best infrastructure, work collaboratively with the departments, help get pilots going, look at the economic impact … and try to integrate it into the infrastructure of the departments.”

Ald. Maria Hadden (49th), who chairs the City Council Committee on Environmental Protection and Energy, described Chicago’s green alley siting process as “a little bit of a shot-in-the-dark implementation strategy.”

“If the goal of the green alley program is to give better alley infrastructure options to each ward, then it’s probably a fine implementation strategy,” Hadden said. “However, if green alleys are supposed to be more of a tool to help with flood mitigation and other water management issues, then I think we’d probably do better in having a different approach in how the locations for those alleys are selected.”

Angela Tovar, Chicago’s chief sustainability officer and commissioner of the newly reconstituted Chicago Department of the Environment, wrote in an emailed statement that the Department of the Environment will “collaborate [with] and advise” other city agencies on flood-related policies as it continues to staff up, and that her team is working with the mayor’s office on “outlining a strategic direction for water policy issues in the city.”

Around the corner from Hillman and his mother’s home on Race Street, many of their neighbors were not as fortunate during last year’s storms.

Steve Richard, who lives on the 5300 block of West Ferdinand Street, had to pay to repair his water heater and replace a refrigerator and washer-dryer system after nearly a foot of sewage water gushed into his basement in July.

The green alley that was built up the street from him caught his attention, he said, noting that his driveway often turns into a pond during periods of heavy rain.

“I would love for my alley here to be replaced like that,” he said.

Contributing: Cam Rodriguez

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Este reportaje ha sido producido por Illinois Answers Project, una organización periodística de investigación y soluciones, y Block Club Chicago, una redacción sin fines de lucro con enfoque en los distintos vecindarios de Chicago.

En una cuadra de casas de estructura triangular y de casas construidas para obreros en los 1900s, la casa en 849 N. St Louis es la única con las ventanas y la puerta selladas. Mientras que la mayoría de los céspedes de la calle están bien cuidados, su jardín trasero está lleno de ramas de árboles y basura. Durante el verano, se acumuló hasta casi la altura de las cercas de los vecinos. 

Los vecinos del oeste de Humboldt Park consideran el lugar peligroso, una “plaga” para el vecindario y un “antro de drogas”. Los vecinos se han quejado con la Municipalidad docenas de veces en los últimos dos años sobre problemas en la propiedad, incluyendo basura, ratas, venta de drogas, consumo abierto de drogas e incluso disparos.

“Sólo quiero deshacerme de esta casa”, dijo una vecina, que no quiso que se publicara su nombre porque teme por su seguridad.

La vecina estaba aún más indignada tras enterarse de que el propietario de la vivienda era de la Autoridad de Vivienda de Chicago (CHA, por sus siglas en inglés) una agencia gubernamental responsable de proporcionar viviendas seguras y asequibles a personas con bajos ingresos.

Esta casa forma parte de un programa de la CHA que se supone que ayuda a las familias a vivir en nuevos vecindarios y acceder a nuevas oportunidades. La propiedad es emblemática de un problema más grave: la agencia es propietaria de muchas otras viviendas similares en toda la ciudad. 

Una investigación llevada a cabo por Illinois Answers Project y Block Club Chicago ha descubierto que la agencia tiene cerca de 500 viviendas vacías incluso cuando Chicago se enfrenta a una crisis de vivienda en múltiples frentes, desde alquileres históricamente altas que muchas familias no pueden pagar hasta un aumento de personas sin hogar y nuevos migrantes que necesitan alojamiento.

Estas viviendas forman parte de un programa de vivienda llamada, “Scattered-Sites” (Sitios dispersos) En total, la CHA posee unas 2,900 viviendas dispersas por decenas de vecindarios bajo este programa. Pero una de cada seis viviendas está vacía, y docenas de ellas llevan años desocupadas, según demuestran los registros.

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Estas viviendas dispersas y abandonadas se encuentran en todos los vecindarios de la ciudad. Por ejemplo, en el lado norte, un lindo edificio de apartamentos de ladrillo amarillo en Lakeview fue renovado por 1.5 millones de dólares a mediados de la década de 2010, sin embargo, el edificio nunca se llenó por completo. En el oeste de la ciudad, varios edificios multifamiliares situados en North Lawndale llevan años vacíos y sellados. Y en South Shore, a pocas cuadras de donde se está construyendo el Centro Presidencial de Obama, más de un tercio de un edificio de 51 apartamentos está vacío. La CHA dice que pronto alquilará la mayoría de esos apartamentos en South Shore.

Las propiedades están sin utilizar a pesar de que más de 200,000 personas están en las listas de espera para recibir asistencia para una vivienda, incluyendo 50,000 personas que quieren una vivienda dispersa.

Además de desperdiciar la oportunidad de alojar a familias, las viviendas vacías durante mucho tiempo pueden provocar delincuencia y reducir el valor de la propiedad en los vecindarios de alrededor.

Los concejales que tienen viviendas dispersas en sus distritos expresaron su irritación por el hecho de que la CHA permita que tantas viviendas permanezcan vacías.

“Es ridículo”, dijo el concejal Walter Burnett Jr. del distrito 27, en cuyo distrito se encuentra la casa abandonada de North St Louis. “Es una vivienda asequible. Eso no tiene ningún sentido. Necesitamos que esas casas se llenen”.

Las personas que buscan alojamiento seguro y asequible necesitan “urgentemente” estas viviendas dispersas, afirmó Jessie Fuentes del distrito 26. Fuentes señaló que decenas de personas viven en campamentos de tiendas en Humboldt Park, en su distrito, y que las rentas han subido en los vecindarios de alrededor. 

“Podemos utilizar algunos de esos apartamentos abandonados de la CHA si se rehabilitan”, dijo Fuentes. 

Funcionarios de la CHA se negaron en repetidas ocasiones a responder a las solicitudes de Block Club y Illinois Answers Project para discutir el programa de viviendas dispersas en una entrevista.

En una declaración, el portavoz de la CHA Matthew Aguilar dijo que la CHA “no está conforme con esta tasa de desocupación y ha priorizado la financiación para volver a poner en servicio los apartamentos y edificios desocupados.” 

Después de que Block Club Chicago e Illinois Answers comenzaron a preguntar sobre el programa, Aguilar dijo que el número total de viviendas vacantes había disminuido de 505 a principios de este año a 484 a finales de septiembre. La agencia ha gastado más de 16 millones de dólares en renovaciones de viviendas dispersas este año y está desarrollando un plan para volver a poner en servicio “casi todas” las viviendas vacantes, según Aguilar.

Eso incluye “hasta 50 millones de dólares” que la CHA tiene previsto destinar en 2024 a la renovación y rehabilitación de 176 de estas propiedades, dijo.  

Además, la CHA está planeando vender alrededor de 40 viviendas dispersas a los residentes de la CHA a través de un nuevo programa llamado “Restore Home” (Restaurar el Hogar). Eso incluirá la vivienda en 849 N. St. Louis, dijo Aguilar.

La CHA también planea buscar nuevos administradores de propiedades en 2024 "para proporcionar una mayor supervisión y un mejor servicio para los residentes", dijo Aguilar en un correo electrónico.

Al mismo tiempo, la declaración de Aguilar destacó los “desafíos operativos” y los altos costes de mantener una cartera de valores de propiedades más pequeñas distribuidas por toda la ciudad. Fuentes culpó la alta tasa de vacantes a las decisiones de los líderes anteriores de la CHA de retrasar el mantenimiento y mantener ciertas viviendas sin alquilar. La actual directora ejecutiva de la agencia, Tracey Scott, asumió el cargo en 2020. 

Aunque la CHA se negó a permitir que Scott estuviera disponible para hablar con los periodistas de Block Club e Illinois Answers, la CEO habló con el Chicago Sun-Times sobre los planes para renovar las viviendas dispersas. Esto fue después de que Illinois Answers y Block Club hicieran saber a la CHA que planeaban publicar este reportaje.

Una deterioro en el vecindario

La mayoría de los jardines de la cuadra 800 North St. Louis están limpios y rodeados de cercas. De los porches cuelgan banderas y banderines estadounidenses y mexicanos. Una tarde de otoño, un hombre con camiseta negra trabajaba bajo el capó de un coche estacionado en la calle.

"Las personas son en su mayoría de clase trabajadora, y solamente se ocupan de lo suyo", dijo un vecino que habló con Block Club e Illinois Answers.

La CHA es propietaria de la vivienda en 849 N. St. Louis desde 1983, pero la casa ha estado vacía durante al menos siete años, según muestran los registros. Desde 2019, los vecinos han llamado al 911 más de 80 veces para informar sobre un robo, una persona con un arma y, en docenas de ocasiones, ventas de drogas, según los registros de llamadas a la Municipalidad. Diecisiete de las llamadas al 911 se realizaron en un tramo de tres semanas en el otoño de 2022. 

Zach Caddy, que anteriormente vivía en la cuadra, dijo que las personas involucradas en el tráfico de drogas “descubrieron que la casa era un lugar donde se podía hacer negocios sin interrupciones.”

Caddy dijo que los coches de policía se quedaban fuera de la propiedad durante algunas horas seguidas, pero que rara vez vio a los agentes tomar alguna medida. 

Tampoco vio nunca a los administradores de la propiedad pasarse por allí. La CHA ha contratado al menos a cuatro empresas para administrar la propiedad desde que comenzó a quedar vacante en 2016. Hispanic Housing Development Corp. es el actual administrador de la propiedad. La compañía no respondió a múltiples solicitudes de entrevista sobre la casa en St. Louis u otras propiedades.

Durante un tiempo, Caddy consideró comprar la casa vacante, pero fue “terriblemente difícil” encontrar a la persona adecuada con quien hablar, dijo.

Más tarde, instaló cámaras de seguridad que captaron parte de la problemática propiedad. Pero dijo que un hombre se le acercó más tarde y lo amenazó con incendiar su coche y el de su compañero si no retiraba las cámaras. 

Caddy vendió su casa y se mudó en mayo.

Si la CHA hubiera alquilado, demolido o vendido la casa, toda la cuadra habría sido más segura, dijo. 

Después de que Caddy se fué, los problemas continuaron. En junio, la policía recibió otra serie de llamadas sobre tráfico de drogas, incluida una en la que se quejaban de que había vendedores en el callejón de detrás de la casa realizando un “reparto”, lo que significa que estaban dando muestras gratuitas. “La fila está larga”, informó la persona que llamó, según las notas de la central. 

Entre enero y octubre, la policía realizó más de 70 arrestos por venta o posesión de drogas en la cuadra, aunque los registros no muestran cuántas estaban relacionadas con la casa. Trabajadores de otros departamentos municipales han visitado la propiedad y limpiado el jardín trasero en alguna ocasión, según los registros. Pero la basura sigue acumulándose y las personas siguen reuniéndose en la parte trasera.

“Todo el mundo sabe que es un antro de drogas”, afirma el vecino que se refiere a la casa como “la plaga” de la cuadra. 

El vecino no se dio cuenta de que la casa era propiedad de la CHA hasta que se lo informó un periodista.

“La otra noche oí a alguien disparando a la casa”, dijo el vecino. “A mi pareja y a mí nos despertaron a las 3 de la mañana. No se siente nada bien”.

“Es espantoso que la agencia [la CHA] sea dueña de esa propiedad y no esté haciendo nada y que Hispanic Housing no esté haciendo nada", dijo el vecino. “Es un deterioro para el vecindario”.

“El alcalde dice que ama el oeste de la ciudad - entonces, que lo demuestre. Que arregle las cosas en esta cuada”.

Dificultades desde el inicio

El programa de viviendas dispersas pretendía contribuir a eliminar la segregación en la vivienda pública de la ciudad de Chicago y ampliar el acceso de los residentes a oportunidades. Pero desde sus orígenes, hace décadas, la oposición política y la mala gestión han limitado su alcance.

Desde los 1930s hasta los 1960s, los políticos de raza blanca se aseguraron de que la mayoría de los proyectos de vivienda pública de alta densidad de la CHA, como Robert Taylor Homes y Cabrini-Green, se mantuvieran fuera de los vecindarios de población blanca y que fueran concentrados en comunidades negras de bajos ingresos. 

En 1966, activistas de los derechos civiles liderados por Martin Luther King Jr. motivaron a la CHA para que agregara más viviendas de baja densidad en los vecindarios de la ciudad. Tres años más tarde, en el histórico caso Gautreaux, un juez federal impidió que la CHA construyera nuevos rascacielos de alta densidad. También ordenó a la agencia que ubicara las futuras viviendas públicas fuera de las zonas segregadas.

“Se suponía que, en adelante, todas las viviendas de la CHA iban a ser dispersas”, dijo Julie Elena Brown, abogada de la empresa de leyes públicas, Impact for Equity, que empezó a trabajar en el caso Gautreaux hace 33 años.

Pero la CHA se paralizó y, en 1987, un juez federal autorizó a una empresa privada de bienes raíces, Habitat Co., a hacerse cargo de las viviendas diseminadas. La CHA nunca puso un gran número de viviendas dispersas en zonas blancas con mayores recursos economicos, sino que a menudo fueron a parar a vecindarios Latinos, mestizos o incluso negros, con propiedades más baratas y menos resistencia política. 

La CHA también tuvo problemas para mantener y gestionar las propiedades, aunque contrató a empresas privadas de gestión en la década de 1990. Como las viviendas estaban dispersas y no había administradores de la propiedad en los lugares, su mantenimiento costaba más que el de los apartamentos en edificios más grandes. 

“Incluso en las mejores circunstancias, el mantenimiento de una cartera de valores  diversa de edificios individuales, pequeños y medianos en diferentes lugares, plantea importantes retos operativos que no existen en los complejos de vivienda pública de mayor tamaño”, señala la declaración de la CHA a Block Club e Illinois Answers.

Poco ha cambiado el programa en las últimas décadas. 

En 1999, cuando la CHA puso en marcha la iniciativa, “Plan for Transformation” (Plan de Transformación), su programa de renovación de viviendas públicas en toda la ciudad, 522 de sus 2,922 viviendas dispersas estaban vacías, según los registros de la agencia. Es decir, un 18%.

Veinticuatro años más tarde, la CHA tiene un número algo inferior de viviendas dispersas: 2,853. Y el número de viviendas vacías se ha mantenido casi igual. El número de viviendas vacías es prácticamente el mismo: 484, es decir, el 17%. 

'Los mapaches se meten a la propiedad'

Las tasas de vacantes son más elevadas en lo que la CHA llama la Región 2, que incluye gran parte de las zonas oeste y noroeste, desde La Villita hasta O'Hare, pasando por Lawndale, Austin y Montclare. A principios de este año, aproximadamente una de cada cuatro viviendas en esta parte de la ciudad estaba desocupada, una tasa “excesiva”, según determinó el inspector general de la CHA en una auditoría realizada en 2023.

Tracey Champion ha vivido en un edificio disperso del oeste de la ciudad durante más de dos décadas, y durante casi la mitad de ese tiempo, uno de los 8 apartamentos del edificio estaba vacío, dijo. La CHA finalmente lo alquiló este año. 

Como ex presidenta del grupo de residentes en el oeste de la ciudad que viven en edificios dispersos, Champion culpa a los administradores privados de las propiedades por no trabajar en el mantenimiento, y culpa a la CHA por no supervisar a los administradores. La CHA ha cambiado de administrador varias veces desde que ella se mudó a su apartamento. Actualmente, su edificio lo gestiona Hispanic Housing. 

Champion dice que los cambios de administradores no han producido cambios sustanciales en los porcentajes de ocupación ni en las condiciones de vida de su región. Los administradores rara vez responden a las llamadas de los inquilinos, dijo. 

Ella cree que los administradores han básicamente concluido: “Este es el oeste de Chicago donde viven los negros - podemos hacer lo que queramos”.

Los administradores de la propiedad están obligados a llenar las viviendas vacías dentro de un mes, dijo Aguilar en su declaración, aunque en las viviendas con extensos daños, “este proceso, obviamente, lleva mucho más tiempo.”

Aún así, la CHA reconoció anteriormente que los altos niveles de vacantes estaban vinculados a la rotación de administradores.

“Una vez que nuevas agencias tomaron el control de las propiedades, descubrieron que las viviendas que se decía que estaban ocupadas no lo estaban y que los residentes que se mudaron no fueron eliminados de la lista de residentes”, escribió un funcionario de la CHA en respuesta a una auditoría del inspector general publicada en 2017. 

Ese año, la CHA se comprometió a abordar el problema. Pero cuando el inspector general llevó a cabo una segunda auditoría basada en las cifras de ocupación de 2021, los auditores descubrieron que la tasa de desocupación de las viviendas dispersas había aumentado. 

En esa auditoría, publicada a principios de este año, el inspector general también encontró que 174 viviendas dispersas habían estado vacantes durante más de dos años, y algunas durante tanto tiempo como 15 años. Permitir que las propiedades permanezcan vacías durante largos periodos de tiempo, advirtió el inspector general, puede acelerar el deterioro, causar problemas a los vecinos y aumentar el coste de las renovaciones en el futuro. En algunos casos, según la auditoría, la CHA violó las leyes municipales al no registrar, asegurar o mantener sus edificios vacíos. 

Una de sus viviendas vacantes es una casa unifamiliar en el lado noroeste que la agencia compró en 2010 y nunca alquiló. 

La CHA pagó 252,000 dólares por la casa de cuatro dormitorios y dos baños, que se encuentra en una tranquila calle residencial en Montclare, a poca distancia de escuelas, un parque, tiendas y restaurantes. 

Según los registros de CHA, la casa está vacía porque es una de las 408 viviendas que están en rehabilitación o a la espera de ella. En 2013 y de nuevo en 2023, la agencia llevó a cabo evaluaciones de las necesidades físicas de la casa que encontraron defectos estructurales y vieron necesario llevar a cabo una amplia renovación, según muestran los registros. Sin embargo, el trabajo de renovación nunca se hizo, la CHA confirmó. 

Mientras la CHA no alquilaba la casa, llegaron a vivir en ella mapaches. Los vecinos notaron signos de una infestación de mapaches en el verano de 2021 y comenzaron a llamar a la línea de solicitud de servicio 311. Les Kniskern, que ha vivido a pocos pasos de la casa vacía durante más de 12 años, también comenzó a ponerse en contacto con miembros del consejo de la CHA y otros funcionarios públicos para solicitar ayuda.

“El edificio lleva vacío más de 10 años y está plagado de mapaches y otros roedores”, escribió un residente no identificado en una solicitud de servicio de julio de 2021 a través del sitio web de 311. “Actualmente estamos experimentando un olor en el vecindario (¿será un mapache muerto? ¿una persona muerta?). El olor exterior es tan fuerte que está causando dolores de cabeza”.

En marzo de 2022, alguien llamó al 311 para informar a la Municipalidad de que los problemas no se habían resuelto. Como resumía un informe de la llamada: “El revestimiento está despegado y los mapaches se meten en la propiedad”. La vivienda estaba "abierta por todas partes”, decía el informe. 

Al cabo de unas semanas, la solicitud de servicio se “cerró” con un aviso de que se trataba de una propiedad de la CHA: “Caso pendiente sin fecha CHA”, decía un informe.

Pasó otro año. Entonces, en junio, la oficina del concejal Gilbert Villegas del distrito 36 envió una solicitud de servicio al Departamento de Edificios. 

“Hay ocho mapaches que viven en este patio y suben al segundo nivel y probablemente a la casa”, decía un resumen de la solicitud de servicio. El informe añadía que los mapaches probablemente “entraban en [el] edificio por las puertas correderas de vidrio”.

El vecino Les Kniskern se puso en contacto con la CHA en varias ocasiones acerca de la casa descuidada en Montclare. (Crédito: Colin Boyle/Block Club Chicago)

Ese mes, casi dos años después de que Kniskern se pusiera en contacto por primera vez con la CHA, la agencia organizó finalmente una reunión con él. Poco después, el personal de la CHA se hizo cargo de la propiedad. “Que yo sepa, el problema se ha resuelto”, dijo Kniskern. 

Pero Kniskern sigue frustrado por el hecho de que la CHA dejara la vivienda sin utilizar durante tantos años. 

Si la CHA no se compromete a renovar y reocupar la casa, añadió, deberían venderla o derribarla. 

“Se supone que este edificio debe utilizarse para alojar a personas de bajos ingresos, y sólo están de brazos cruzados”, dijo Kniskern. 

En noviembre, Aguilar dijo que la agencia planea renovar la casa y venderla a un residente como parte de la iniciativa “Restore Home”. 

Chinches y ratas

Muchos residentes de viviendas dispersas se muestran satisfechos con sus hogares. Pero algunos edificios alquilados son administrados de forma inadecuada, lo cual produce condiciones inseguras para los residentes y los vecinos de su cuadra.

Una mujer que reside en una vivienda dispersa de Logan Square dice haber sufrido muchos dolores de cabeza durante la última década al tener que lidiar con administradores de propiedades y funcionarios de la CHA que según ella han sido poco serviciales. La mujer no quiere que se utilice su nombre porque le preocupa que la CHA pueda tomar algún tipo de represalia. 

Hace unos 10 años, estaba en la lista de espera de la CHA y recibió una llamada de la agencia. Dijo que se sintió “bendecida”. 

Los empleados de la CHA le enseñaron tres viviendas y le dejaron elegir la que mejor le parecía. Un amigo le sugirió que se mudara a Logan Square, y ella le gustó por las escuelas y los servicios del vecindario. Eligió un apartamento de tres dormitorios y un baño.

Le encantó el lugar y puso en práctica su talento para la decoración. Pintó las paredes de azul turquesa, colgó luces alrededor de las ventanas y redecoró su árbol de Navidad para otras fiestas, con corazones para San Valentín y adornos amarillos y naranjas para Pascua. 

Dice que conoce a todos los vecinos del edificio y que acude a la iglesia de enfrente.

Pero en abril, una gotera en el baño del piso de arriba penetró por el techo de la sala, dañando el suelo, los muebles y su ropa.

Los trabajadores de mantenimiento de Hispanic Housing, que administra el edificio, taparon el agujero debajo del lavabo del baño con plástico y cinta adhesiva. No secaron el techo mojado. Los responsables de la CHA prometieron compensarla por los daños sufridos, pero nunca lo hicieron. 

Luego llegaron las moscas y más tarde una plaga de cucarachas, que caían en gran cantidad sobre ella mientras dormía. En febrero, se dio cuenta de que había moho debajo del lavabo. Se preguntó cómo podría afectar esto a su hijo de 13 años, que tiene asma, y si esto había podido provocar sus dolores de cabeza. Ahora está en conversaciones con los responsables de la CHA para mudarse a otra vivienda. 

“No recomendaría la CHA a nadie porque odiaría que alguien pasara por lo que yo estoy pasando,” dijo la inquilina. “[La CHA] es realmente negligente y las personas negligentes no deberían dirigir un programa como éste. Es evidente que no están haciendo un buen trabajo”.

En general, las compañías de gestión deberían estar atentas, dijo Aguilar, el portavoz de la CHA: “Es inaceptable que los administradores de propiedades no atiendan las quejas de los residentes”. 

Dijo que los residentes pueden llamar a la línea de servicios de emergencia de la CHA de día o de noche si los administradores no son de ayuda. Agregó que la CHA planea buscar nuevos administradores de propiedades y reescribir los contratos de gestión con normas de cumplimiento más estrictas y mejores sistemas de rendición. 

'La genta está desesperada'

Caroline Dodge, de 84 años, dice que el programa de vivienda dispersa le ofreció a ella y a su familia estabilidad, un sentido de comunidad y una razón para salir adelante. 

Dodge vivió en el proyecto de vivienda pública Cabrini-Green de la CHA durante 19 años. Pero los ascensores se descomponían con frecuencia, y subir cinco pisos por las escaleras hasta su apartamento le empeoraba su asma. En 1983 decidió mudarse con su hija adulta a una vivienda dispersa a unas pocas cuadras de distancia, en North Avenue. El apartamento estaba en uno de los tres edificios idénticos que la CHA había construido en Lincoln Park durante la primera oleada de construcción de viviendas dispersas en 1969. 

A Dodge le encantaba su apartamento del primer piso de la 430 W. North Ave. El vecindario le brindó un mayor acceso a espacios naturales y al lago, y su edificio estaba alejado de la calle, con un amplio espacio de jardín en todos los lados. Dodge cultivaba verduras bajo la sombra de media docena de robles y arces. 

Pero la CHA no mantuvo adecuadamente el complejo de vivienda de 12 apartamentos, ni siquiera después de contratar compañías privadas de gestión en la década de 1990. El agua goteaba en el apartamento de Dodge cuando llovía. La CHA arregló el techo en 2010, pero eso no detuvo las goteras. El moho creció detrás de las paredes, dijo.

En 2017, la CHA gastó $52,000 para renovar un apartamento en el complejo de vivienda de Dodge que había estado vacante durante dos años, según muestran los registros. Sin embargo, los funcionarios de la CHA pronto comenzaron a reubicar a los inquilinos del edificio.

Dodge dijo que un squáter/paracaidista entró y se instaló en un apartamento de arriba, incluso después de que la administración aseguró la entrada. “La gente está desesperada”, dijo. “Está desesperada por encontrar donde vivir”. 

En 2018, todo el complejo de vivienda estaba vacío. 

Dodge fue una de las últimas en salir. Tras insistir en quedarse en el vecindario, se mudó a un apartamento en Sedgwick, a unas pocas cuadras de distancia. Construido en el mismo estilo que los apartamentos de North Avenue, ese edificio está situado entre casas de estilo vanguardista valoradas en varios millones de dólares, estructuras históricas protegidas por leyes de conservación y parques adornados con fuentes, tableros de ajedrez y esculturas. 

Tres de los seis apartamentos del edificio estaban vacíos cuando ella se mudó. Cuatro años después, siguen estándolo.

Manage Chicago, la compañía contratada para gestionar la propiedad, declinó hacer comentarios sobre el edificio de Dodge. Después de las preguntas de Block Club y Illinois Answers, Aguilar dijo que un contratista ha sido asignado para rehabilitar los apartamentos vacantes allí.

La casa anterior de Dodge también está vacía, cuatro años después de que ella fue la última residente en mudarse. La CHA está considerando la posibilidad de demoler los viejos edificios para construir una vivienda más grande, de ingresos mixtos, con un máximo de 100 apartamentos, poniendo fin al experimento de 54 años de viviendas dispersas.

Dodge tiene otra propuesta para los edificios.

“Abrirlos de nuevo”, dijo Dodge. “Gestionarlos mejor. No dejemos que se deterioren”.

There’s a wide spectrum of cyclists who take to the streets each week with the Evanston Bicycle Club.

Newer, lower-speed riders mostly stay inside Evanston and surrounding suburbs, taking advantage of barrier-protected bike lanes and quieter residential streets. Cyclists with a bit more energy and experience go for longer rides up to Wilmette or Glencoe. 

But only the more advanced groups venture into the city of Chicago, said Al Cubbage, who last month ended a two-year stint as president of the club, which organizes multiple rides per week.

Taking Clark Street down through Rogers Park means “taking your life into your own hands,” said Cubbage, a retiree who considers himself an intermediate rider. “We have to give people a reminder that it’s a busy street. There’s lots of cars, lots of delivery trucks.”

In 2022, the latest year complete data is available, 201 people were killed on Chicago’s roadways. Traffic crashes, injuries and deaths have risen in the past decade, following national trends aligning with the proliferation of smartphones and ever-larger vehicles.

As city leaders strain to reverse the trend, Evanston has set a powerful example. Following a coordinated, yearslong effort to slow down drivers, Evanston has seen traffic-related injuries in the last decade fall by nearly half and the city went five years without a death, state records show.

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That success caught the attention of U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, who praised Evanston last January at the U.S. Conference of Mayors for its role in advancing traffic safety.

Evanston has “seen several years without a single traffic death thanks to robust complete streets programs, anti-speeding efforts and other measures,” Buttigieg said.

Advocates and officials say Evanston’s success has bolstered the argument they’ve made for years: forcing drivers to slow down, especially in ways that expand designated spaces for cyclists and pedestrians, make streets safer for all users. 

Evanston city officials say they’ve achieved that goal through a coordinated and centralized effort that incorporates feedback without letting drivers, business owners or even local elected officials undermine their vision for a safer and more accessible public way.

While Chicago faces obstacles to following in Evanston’s footsteps, advocates are pointing to signs that the city could be on the cusp of a breakthrough.

How Evanston Built Its Way to Safety

Evanston’s roadway overhaul dates back to 2009, when the city published a 223-page transportation plan that laid out a strategic foundation for the city’s roadways to balance different modes of transportation. 

The plan set no specific goals related to traffic safety, said Lara Biggs, the city’s lead engineer. 

“The intent initially was just to create a way for people to safely bike around town,” Biggs said. “But when you put in a bike lane, you almost always have to narrow the traffic lanes, and … people start to naturally slow down.”

The Evanston City Council followed up with multiple ordinances to lower speed limits on major streets, combined with a series of planned “road diets” that narrowed roadways and created barriers that forced drivers to slow down.

Since 2015, Evanston’s Public Works Agency has overseen the construction of barrier-protected bike lanes on Dodge Avenue near Evanston Township High School and on Sheridan Road near the Northwestern University campus, all while budgeting consistent amounts each year for new sidewalk extensions and speed bumps in the most crash-prone spots.

A decade later, the evidence is clear: Evanston’s streets are safer.

Roadway crashes in the suburb steadily fell by 33% in a decade, from more than 1,200 in 2012 to just over 800 in 2022, according to data from the Illinois Department of Transportation. Traffic injuries fell by 44%, with 347 people hurt on Evanston’s roadways in 2012 compared to 193 in 2022.

By early 2023, when Buttigieg addressed the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the city had not registered a single traffic death since late 2018 after having averaged about two deaths per year between 2010 and 2016, according to state records. Two pedestrians have since been killed in traffic crashes in Evanston.

For comparison, 46 of Chicago’s 50 wards – each of whose population is smaller than Evanston – averaged at least one traffic death per year between 2019 and 2022, and 16 wards averaged at least four deaths per year, according to the city’s Vision Zero Data Portal. Cicero, a suburb just west of Chicago whose population is comparable to Evanston, averaged about four deaths and 400 injuries per year during the same period.

The transformation of Evanston’s roadways has not come without some backlash. In 2018, neighbors along Dodge Avenue in southwest Evanston pushed back against an effort to use parking spots as a barrier between car traffic and bike lanes. A local alderman called the barrier-protected lanes “chaotic and disruptive” for contributing to car traffic, and she pushed for the project’s undoing.

But city leaders opted to keep the lanes in place after Biggs presented data showing a sharp drop in crash-related injuries along Dodge since buffers were put in place, even as side-swipes increased. 

“Because the lanes were narrower, traffic slowed down, and visibility was better so there were fewer conflicts between pedestrians and cars that were turning,” Biggs said. “The purpose of that project was not to slow traffic, but the whole thing kind of became naturally traffic-calming.”

Problems in Chicago: ‘An Extraordinarily Sad Narrative’

Chicago’s roadways are, in many ways, incomparable to Evanston’s. The suburb has no expressways and only a handful of busy arterial streets, while Chicago has dozens.

Chicago’s sheer size, with more than 30 times Evanston’s population, and its vast constellation of decision-makers and funding sources make it difficult to carry out a proactive and coordinated citywide plan, officials and advocates say.

“Ending traffic fatalities is not rocket science,” said Chicago Ald. Daniel La Spata (1st), who chairs the City Council Committee on Pedestrian and Traffic Safety. “It’s a combination of smart infrastructure, education and reasonable enforcement. We know how to do that. We just need to choose to do it.”

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City officials have installed multiple safety upgrades in La Spata’s ward in recent years — but often in response to high-profile tragedies, he said.

“It speaks to a particular challenge in Chicago that our infrastructure improvements tend to be reactionary to traffic fatalities,” La Spata said. “That is an extraordinarily sad narrative for a city to have.”

Improvements have not been equally distributed across the city — in large part, La Spata said, because alderpeople have wide latitude to guide policies in their own wards. Council members are allocated $1.5 million each year in discretionary “menu” funds under their control, and the unwritten rule of “aldermanic prerogative” means they have heavy influence over other infrastructure spending in their wards.

Some alderpeople have resisted new bike lanes or even pushed to have them removed, citing backlash from drivers. During a budget hearing in October, South Side Ald. David Moore (17th) said he would only support new bike lanes in his ward “if I see a need for it…but in so many cases, they’re causing more problems than not.”

In a subsequent interview with Illinois Answers, Moore said new painted bike lanes along Vincennes Avenue in Auburn Gresham caused so much traffic near Westcott Elementary School that he had to call on police to monitor the area at pickup and dropoff times.

“Traffic gets so backed up, cars are swerving around and driving in the bike lanes, sometimes almost hitting kids,” Moore said. “I’m also having residents call and complain because we’re getting cars and trucks driving up and down the side streets.”

Aldermanic prerogative can be a barrier to citywide planning, said Jim Merrell, advocacy director for the Active Transportation Alliance, which lobbies for policies that support walking, cycling and public transit.

“Alders are incredibly important stakeholders and conveners, but we need to let transportation decisions be made by professionals,” Merrell said. “In many ways, we still have 50 different fiefdoms, and it’s hard to build a citywide network when you have that many veto points.”

Another barrier is channeling the gamut of funding sources and programs across city agencies and neighborhoods — and across mayoral administrations — into a unified, cohesive planning process like Evanston’s, he said.

Unlike most of its peers, Chicago does not pass an annual budget for capital projects, making it difficult to track yearly progress.

As for longer-range strategies, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration released a “Vision Zero action plan” in 2017 and followed up a year later with a plan to prioritize “high-crash corridors” for safety revamps. The action plan sought to reduce deaths from traffic crashes by 20% by 2020. Instead, traffic deaths increased by 28% from 2017 to 2020.

The Department of Transportation under Mayor Lori Lightfoot did not update either plan, instead releasing a broader “strategic plan for transportation” that charted out new goals and criteria for success.

“Every different mayor who comes in wants to put their own unique mark on things, so you don’t necessarily have sustained political champions with the same priorities,” Merrell said. 

Lessons from Evanston’s Planning

The Evanston Public Works Agency takes feedback and ideas from City Council members and their constituents, but the city’s nine alderpeople aren’t empowered to make decisions about new infrastructure on their own. Instead, city transportation officials synthesize public input with crash data to decide which projects should be prioritized, said Biggs, the suburb’s lead traffic engineer. 

Evanston city leaders chart out their longer-range spending goals in five-year capital plans, combined with annual capital budgets to nail down the specifics of how each project’s timing and spending fits into the bigger picture, Biggs said.

“The City Council always has the right to make changes, and we always try to make sure they understand what’s in the annual capital plan,” she said. “But the City Council is generally really supportive of the staff recommendations, partly because we’re choosing projects based on where we know the most problems are.”

The annual budgets also help Biggs and her team ensure the city spends consistent amounts on improvements each year. The city allots $300,000 annually to build or replace sidewalks, plus another $250,000 for “traffic calming” infrastructure like new speed humps, crosswalks and speed radar signs, Biggs said.

Evanston took another step to centralize its planning process in 2021 when it retired its Shared Cost Sidewalk Replacement Program that let residents apply for sidewalk restoration projects. By switching to a grid system, Evanston prioritized the most dangerous sidewalks instead of those forefronted by the city’s most politically engaged, Biggs said.

Cities that take proactive approaches to upgrading infrastructure are usually better at protecting their most vulnerable residents than cities with reactive, complaint-based models, said Victoria Barrett, a senior urban planner with the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning.

“We’ve seen a lot of inequitable deployment of safety infrastructure,” Barrett said. “The people who are most affected by traffic safety are usually the people who are most disenfranchised from the political process.”

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Reasons for Hope in Chicago: ‘We Have a Blueprint’ 

Despite the barriers holding back Chicago from replicating Evanston’s success, advocates say they’re emboldened by an unprecedented gush of infrastructure funds.

The five-year “Chicago Works” capital improvement plan, bolstered by a 2021 bond, tees up billions of dollars for streetscape improvements. The state’s 2019 Rebuild Illinois capital plan, the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021 and Cook County’s annual Invest in Cook capital program combine for billions in additional funding that was unavailable to Chicago just five years ago.

“This has been the biggest story in transportation that no one’s talking about,” Merrell said. “Having local dollars for street improvements that don’t come will all the strings of state and federal dollars — and also doesn’t come from the aldermanic menu budgets that require negotiation and haggling — means we’re able to build more things, more quickly.”

Between 2021 and 2022, arterial resurfacing projects alone brought about 802 new curb extensions, 55 sidewalk bump-outs, 52 new pedestrian refuge islands, 17 miles of new bike lanes and 22 miles of repainted bike lanes, the city reported in December 2022.

The transportation department installed just 14 miles of new barrier-protected bike lanes across the city between 2018 and 2022. But as of last month, the city was on pace to add 55 miles of “bikeway projects” in 2023 alone, said Erica Schroeder, spokesperson for the Chicago Department of Transportation.

Last year, officials identified locations and secured funding for another 150 miles of new bike lanes, with more than 120 of those miles protected by barriers, the department said in its spring 2023 Chicago Cycling Update.

“While any traffic fatality is too many, we are continuing to see positive trends in traffic safety following a spike in traffic fatalities during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Schroeder wrote in an emailed statement.

State records show about a 3% dip in Chicago roadway injuries and a 13% drop in deaths between 2021 and 2022. And while state data is not yet available for 2023, Schroeder pointed to the city’s Vision Zero Data Portal, which shows a 22% drop in traffic deaths across the city during the first 10 months of 2023 compared to a year earlier.

Schroeder attributed the declines to “making sustained investments in infrastructure improvements, strengthening community partnerships to identify and program local safety initiatives, and enforcing rules of the road.”

While not yet enough to prove a sustained trend, officials have pointed to local successes they say are further proof of positive effects.

A “road diet” project on Jackson Boulevard through Columbus Park contributed to a 75% drop in speeding violations, according to the strategic plan one-year update. And officials have measured sharp drops in driving speeds along stretches of Augusta Boulevard and Kedzie Avenue where buffered bike lanes were installed earlier this year.

La Spata said he and his constituents have reaped the benefits of new roadway infrastructure in his Near Northwest Side ward, which included the installation of protected bike lanes along Milwaukee Avenue and speed cameras and curb extensions at the crash-heavy intersection of Fullerton and Washtenaw avenues.  The 1st ward recorded just one death in 2023, compared to three in 2022 and five in 2021, according to the Vision Zero Data Portal.

“We know how to do it. We have a blueprint. And we have the funding,” La Spata said. “All we need is the political will to want to do it.”

This story was produced with South Side Weekly, a nonprofit newsroom serving the South Side of Chicago.

It was early 2020 when Jay Davis realized his family was going to lose his childhood home, a red brick house in Rosemoor on the South Side of Chicago that had been in his family for generations. 

Davis’ great-uncle had been living there, and as his dementia worsened the one-story house began to deteriorate. When he died, he left it to his son who had serious health issues and could not maintain the home, Davis said. 

Davis, 41, wanted to keep the house from becoming another vacant lot on the South Side. He understood the significance of homeownership as a tool for building generational wealth that has been denied to many Black Chicagoans due to racist practices like redlining and predatory lending.

He experienced this first-hand when he was in his early 20s and made a foray into real estate investment. Davis was the proud new owner of a condo and another property that he planned to rent out when the 2008 financial crisis hit. He wasn’t able to make his mortgage payments – which he said he should have never been approved for – and lost both homes. 

“When I decided that I wanted to get back into real estate, it was to combat predatory practices and to provide stable housing for people that need it,” Davis said. 

With help from Courtney Jones, a real estate developer and leader of the newly established Community Receiver Program, Davis worked to fix up his cousin’s home for resale. 

The Community Receiver Program works with Black and brown real estate professionals on the South and West sides to rehabilitate vacant and foreclosed properties.

Typically, receivers are management companies brought in by the courts to address unsafe conditions in buildings that have been neglected before turning them back over to their original owners.

Private, for-profit actors in this space aim to maximize profits and often don’t have much of a stake in the long-term success of the neighborhood. In the past, some companies have used receivership to take ownership of occupied homes through foreclosure when owners could not pay for the cost of repairs, a practice that is now frowned upon by the courts, said Will Edwards, assistant commissioner for neighborhood development and housing preservation in the Department of Housing.

Today, the Department of Housing partners with nonprofit agencies to do this work in a more community-minded way through a program called the Troubled Buildings Initiative, but the need has outpaced the federal funding available to these agencies. 

With the Community Receiver Program, Edwards said the city hopes to “right historical wrongs” by playing an active role in training participants to responsibly rehabilitate abandoned properties.

The program works to empower local professionals – brokers, general contractors, mason workers and first-time investors – to reclaim receivership as a tool to uplift themselves and their communities by restoring affordable housing and keeping wealth generated from property sales circulating in the local economy, said Jones, who is executive director of the Black Coalition for Housing, which co-runs the program.

Sometimes they petition to be receivers through the courts, but they also make use of other opportunities and city programs like Chicago Neighborhood Rebuild that help investors acquire, remodel and resell abandoned properties that might otherwise have remained vacant. 

Since 2020, the program has trained about 520 people and helped rehabilitate 16 buildings, contributing nearly $4.5 million in restored property value, according to the program’s website.

In Davis’ case, he began working on the Rosemoor home after his cousin voluntarily forfeited ownership to him in 2021. Davis said he paid about $7,500 in fees and unpaid water bills to obtain the house, and made sure his cousin found housing.

With guidance from the Community Receiver Program, he assembled a team and repaired the exterior of the home, replaced the roof and some of the pipes, and remodeled the basement. He sold the house in 2021 to a family friend.

“My whole mission in doing this is really to build up the Black community and provide affordable housing for potential Black homebuyers,” Davis said, “and especially first-time Black homebuyers, so they don’t have to go through what I went through.”

The History of Receivership and Abandoned Buildings in Chicago

As the housing bubble burst in 2008, foreclosures spiked across the city but Black homeowners on the South and West sides were hit particularly hard due to heightened rates of subprime lending in segregated communities, according to a 2018 study published by the University of Illinois Department of Urban and Regional Planning. 

While other areas of the city stabilized by 2013, foreclosure rates remain high in communities on the South and West sides, according to data from DePaul University’s Institute for Housing Studies. This has led to the deterioration of smaller rental properties of two to four units, which make up the bulk of Chicago’s affordable housing, said Sarah Duda, the institute’s deputy director.

This contributed to a crisis of vacant lots and the displacement of more than 180,000 Black Chicagoans from 2000 to 2010 and another 75,000 in the subsequent seven years, many of whom left in search of economic opportunity and affordable housing, according to a report from the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

As foreclosures produced distressed and vacant properties, private receivers became more active. 

Private receivers oversee the rehabilitation of properties, the cost of which is ultimately paid for by the building’s original owner. If the owner cannot pay back the receiver, the cost becomes a lien – a debt held against the property – and the property may be entered into foreclosure and sold by the receiver, who can keep the profits. Receivers of occupied buildings collect rent on behalf of owners and can raise rents with the permission of the court to help cover repair costs. 

It can take months or years for private receivers to fully recover their investment and even then they could potentially lose money, said Anthony Simpkins, president and CEO of Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS) Chicago, a nonprofit that offers loans and other resources to support affordable housing and homeowners in underserved communities. 

That’s why private receivers usually only invest in properties that have a strong potential to generate income, he said.  

For renters, receivership is an essential tool when they have run out of options to compel their landlords to address poor, unsafe living conditions, said David Wilson, a community organizer with the Metropolitan Tenants Organization, a tenants’ rights advocacy group. 

But it comes with a significant risk. Tenants may be evicted when the receiver starts making repairs or displaced later on if the receiver or the building’s owner increases rent, Wilson said. 

In an effort to preserve affordable housing and protect residents from displacement, the Department of Housing, through the Troubled Buildings Initiative, works with NHS Chicago and the Community Investment Corporation to provide building owners with resources to try to avoid the need for receivership all together. 

When receivership is necessary, the two agencies act as receivers and use federal funding from Community Development Block Grants to cover repairs. This safety net allows them to address the “worst buildings in the poorest neighborhoods” that would not be economically viable for private receivers, Simpkins said. 

While owners are still charged the cost of repairs, those who live in their buildings – single-family homes or smaller multi-family homes – can apply for grants to have their debt forgiven over a period of five years, said Edwards, of the Department of Housing. 

For owners of larger buildings, they pay back the repairs via repayment plans or otherwise have a lien placed against their property. If they refuse or can’t make payments toward the lien, the property is entered into foreclosure and sold to a new owner, oftentimes a bank. 

As long as there is public money invested in a building through a lien or grant agreement, the Troubled Buildings Initiative restricts the rental price of units to rates that would be affordable to those who make 80% of the city’s area median income (AMI). 

Critics say this restriction doesn’t do much to ensure housing remains affordable because low-income neighborhoods have a much lower median income than the city’s AMI, which includes surrounding suburbs.

South Shore’s area median income, for example, is less than half of the citywide median income, according to the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning.

“When we do affordable housing, the question is affordable to who?” said Dixon Romeo, executive director of Not Me We, a community organization that fights gentrification in South Shore.

Using Receivership in a New Way

The Community Receiver Program brings together city, experts and nonprofit resources to train participants on how they might use receivership in a new way – often approaching the process as developers rather than temporary managers of properties, said Sanina Ellison Jones, president of the Dearborn Realtist Board, a trade association for Black real estate professionals that co-runs the program.

Instead of focusing solely on addressing unsafe living conditions, the Community Receiver Program seeks to fully renovate buildings and resell properties to local homebuyers of color or rent them out at affordable rates. 

Program organizers want to avoid turning properties back over to negligent owners – which is one way that both nonprofit and for-profit receivers have failed Black and brown communities in the past, Ellison Jones said. 

“There was this cycle that we noticed that was continuing, which impacted the residents of the community,” she said.

Courtney Jones, who is married to Ellison Jones, said instructors strive to create a culture that uplifts the surrounding community as well as the investor. The fact that community receivers take on properties in their own backyards naturally pushes them to be better actors, he said. 

“If you’re living in that community, how you manage that project is going to impact your own real estate,” he said.

Receivership training is free for participants and run by volunteers from city departments, the city’s two nonprofit lenders and the Dearborn Realtist Board. Community receivers are assigned mentors and work in pods, learning from their peers.

Over the course of the program, participants learn how to acquire and rehabilitate neglected buildings and how to leverage grants or city programs to help obtain those properties.

“Often the value of the property is actually less than the cost to rehabilitate it,” NHS Chicago’s Simpkins explained. “So they can then come to us and get grants toward the acquisition and closing costs to make that project feasible.” 

Beyond petitioning for receivership through the courts, community receivers can also acquire vacant buildings through the Cook County Land Bank Authority, which has partnered with the program to hear project presentations from graduating students. 

In this way, community receivers – much like public receivers – are empowered to fix up properties that would not normally receive attention from developers and sell those homes for affordable rates while still turning a profit, Jones said.

Jones said he hopes to continue expanding the network of graduates so that the Troubled Buildings Initiative can tap them whenever it needs work done on buildings, even if it is a smaller job like repairing a roof or fixing a boiler. 

What’s Next for the Community Receiver Program?

Many graduates of the Community Receiver Program struggle to file their first petition for receivership because of the financial risk associated with taking on this kind of project, Ellison Jones said. Moving forward, she hopes to continue to partner with the land bank and with entities like the Chicago Community Loan Fund to get more financial backing for graduates. 

Eventually, this might also allow community receivers to be assigned to larger, multi-family buildings, Courtney Jones said. Currently, the program is focused on single-family homes and smaller rental buildings.

The city will continue doing what it can to reduce barriers for community receivers and connect them with opportunities for monetary support, Edwards said. An ordinance passed last year by the City Council allows city debt to be waived on vacant or abandoned properties in low- to moderate-income neighborhoods for those looking to rehabilitate them.

Simpkins said there is always a need for more federal funding to support grant and loan programs that NHS Chicago helps facilitate for community receivers and homeowners. NHS Chicago had to stop accepting new applications for those programs in August due to budget constraints, he said.

The Community Receiver Program is “an important aspect of the [Troubled Buildings Initiative] process that I think is not being utilized enough,” Simpkins said. 

But it’s just one small piece in the puzzle of bringing about a reality where housing is regarded as a human right and where public policy affirms that, said Romeo whose organization, Not Me We, serves residents in South Shore and the surrounding area.

While Romeo understands the intention behind an initiative like the Community Receiver Program, he said the city needs to do more to safeguard affordable housing and address its history of discriminatory housing practices – to get at the root of the problem. 

“The reality is, it’s one program that’s got a pretty limited scope,” he said, adding that residents also need rent control, more paths to homeownership and additional rental vouchers. “We need all these things at once.”

The Rosemoor Home

When it came time to sell the Rosemoor home, Davis wasn’t out to turn a huge profit, he said. He invested $75,000 in remodeling the home and sold it to his best friend’s younger brother, LaMarr Brown, for $150,000 in August of 2021, Davis said.

“Now, my little brother is a homeowner,” Davis said. “… I’m very proud of him.”

Brown smiled as he stood outside of his home with his 10-week-old son, LaMarr Junior, on a sunny afternoon earlier this year. After completing his service with the U.S. Military in 2020, Brown said he was glad to buy his first home from someone he knew he could trust.

After graduating from the Community Receiver Program, Davis purchased an Englewood property from the land bank through Chicago Neighborhood Rebuild, a program in which developers can get loans to rehabilitate vacant homes in Englewood, Garfield Park and Humboldt Park. 

“It feels pretty great to be a homeowner because I basically went from barracks to barracks, so I never really lived in a home other than when I was a child,” Brown said.

Davis placed the Englewood home on the market in September. 

Now, he’s looking for a property on the South Side to take another shot at petitioning for receivership through the courts. He plans to continue this work of fixing up run-down buildings to support homeownership in his community.

Reporting on equity issues by the BGA is supported by Joel M. Friedman, president of the Alvin H. Baum Family Fund.

Leaders of the City Council are calling for more accountability from the Chicago Housing Authority following an investigation by the Illinois Answers Project and Block Club Chicago that put “front and center” the agency’s hundreds of empty, deteriorating units.

Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez (25th), who chairs the council’s Committee on Housing and Real Estate, said he already requested quarterly meetings with CHA CEO Tracey Scott and other officials in early November to answer questions about the vacancies and other issues.

“We want to make sure that council members and the public at large … and especially CHA residents and people on the waiting lists, are able to come and hear directly from the CEO and the leadership on the progress that is being made on scattered housing, among other topics,” Sigcho-Lopez said.

Other alderpeople also expressed concerns after Illinois Answers and Block Club found that nearly 500 of the CHA’s scattered-site properties are empty while more than 200,000 people are on the agency’s waiting lists for housing. After the news outlets began asking questions, the CHA announced it plans to spend $50 million in 2024 to rehabilitate 176 of the scattered-site properties.

The scattered-site program was intended to help desegregate the city’s public housing and expand residents’ access to opportunities. Instead, one in six of the CHA’s scattered sites are unused — and in some cases decaying and becoming blights on the neighborhood.

Ald. Gilbert Villegas (36th) said the investigation by Illinois Answers and Block Club shows why the housing committee needs to hear regularly from CHA leaders.

“It’s only incumbent on us as a City Council to ask these questions as to what is CHA doing in order to accommodate the shortage of affordable housing,” Villegas said. “Obviously here’s one topic that’s front and center that we should immediately begin to ask questions around and have CHA come in and testify about what they’re doing.”

Villegas’ ward includes one of the long-vacant homes featured in the Block Club-Illinois Answers story. After the house was infested with raccoons, Villegas said he had to intervene and contact CHA property manager Hispanic Housing Development Corp. multiple times. They eventually responded, he said, but “they should be out driving around to make sure everything is good to go.”

The CHA is formally an independent government body with its own board responsible for providing oversight. But the agency has been under fire in recent years for its slow pace of housing construction — and deals to sell off parcels of land — while thousands of people struggle with housing insecurity and homelessness.

The CHA’s board members and CEO are appointed by the mayor and approved by the City Council. As a candidate for mayor, Brandon Johnson called for a new direction at the agency. But he has said little about the CHA since taking office in May.

A spokesman for the mayor did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Under Sigcho-Lopez’s plan, the housing authority will be tasked with providing alderpeople a report on its progress, he said. 

The committee hearings will then focus on allowing residents and alderpeople to share their questions and concerns about needed improvements at existing public housing as well as plans for building new housing, Sigcho-Lopez said. He hopes to hold some of the meetings in impacted communities outside of City Hall.

The first meeting will likely be sometime in the first quarter of next year, he said. But Sigcho-Lopez said he’s still negotiating the frequency of the hearings. Officials from the CHA have agreed to appear twice a year but not quarterly, he said.

A spokesperson for the CHA said in a statement that its leaders have not yet talked with Sigcho-Lopez about appearing quarterly, though the agency “shares the City Council’s commitment to ensuring affordable housing throughout the city. 

“We regularly work with Aldermen and are available to answer questions from City Council,” the statement continued. “Our CEO appeared in front of the Committee on Housing and Real Estate earlier this year.”

Tracey Scott, the agency’s CEO, faced a barrage of questions and complaints when she made that appearance in February.

Sigcho-Lopez said the reluctance of CHA officials to appear before the public is part of the reason he and other alderpeople are requesting a change in leadership at the agency, he said.

He said he expects the City Council to “put more pressure on the CHA” next year. 

Villegas said the agency should be really concentrated on building more public housing. 

He said he lived in CHA housing with his family for eight years when he was a child. That allowed his family to regroup and get back on their feet before finding a market-rate home. He worries that others aren’t getting the same opportunity.

“You have 200,000 people and families on a waiting list, 200,000 families and people that are waiting for an opportunity,” Villegas said. “And the department that’s responsible for it is not moving in a fashion or in a way to address the needs.” 

“Reporting on equity issues by the BGA is supported by Joel M. Friedman, president of the Alvin H. Baum Family Fund.”

This story was produced by the Illinois Answers Project, an investigations and solutions journalism news organization, and Block Club Chicago, a nonprofit newsroom focused on Chicago’s neighborhoods. 

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On a block of frame houses and workers cottages, 849 N. St. Louis stands out: It’s the only home with its windows and front door boarded up. While most of the lawns on the street are well tended, its backyard is littered with tree branches and trash; over the summer, the heap grew nearly as high as the neighbors’ fences. 

Neighbors call the West Humboldt Park home a magnet for danger, a “scourge” of the block, a “drug den.” They’ve complained to the city dozens of times in the last two years about trouble at the property including garbage, rats, drug sales, open drug use and even gunfire.

“I just want to get rid of this house,” said one neighbor, who didn’t want her name published because she fears for her safety.

The neighbor was even more outraged after learning the owner of the property — the Chicago Housing Authority, a government agency responsible for providing safe, affordable homes to low-income people. 

That house is part of a CHA program that’s supposed to help families access new neighborhoods and opportunities. Instead, the property has become emblematic of a broader problem: The agency owns vacant, deteriorating homes like it all over the city.

An investigation by the Illinois Answers Project and Block Club Chicago has found the CHA is sitting on nearly 500 empty homes that are part of its scattered-site program — even as Chicago struggles to address housing crises on multiple fronts, from historically high rents that many families can’t afford to a surge in homelessness to a stream of migrants who need shelter.

In all, the CHA owns about 2,900 scattered-site residences dispersed through dozens of neighborhoods. But one out of every six of the homes is empty, and dozens of them have been unoccupied for years, records show.

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The CHA’s neglected scattered sites can be found on every side of town. For example, on the North Side, a handsome yellow-brick apartment building in Lakeview was renovated for $1.5 million in the mid-2010s, yet the building was never completely filled. On the West Side, several multifamily buildings in North Lawndale have been vacant and boarded up for years. And in South Shore, blocks from where the Obama Presidential Center is being built, more than a third of a 51-unit apartment building is vacant. The CHA says it will soon rent out most of those South Shore apartments.

The properties are unused even though more than 200,000 people are on the CHA’s waiting lists for housing assistance, including 50,000 who want a scattered-site unit.

In addition to the lost opportunity to house families, long-vacant units can spark crime and lower property values in the surrounding neighborhoods.

Alderpeople with scattered sites in their wards expressed exasperation that the CHA is letting so many of the homes remain vacant.

“That's ridiculous,” said Ald. Walter Burnett Jr. (27th), whose ward includes the boarded-up house on North St. Louis. “That's affordable housing. That doesn't make any sense. We need these houses filled up.”

The scattered-site homes are “drastically” needed for people searching for safe, affordable options, said Ald. Jessie Fuentes (26th). The alderperson noted that dozens of people are living in tents in Humboldt Park, in the middle of the 26th Ward, and rents have skyrocketed in surrounding communities. 

“We can use some of those abandoned CHA units if they were rehabbed,” Fuentes said. 

CHA officials repeatedly declined requests from Block Club and the Illinois Answers Project to discuss the scattered-site program in an interview.

In a statement, CHA spokesman Matthew Aguilar said the CHA “is not satisfied with this vacancy rate and has prioritized funding to bring vacant units and buildings back into service.” 

After Block Club and Illinois Answers began asking about the program, Aguilar said the total number of vacant units had decreased from 505 earlier this year to 484 by the end of September. The agency has spent more than $16 million on renovations of scattered sites this year and is developing a plan to bring “nearly all” of the vacant units back online, according to Aguilar. 

That includes “up to $50 million” the CHA is planning to earmark in 2024 for renovating and rehabilitating 176 of these properties, he said.  

In addition, the CHA is planning to sell about 40 scattered-site units to CHA residents through a new program called “Restore Home.” That will include 849 N. St. Louis, Aguilar said.

The CHA also plans to seek new property managers in 2024 “to provide greater oversight and better service for residents,” Aguilar said in an email.

At the same time, Aguilar’s statement highlighted the “operational challenges” and higher costs of maintaining a portfolio of smaller properties spread throughout the city. And it blamed the high vacancy rate on decisions by previous agency leaders to defer maintenance and keep certain units unrented. The agency’s current CEO, Tracey Scott, took the position in 2020. 

While the CHA declined to make Scott available to Block Club and Illinois Answers reporters, the CEO spoke with the Chicago Sun-Times about plans to renovate scattered site housing. This was after Illinois Answers and Block Club made the CHA aware that they were planning to publish their story imminently.

A blight on the block

Most of the yards on the 800 block of North St. Louis are tidy and surrounded by fences. American and Mexican flags and pennants hang from front porches. On one recent fall afternoon, a man in a black T-shirt worked under the hood of a car parked on the street.

“Most of the people are working class, just minding their business,” said the outraged neighbor who spoke with Block Club and Illinois Answers.

The CHA has owned 849 N. St. Louis since 1983, but the home has been vacant for at least seven years, records show. Since 2019, neighbors have called 911 more than 80 times to report a burglary in progress, a person with a gun and, on dozens of occasions, drug sales, according to city call logs. Seventeen of the 911 calls were made in one three-week stretch in the fall of 2022. 

Zach Caddy, who formerly lived on the block, said people involved in the drug trade “discovered the house was very much a place where you could do business without interruptions.”

Caddy said police cars would sit outside the property for a few hours at a time but he rarely saw officers take any action. 

He also never saw property managers stopping by. The CHA has contracted with at least four  firms to manage the property since it became vacant in 2016; Hispanic Housing Development Corp. is the current property manager. The company did not respond to multiple requests for an interview about the home on St. Louis or other properties.

For a time, Caddy looked into buying the vacant house, but it was “outrageously difficult” to figure out the right person to talk to, he said. 

Later, he installed security cameras that captured part of the troubled property. But he said a man later approached him and threatened to set his car and his partner’s car on fire if he didn’t remove the cameras. 

Caddy sold his house and moved out in May.

If the CHA had rented out, demolished or sold the home, the whole block would have been safer, he said. 

After Caddy left, the troubles continued. In June, police received another series of calls about drug traffic, including one complaining that sellers were in the alley behind the house conducting a “pass out,” meaning they were giving away free samples. “Line is long,” the caller reported, according to the dispatcher’s notes. 

From January through October, police made more than 70 arrests for drug sales or possession on the block, though records don’t show how many were tied to the house. Workers from other city departments have visited the property and cleaned out the backyard on occasion, records show. But garbage continued to accumulate, and people keep gathering in the back.

“Everybody knows it’s a drug den,” said the neighbor who calls the home the “scourge” of the block. 

The neighbor didn’t realize the house was owned by the CHA until informed by a reporter.

“The other night I heard someone shooting at the house,” the neighbor said. “My partner and I were awakened at 3 in the morning. That’s not a good feeling.”

“It’s appalling that the agency [the CHA] owns that property and they’re not doing anything and Hispanic Housing isn’t doing anything,” the neighbor said. “It’s a blight on the neighborhood.”

"The mayor says he loves the West Side — let him prove it. Fix things on this block."

Hobbled from the start

The scattered-site program was intended to help desegregate the city’s public housing and expand residents’ access to opportunities. But from the time of its origins decades ago, political opposition and poor management have limited its reach.

From the 1930s through the 1960s, white politicians ensured that most of the CHA’s large, high-density developments like the Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini-Green were kept out of white neighborhoods. That left them concentrated in low-income Black communities. 

In 1966, civil rights activists led by Martin Luther King Jr. called on the CHA to add more low-density housing in neighborhoods around the city. Three years later, in the landmark Gautreaux case, a federal judge blocked the CHA from building additional high-rise, high-density developments. He also ordered the agency to place future public housing outside of segregated Black areas. 

“Going forward, all CHA development was supposed to be scattered sites,” said Julie Elena Brown, an attorney for the public interest firm Impact for Equity who began working on the Gautreaux case 33 years ago.

But the CHA stalled, and in 1987 a federal judge authorized a private real estate development firm, the Habitat Co., to take charge of the scattered sites. The CHA never put large numbers of scattered sites in affluent white areas; instead, they often ended up in Hispanic, racially mixed or even Black neighborhoods with cheaper real estate and less political resistance. 

The CHA also struggled to maintain and manage the properties, though it hired private management companies in the 1990s. Because the homes were spread out, with no property managers at the locations, the scattered sites cost more to keep up than apartments in larger developments. 

“Even in the best of circumstances, there are significant operational challenges that come with maintaining a geographically diverse portfolio of single, small and medium-sized buildings that do not exist in larger public housing complexes,” said the CHA’s statement to Block Club and Illinois Answers.

Little has changed in the program over the last several decades. 

In 1999, when the CHA launched the Plan for Transformation, its citywide public housing makeover, 522 of its 2,922 scattered site units were vacant, according to agency records. That’s about 18%.

Twenty-four years later, the CHA has slightly fewer scattered-site units: 2,853. And the number of vacancies has stayed almost the same: 484, or 17%. 

'Raccoons are harboring in the property'

The vacancy rates are highest in what the CHA calls scattered site Region 2, which includes much of the West and Northwest sides, from Little Village through Lawndale, Austin, Montclare and up to O’Hare. As of earlier this year, about one in every four units in this part of the city was unoccupied — an “excessive” rate, the CHA’s inspector general determined in a 2023 audit.

Tracey Champion has lived in a West Side scattered-site building for more than two decades, and for nearly half that time, one of the building’s eight apartments was empty, she said. The CHA finally rented it out this year. 

As the former president of the West Side scattered-site residents’ group, Champion blames the private property managers for neglecting maintenance work — and she blames the CHA for not monitoring the managers. The CHA has switched property managers several times since she moved into her apartment. Currently her building is managed by Hispanic Housing. 

Champion said changes in managers have not led to substantive changes in occupancy rates or living conditions in her region. The managers rarely respond to calls from tenants, she said. She believes the managers have essentially decided, “This is the Black West Side of Chicago — we can do whatever we want.”

The property managers are required to fill empty units within a month, Aguilar said in his statement, though in units with extensive damage, “this process obviously takes much more time.”

Still, the CHA previously acknowledged the high vacancy levels were linked to property management turnover. 

“Once new firms took control of properties, they found that units that were said to be occupied were not and that residents who moved out were not taken off the resident list,” a CHA official wrote in response to an inspector general audit published in 2017. 

That year, the CHA committed to addressing the problem. But when the inspector general conducted a second audit based on 2021 occupancy numbers, auditors found that the scattered-site vacancy rate had actually inched up. 

In that audit, published earlier this year, the inspector general also found that 174 scattered-site units had been vacant for more than two years, and some for as long as 15 years. Allowing properties to sit vacant for extended periods of time, the inspector general cautioned, can speed up deterioration, causing problems for neighbors and increasing the cost of renovations down the road. In some cases, the audit found, the CHA broke city laws by failing to register, secure or maintain its vacant buildings. 

One of its vacant units is a single-family home on the Northwest Side that the agency purchased in 2010 and never rented out. 

The CHA paid $252,000 for the four-bedroom, two-bathroom home, which is on a quiet residential street in Montclare, within walking distance of schools, a park, shops and restaurants. 

According to CHA records, the house is empty because it is one of 408 units undergoing or awaiting a rehab. In 2013 and again in 2023, the agency conducted physical needs assessments of the home that found structural defects and a need for extensive renovation, records show. Yet the renovation work was never done, the CHA confirmed. 

While the CHA failed to rent the home, raccoons moved in.

Neighbors noticed signs of a raccoon infestation in summer of 2021 and started calling the city’s 311 service request line. Les Kniskern, who has lived kitty-corner from the vacant house for more than 12 years, also started reaching out to CHA board members and other public officials to request assistance.

“The building has been vacant 10+ years, and is overrun with raccoons and rodents,” an unidentified resident wrote in a July 2021 service request through the city’s online 311 portal. “Currently we are experiencing an odor in the neighborhood (dead raccoon? Dead human?). The smell outside is so bad it is causing headaches.” 

In March 2022, someone called 311 to tell the city that the problems had not been resolved. As a report of the call summarized: “Siding is peeled back and raccoons are harboring in the property.” The home was “open all over,” the report stated. 

Within a few weeks, the service request was “closed” with an acknowledgement that it was a CHA property: “Pending case no date CHA,” a report stated.

Another year passed. Then, in June, the office of Ald. Gilbert Villegas (36th) forwarded a service request to the Department of Buildings. 

“There are 8 raccoons living in this yard and going up to the second level and probably into the house,” stated a summary of the service request. The report added that the raccoons were likely “getting into [the] building by the sliding glass doors.”

That month, nearly two years after Kniskern first contacted the CHA, the agency finally arranged to meet with him. Shortly after, CHA staff secured the property, he said. “To the best of my knowledge, the problem has been resolved,” Kniskern said. 

But Kniskern remains frustrated that the CHA let the home go unused for so many years. 

If the CHA won’t commit to renovating and reoccupying the house, he added, they should sell it or tear it down. 

“This building is supposed to be used for low-income housing, and they're just sitting on it,” Kniskern said. 

In November, Aguilar said the agency plans to renovate the home and sell it to a CHA resident as part of the “Restore Home” initiative. 

Bed bugs and rats

Many scattered-site residents express appreciation for their homes. But some rented-out buildings are mismanaged, creating unsafe living conditions for the residents and their neighbors on the block.

One woman who lives in a Logan Square scattered-site apartment said she has repeatedly suffered from headaches over the last decade when dealing with unhelpful property managers and CHA officials. The woman doesn’t want her name used because she’s concerned the CHA could retaliate in some way. 

About 10 years ago, she was on the CHA’s waiting list when she received a call from the housing authority. She said she considered herself “blessed.” 

CHA employees showed her three units and let her choose which one felt right. A friend encouraged her to move to Logan Square, and she was drawn to the schools and neighborhood amenities. She chose a three-bed, one-bath apartment not far from the square itself.

She grew to love it there, using her flair for decoration to brighten the apartment. She painted the walls a turquoise blue, hung lights around the windows and redecorated her Christmas tree for other holidays, with hearts for Valentine’s Day and yellow and orange adornments for Easter. 

She said she knows all of her neighbors in the multiunit building, and she attends a church across the street.

But in April a leak in her upstairs bathroom dripped through the ceiling of her living room, damaging the floor, furniture and clothes.

Maintenance workers from Hispanic Housing, which manages the property, put plastic and tape over the hole under her bathroom sink, she said. But they didn’t dry out the wet ceiling. She said CHA officials promised to compensate her for the damage to her property but never did. 

Then came the fruit flies, followed by an infestation of roaches, which repeatedly fell on her while she slept. In February, she noticed mold growing under a bathroom sink. She wondered how this might impact her 13-year-old son, who has asthma, and whether it has contributed to her headaches. She’s now working with CHA officials to move into another home. 

“I wouldn’t recommend CHA to anyone anymore because I’d hate for someone to be going through what I’m going through,” the tenant said. “[CHA] is real careless and careless people shouldn’t be running a program like this. They’re obviously not doing a good job.”

In general, management companies should be responsive, said Aguilar, the CHA spokesperson: “It is unacceptable for property managers to fail to address complaints from residents.” 

He said residents can call the CHA emergency services line day or night if managers aren’t helpful. He added that the CHA plans to seek new property managers and to rewrite management contracts with higher performance standards and accountability mechanisms.

'People are just desperate'

Caroline Dodge, 84, said the scattered-site program offered her and her family stability, community and a sense of purpose. 

Dodge lived in the CHA’s massive Cabrini-Green development for 19 years. But the elevators broke down frequently, and walking up five flights of stairs to her apartment aggravated her asthma. In 1983 she decided to move with her adult daughter into a scattered-site apartment a few blocks away on North Avenue. The unit was in one of three identical buildings the CHA had built in Lincoln Park during the first wave of scattered-site construction in 1969. 

Dodge loved her first-floor apartment at 430 W. North Ave. The neighborhood gave her greater access to nature and the lake, and her building was set back from the street, with ample yard space on all sides. She grew vegetables under the shade of a half dozen oak and maple trees. 

But the CHA didn’t properly maintain the 12-unit complex, even after it hired private management companies in the 1990s. Water leaked into Dodge’s apartment when it rained. The CHA fixed the roof in 2010, but that didn’t stop the leaks. Mold grew behind the walls, she said.

In 2017 the CHA spent $52,000 to renovate a unit in Dodge’s complex that had been vacant for two years, records show. Yet CHA officials soon started relocating tenants from the building.

Dodge said a squatter moved into the unit above her, even after management secured the stairway. “People are just desperate,” she said. “They’re desperate for shelter.” 

By 2018, the entire complex was empty. 

Dodge was one of the last to leave. After insisting she stay in the neighborhood, she moved to an apartment on Sedgwick a few blocks away. Built in the same style as the apartments on North Avenue, Dodge’s building is nestled between avant-garde multimillion-dollar homes, historic structures protected by preservation laws, and parks lined with fountains, chess boards and sculptures. 

Three of the six apartments in the building were vacant when she moved in. Four years later, they still are, she said.

Manage Chicago, the company hired to manage the property, declined to comment on Dodge’s building. After inquiries from Block Club and Illinois Answers, Aguilar said a contractor has been assigned to rehab the vacant units there.

Dodge’s former home is also empty, four years after she was the last resident to move out. The CHA is considering razing the old buildings to put up a larger, mixed-income development with up to 100 units — ending the 54-year experiment there with low-density, scattered-site homes.

Dodge has another proposal for the historic properties.

“Open them back up,” Dodge said. “Get better management. Don't let them run down.”

"Reporting on equity issues by the BGA is supported by Joel M. Friedman, president of the Alvin H. Baum Family Fund."