CHICAGO, Nov. 5 (AScribe Newswire) -- With Congress considering reauthorization of the HOPE VI program for public housing revitalization at sharply reduced funding levels, members of Congress from Chicago have agreed to a request from the Coalition to Protect Public Housing to sponsor a local congressional hearing on the program. Full details are available from Community Media Workshop at http://www.newstips.org.
Reps. Danny Davis, Luis Gutierrez, Jesse Jackson Jr., Bobby Rush, and Jan Schakowsky, as well as Sen. Richard Durbin, have agreed to attend a hearing Monday, November 10, 9 a.m. to noon, at the Metcalf Federal Building, 77 W. Washington, examining the nation's largest HOPE VI program, the CHA's $1.5 billion Plan for Transformation.
The Coalition has invited CHA and city officials and scheduled a range of housing advocates, with an emphasis on testimony from public housing residents. While seeking reforms, including restoration of one-for-one replacement requirements for public housing redevelopment, CPPH supports reauthorization and full funding for HOPE VI, said Betty Willhoite.
Federal funding for the CHA's plan has already been allocated, but coalition members say more could easily be required. Two years ago the Chicago Rehab Network projected a $1 billion shortfall for the CHA's redevelopment plan.
Congress is expected in January to consider legislation reauthorizing HOPE VI with funding between $50 million and $200 million, after the Bush administration requested zero funding for the program in its budget proposal last spring.
The CHA plan, centered on demolishing 51 high-rises and replacing them with mixed-income housing, will reduce public housing for families by 14,000 units. Meanwhile the critical shortage of housing for very-low-income families has deepened, and the CHA's waiting list has grown from 30,000 in 1999 to over 55,000 currently, according to CPPH president Carol Steele, who is also president of the Cabrini-Green resident advisory council.
"The mandate to develop mixed-income developments and reduce the overall number of public housing units at a time of such great need does not make sense to us," Steele wrote in recent comments on the agency's yearly plan. "Mixed income development should not come at the cost of homelessness."
And demolitions have far outpaced construction of replacement housing, said Bill Wilen of the National Poverty Law Center; in fact the CHA is ahead of schedule on demolitions (about 14,000 so far) while far behind its own projections for new construction (about 900, over half at Horner Homes, where redevelopment was guided by a consent decree won by Wilen on residents' behalf). With the rush to demolish, relocation assistance has been inadequate, and residents moving with Section 8 vouchers have been resegregated, Wilen said, although one of the program's aims was to break up concentrations of poverty. NPLC and other civil rights groups filed suit against the CHA in January demanding greater options for relocating CHA residents.
"The city risks enormous increases in the homeless population" as CHA developments are demolished, according to an Urban Institute report this summer, which called for supportive and transitional housing and other programs for those most difficult to house.
A major shortfall of unit for large families in
newly-constructed housing is another concern, as well as
restrictions on relocation rights that could exclude a
majority of current CHA families, Wilen said. A national
study of HOPE VI ("False Hope" by the National Housing Law
Project) found 12 percent of original residents ended up
returning to developments redeveloped under the program;
Wilen thinks in Chicago the final number of returnees could
be lower than that. "The question that gets lost is, who's
supposed to benefit?" he points out.
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