News

CCH’s Statewide Network organized the protest, mobilizing more than 150 people from nine organizations.

View the TV news report via this link.

CHICAGO (CBS) — Activists want to send a message to Governor Bruce Rauner that really hits home, so they are protesting outside his home.

CBS 2’s Roseanne Tellez reports protesters are ready to spend the night outside Rauner’s condo inside a Lakeshore East high rise.

The coalition of several community groups are protesting what they say are $18 million in budget cuts.

The group of about 150 people gathered over at the Bean in Millennium Park where the speakers revved up the crowd and then they hit the streets, marching over chanting and holding signs. They say Rauner’s cuts will spell disaster for the state’s homeless, poor, disabled and people with mental health and substance abuse problems.

“The actual proposed budget cuts make me just furious because Rauner really needs to take a look directly in the faces of the people who these cuts are going to hurt and not think of them as statistics,” said Julie Rush.

“Illinois is solving its problems on the backs of people least able to support that burden,” said Peggy Slater. “It’s a cheap shot and I don’t want to be a part of taking it.”

The group planned on putting up what they call “Raunervilles” and about 15 are planning on spending the night in a tent outside Rauner’s condo.

In response to the protest, the governor’s said the state is facing a hole because of insider deals and overspending and says the budget contains $15 million for services specifically designed to help the homeless and other assistance programs.

—

Groups participating were Access Living, Action Now, Jane Addams Senior Caucus, Chicago Coalition for the Homeless (CCH), Grassroots Collaborative, Jewish Council on Urban Affairs, Kenwood Oakland Community Organization (KOCO), Northside Action for Justice, and ONE Northside.

Editor’s Note: CCH is a partner in the Keep Chicago Renting Coalition, led by Communities United (formerly the Albany Park Neighborhood Council). Other partners were Business and Professional People for the Public Interest, Lawyers Committee for Better Housing, and the Metropolitan Tenants Organization.

By Fran Spielman

The City Council on Wednesday took steps to plug holes that have limited the effectiveness of a two-year-old ordinance tailor-made to protect tenants displaced by rental building foreclosures.

The so-called “Keep Chicago Renting” ordinance requires banks that acquire legally occupied rental buildings at court-ordered foreclosure auctions to register with the city, send prompt notices to tenants and give those renters a choice between a one-year lease extension with no more than a 2 percent rent increase or a one-time relocation fee of $10,600.

Diane Limas, a volunteer with Communities United, said housing advocates have knocked on the doors of nearly 100 renters living in foreclosed buildings and surveyed impacted renters to gauge the effectiveness of the new law.

The results were disappointing. In 80 percent of “documented cases,” the new owners “exploited loopholes” that prevented the ordinance from providing the protections intended, she said.

“Oftentimes, new owners would cut off contact with renters after sending the proper notice. By cutting off contact, the new owner was able to remove tenants without paying the relocation assistance fee,” Limas told the Housing Committee earlier this week.

“Having the renters live in limbo — not knowing if they were being provided with a lease or the relocation assistance — would push the renters to leave in frustration if no one informed them of their rights under the law.”

On Wednesday, the City Council moved to end that confusion. The changes would:

* Require a dated initial notice to be sent to the tenant with an attached tenant disclosure form. Failure to return the form would not excuse the owner from responsibility to pay the $10,600 relocation fee or offer the tenant a rent-controlled, one-year lease extension.

* Establish a time frame for tenant notification. Building owners would have 21 days after the tenant returns the disclosure form — or 42 days under special circumstances — to notify the tenant which of the two options the owner has chosen to provide. Circumstances will be different if the tenant lives in a hazardous or illegally coverted unit.

*Extend the same protections to family members renting in the same building under a “bona fide” lease.

*Clarify that, for tenants occupying illegal units, the owner must either pay the relocation fee or provide another unit acceptable to the tenant.

Frank Avellone, a senior attorney at Lawyers Committee for Better Housing, said it is “a lot less chaotic out there” since the ordinance took effect in September 2013.

But with 3,000 foreclosure-related evictions still going on in Chicago, Avellone said there remains a “lack of communication and some manipulation” between guarantors, banks and tenants.

“These common-sense changes will help close that loop by making it clearer to both banks and tenants whose responsibility it is to do what and, more importantly, when. The original ordinance had no endgame. This places an end game on the whole process and will hopefully make things much more clear,” Avellone said.

Lucy Esquivel, who testified before the committee, is a poster child for the changes approved Monday.

One year ago, the Albany Park apartment where she lives with her husband and four kids was targeted for foreclosure. After being contacted by the bank and verbally offered the opportunity to stay, she filled out the appropriate paperwork, but hasn’t heard a word since, an interpreter told the committee.

“She’s been taking care of the building. She’s been paying for all the utilities and even after all this, the bank is trying to evict her when all she wants to do is try to stay,” the interpreter said of Esquivel, whose children attend a neighborhood school.

“If these changes were in place, there would be a process so this wouldn’t happen to other families like it’s happened to her.”

By Sue Ontiveros

One night a week I give a friend a ride home, and when we get off the Drive at Lawrence Avenue, that’s when I see them.

Actually, I shouldn’t say “them.” I don’t ever see people, just zipped-up tents. But I know they are inside, folks who obviously can’t afford to live indoors and, for whatever reason, don’t go to shelters.

OPINION

In an orderly little row, the tents line the viaduct. Often this winter they sat next to hills of snow plowed onto the sidewalk.

Every time we drive past, I can’t help but think, isn’t there another way?

So when I saw that Downstate Bloomington is considering a plan to build tiny houses for the homeless, I wanted to learn more.

Tiny houses are trending big these days, but until now I knew of them mostly in regards to those who see the petite places as a way to get rid of the clutter – real and metaphorical – in their lives. There’s even a show – “Tiny House Nation” – on cable.

Frankly, when I see tiny homes posted dreamily on Facebook, the cynical me is thinking: really, with your collection of shoes, you think a tiny house would work?

But tiny homes for the homeless? Now that sounds like an idea worth exploring.

The Bloomington plan that is being floated – by a team that includes representatives from the city, social service agencies and clergy – proposes building 350-square-foot homes at some $12,000 apiece. They would be placed near public transportation and there would be social services for the home dwellers as well.

Actually, according to the Pantagraph story on this proposal, Olympia, Wash., and Newfield, N.Y., each have a community of tiny houses for the homeless, as does Madison, Wis.

The affordability of building these tiny homes caught Ed Shurna’s eye. Shurna is the executive director of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. Building affordable housing is so costly, according to Shurna, that in Chicago it’s in the neighborhood of $300,000 a unit.

Ah, but affordable tiny houses? That’s something new, and intriguing. “It could be talked about in Chicago,” says Shurna. “It’s a nice way to get people off the street.”

Certainly, a number of factors would have to be considered, such as how the house would fit in a neighborhood – although there’s certainly no shortage of empty lots here – and Shurna sees value in involving some sort of sweat equity. “People get pride in something that’s theirs,” he says.

The idea of linking social services to tiny houses for the homeless is another good aspect of the Bloomington proposal. “For some people, [housing] without services isn’t the solution,” Shurna says. “Sometimes they just need some help.”

Shurna also pointed out that in new construction throughout the city, you can see the trend toward smaller housing, even for those who could afford more. (A building going up at Ashland and North is renting 400-square-foot units for $1,200, he points out.)

When I look at those tents, I often wonder if maybe the occupants choose that alternative because once the entry is zipped up, the person is in his or her own little world.

Tiny affordable houses could offer them that too, as well as heat, safety and dignity.

By Kristen Thometz

Homeless youth are one of Chicago’s most vulnerable populations. Estimates vary, but roughly 2,000 Chicago teens are thought to be homeless each night. But homelessness for youth often looks very different than it does for adults. Advocates call it “housing instability.” We visit one program trying to prevent these teens from becoming chronically homeless adults.

On a chilly and windy March afternoon, “L” riders in Englewood learn about services for homeless teens.

“We’re out here trying to help youth ages 14-24 find stable housing, GED, whatever kind of help they might need,” said Tiffany Willis.

“We are like the first contact a lot of people have with TLP,” said Libby Karl. “So sometimes we’ll catch people like ‘Hey, we help people find stable housing,’ and they’re like ‘I need a place to stay too.’ So we can help them right there find a place to go that night.”

Tiffany Willis was herself a client of Teen Living Programs. Now, she is employed by them as a peer educator.

“I was homeless. I got kicked out a lot—an unstable house basically,” she said. “I just felt that I needed a more secure ground so that I can finish high school and do everything that I needed to do.”

The newest service offered by TLP is their Drop-In Center. The center is in the basement of an Englewood church. It opened in June of 2013 with new city of Chicago funding and offers computer access for job hunting, counseling and case management, and a comfortable place to hang out or even take a nap.

View a map of TLP locations.

Jeri Lynch Linas is executive director of Teen Living Programs.

“The concept of a Drop-In Center is a safe space for young people to just walk in off the street and to get some kind of respite, and further services,” Linas said. “So perhaps get a hot meal. Do some laundry. Have a shower. Get connected to services.”

And she says that homelessness often looks quite different for youth than it does for adults. They call it “housing instability.”

“Couch surfing is very common. Doubled up, tripled up with family members, with friends, with aunts,” Linas said. “They travel on the CTA all night. We know that they use abandoned buildings. We know that they’re sleeping in the foyer of a building that somebody they know is in that building.”

Aaron Good has known that kind of instability. He grew up both in Chicago and the suburbs, but after a dispute with his father, he had no place to live.

“I had family that lived on the south side, family that lived on the west side,” Good said. “I wasn’t too comfortable living with either side of my family, that I just chose to try, you know, to get stability on my own.”

That brought Aaron to TLP. Now, he is enrolled at the American Academy of Art, and he has a paid internship at TLP, teaching music and audio engineering.

“I conduct workshops and studio hours, and what I do is I educate my peers on audio engineering, or song theory, music theory,” Good said.

“Instead of, ‘Oh, let me go outside and join a gang,’ no, I can go and release all my anger and emotions through music. I can learn something that’s productive,” Zamari Vevens said. “I can actually take this knowledge and go somewhere with this.”

The Drop-In Center serves 20-30 people a day, aged 18-24. On the day we visited, it was pretty empty because a group of TLP regulars were in Springfield to protest proposed budget cuts that they say could seriously impact TLP programs.

“The proposal from the governor for youth homelessness funding for Fiscal Year 16 is reduced by 55 percent, so it will reduce the funding to a program like Teen Living literally by over 50 percent, which will then impact our capacity to do the services,” Linas said.

And, she says the impact would not be solely on immediate needs. The longer term goal is preventing adult homelessness.

“That’s the goal. We intervene now. We make some changes to their circumstances—with their partnership of course—to guide them into a different road that is steering them away from not having safe and stable housing 10 years from now,” she said.

Read an interview with Julie Dworkin, director of policy at the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless.

How many homeless youth live in Chicago?

We did a study with the University of Illinois in 2005 and came up with 25,000 statewide. We do an annual estimate which is based primarily on data from CPS, and in the most recent estimate we have for the 2013-2014 school year, we estimated 12,186. And that’s youth ages 14-21…. In that particular year, CPS identified 2,647 as being homeless. But of course those that are 18-21 are no longer in school anyway, so it’s more encompassing than CPS.

Have you noticed a trend with homeless youth numbers over the years?

They have been going up in general. CPS does their count, and as a portion of the count, [they] track how many of those children or youth are homeless with families and those who are unaccompanied youth. The numbers have fluctuated somewhat…The past three or four years the numbers have gone up and down, but overall there’s an increasing trend in homeless youth.

What is an unaccompanied youth?

Children that are homeless with their parents are considered homeless families, and they would be going to a shelter or moving around as a family unit. Unaccompanied youth are these young people who left their families or were pushed out of their families because of bad situations. They are homeless because they are on their own without a parent.

What are some of the reasons or contributing factors to youth homelessness?

The primary reasons would be serious family circumstances, physical or sexual abuse, parents with substance abuse issues, children that are LGBTQ and are pushed out by families… pregnant and parenting teens are a big piece of the population.

Is there a correlation between youth homelessness and adult homelessness?

We believe that if you don’t intervene with these youth in a positive way, they will experience homelessness as an adult. You definitely hear adults telling their stories and they often begin at a time when they were teens. That doesn’t happen for everybody, but it’s a common story. I don’t know if I have a scientific study to cite. The reason why we put a huge emphasis on programs that help youth is because they are at a transitional age. Young people in families have a ton of support as they move into the world. If [they] don’t get that support, they can’t successfully figure out how to live on their own and to get an education to find a job. These programs serve as surrogate families as they are making those transitions.

Can you tell me about some of those programs?

There’s a whole range of services in the city. Everything from outreach services, where people go out and talk to youth on the street. That’s a really important first step because a lot of times young people are really traumatized and hurt by adults, so they might not be willing to get help from a program that could provide housing. Drop-In centers are just a place they can go to during the day and get off the street, get a meal, and start to get engaged with services. We advocated for low-threshold shelters that would let them just get off the street, sleep overnight, and not have a lot of rules or expectations. Moving on from there, there are more structured programs—housing on an emergency basis, housing for 120 days, programs for housing for up to two years, and permanent housing for youth that is subsidized.

I noticed CCH has a brochure about the rights of homeless youth. Can you talk about that a little bit and specifically about educational rights?

We actually are just completing a statewide handbook with United Airlines and Baker & McKenzie law firm that has all the legal issues in one place. The Law Project does spend a lot of time working on individual cases of children and youth that are being denied access to education. The same will apply whether it’s an unaccompanied youth or homeless family; children can immediately enroll in school without having to produce any identification. There are a number of schools they have the right to go to. They don’t have to live in the district. They can go to the same school they attended when they first became homeless; they have the right to transportation. The idea is to keep them stable in one school. If you move five times in one year, you should stay in one school the whole time. It’s important stability for them.

Can you tell me about the No Youth Alone campaign?

That’s really our advocacy work, which has been going on since the mid-80s. We’re really the first organization that recognized the problem of youth homelessness and got funding for shelters for the first time… We had received $5.6 million last year and did a whole expansion of the program because we got an increased amount. And now with Gov. [Bruce] Rauner’s proposed cut of 55 percent or $3.1 million from the program — that would be disastrous for all agencies around the state that provide services to homeless youth—most of which are operating on a bare bones budget. This is the primary funding in Illinois to provide these services. We get a little federal money, but it’s not very much. That’s been the main focus our advocacy work around state funding. Last year, we passed a bill that allows unaccompanied youth to consent to their own primary health care without parental consent.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

The other thing we’re really concerned about in terms of the state budget proposal, in addition to slashing funding, is the proposed elimination of all services for wards of the state 18-21. That’s really problematic for two reasons. One is really we see these two groups as interchangeable—some have gotten into the child welfare system and some haven’t. They’re coming from the same types of families and need the same type of support. When youth leave the system at 21 and aren’t prepared, they risk becoming homeless. If they leave at 18, we’ll see a lot more becoming homeless.

Interview has been condensed and edited.

By Mark Brown, columnist

The Chicago Public Schools’ official policy for handling homeless students instructs school personnel to provide them with CTA “tokens” to help them travel back and forth to class from wherever they are temporarily staying.

The reference to the long-obsolete token system is only the most obvious example of how the 1996 policy is outdated, homeless advocates, students and parents say.

They are pressing CPS to rewrite the policy in recognition of important legal protections for homeless children enacted in the intervening years — and to place greater emphasis in schools on providing them the support to which they are entitled.

“If they don’t see it in the policy, you pretty much won’t get the services,” said Marilyn Escoe, 39, referring to her experiences with local school personnel after ending up in a Rogers Park homeless shelter with her four children in 2011.

Escoe said she struggled to use mass transit to get her children to and from their old school on the West Side — a four-hour combined commute — before learning a year later that they were entitled to have a school bus pick them up at the shelter because she had a job.

“We were already unstable, so I didn’t want to make it worse,” Escoe said of her decision to keep the kids at the old school.

Her daughter, Kaleyah, who was 12 at the time and temporarily saddled with the job of supervising her siblings for the commute, explained why that was important to her.

“I wanted to stay in my school. I didn’t want to leave. I knew everyone, and I didn’t want to start all over again,” said Kaleyah, who is now doing well in high school after her mother found an apartment last year.

The purpose of the homeless policy is to put an emphasis on keeping homeless students in school. A good education too easily becomes a casualty when families are uprooted from their homes and moving regularly to keep a roof over their heads.

Those “tokens” aren’t really a problem, everyone admits, with schools well adapted to current CTA payment systems.

More problematic is an attitude at some schools that resists making transportation and other legally required benefits available to homeless students, say the families.

Homeless students are entitled to free school uniforms and supplies, a waiver of most school fees and even school bus transportation under some circumstances.

Most important, they are entitled to immediate enrollment in school without getting caught in any bureaucratic hold-ups over missing paperwork from their previous school.

Charles Jenkins, 60, who took in his two young grandsons when their mother temporarily lost custody, said their admission to the school near his North Lawndale home was delayed two weeks by school employees unfamiliar with the legal requirements.

Each school is required to have one person on staff trained to serve as the homeless liaison to assist displaced students.

Although many of those liaisons are strong advocates for their students, Jenkins believes too many others see their function as “gatekeepers” who are more concerned somebody will receive a benefit for which they don’t qualify than whether a student who needs it will go without.

CPS officially refers to the 22,144 homeless students it has identified this year as “Students in Temporary Living Situations.”

That might sound euphemistic, but it’s also probably a more accurate description of the problem.

Most homeless students aren’t living on the street or even staying in homeless shelters.

More likely, their families are “doubled up” in a home with relatives or friends, or they are “couch-surfing,” as students sometimes call the practice of moving around constantly to keep from wearing out their welcome.

Not every doubled-up family situation is an indication of homelessness, of course, but if it’s the result of an eviction or some other economic hardship that leaves one of the families without a place to stay, that truly is being homeless, even if it doesn’t fit our normal concept.

Even many of the affected families don’t recognize this hidden homelessness.

“We’ve been in schools where 50 percent of the students are homeless, and they think nobody is homeless,” said Hannah Willage, of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless.

CPS officials told me they are in full support of revising the policy and have been working closely with the coalition to get it done.

Then, let them think of this article as encouragement to get it done sooner.

By Mary Ellen Podmolik

Chicago aldermen still want residential developers to boost the supply of affordable housing within the city but are temporarily scaling back the stiff fees that will be charged to companies who’d rather pay than play.

Downtown apartment and condominium developers, who warned the city that the current hot streak of development would grind to a halt if onerous fees were imposed, caught a break. While they will pay more than they have to satisfy the city’s Affordable Requirements Ordinance, the law will not take effect for 180 days and after that, the steep fees won’t kick in for one year.

The ordinance passed by the Chicago City Council on Wednesday splits the city into three zones and will treat residential developers in each differently. The rules, designed to make 10 to 20 percent of the units in market-rate developments more affordable, only will apply to developers who seek a zoning change, city financial assistance or city-owned land. They were the subject of intense negotiation even after the council meeting began Wednesday.

More changes may be coming. Last-minute negotiations between the city, housing advocates and developers led to the substitute ordinance that was passed, but Ald. Ray Suarez, 31st, said there may be more amendments to it in May or June.

For years, most for-profit developers have written checks of $100,000 for every affordable unit they were supposed to include in their buildings, rather than actually adding them to the city’s housing stock.

Downtown apartment developers will now have to meet that 10 percent affordability requirement by creating 25 percent of those required units either on-site or off-site, within two miles of the building but still in a downtown or higher-income area. A developer could satisfy the rest of its requirement by paying smaller fees of $115,000 to $140,000 in the first year of the ordinance and $150,000 to $175,000 thereafter.

Downtown condo developers may satisfy the law by building units on-site, off-site or they can pay into the fund a sum that will increase after the first year to between $150,000 and $225,000 per required unit.

Developers in higher-income neighborhoods outside of downtown have no such phase-in period. They must provide 25 percent of the required units either on-site or off-site, within 2 miles and in either a similar or higher-income area. The remaining portion of the requirement can be met through a fee of $100,000 to $125,000.

In low- and moderate-income areas, developers must provide at least one-quarter of the required affordable units on-site. They could choose to pay $50,000 for each additional unit required.

“It’s a great start,” Suarez said. “It took a lot of hard negotiating.”

No aldermen opposed the measure, but several expressed concerns that they hoped the law would not slow development and that companies would look to create affordable for-sale homes in the city as well. “We still need to find the catalyst for for-sale units,” said Ald. Jason Ervin, 28th.

The original ordinance, passed in 2003 and updated in 2007, resulted in the creation of 189 on-site affordable rentals in market-rate developments and $53 million in in-lieu fees. The fees were used, in the form of rent subsidies, to help underwrite 2,500 apartment units, according to the city.

By Ryan Grim, Arthur Delaney and Kim Bellware

CHICAGO — Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s housing agency has been pulling hundreds of millions of dollars from a fund earmarked for its affordable housing program and using the money instead to boost its pension, purchase government debt and build up a staggering cash reserve.

Meanwhile, Chicago’s most vulnerable are bearing the brunt. The Chicago Housing Authority’s waitlist tops 280,000, with a sizable portion of the city’s population hoping for a shot at affordable housing. Ninety-seven percent of the people receiving housing assistance are black or Latino, and 85 percent are women, according to the agency. Some 15,000 families on the list are homeless.

Early in Emanuel’s term, the size of the housing agency’s reserves began hitting eye-popping levels. Instead of pouring that money into housing, it found other ways to chip away at the pile. In 2011 and 2012, the CHA pumped more than $55 million into its pension fund, nearly 10 times the amount it was required to. But because the amount of federal money the agency was receiving outstripped what it spent by such a large amount, the reserves remained high. So in late 2012, the agency took $185 million and paid down its debts early. Of what remained, millions were pumped into state and local bonds.

Despite the more than $200 million the agency moved from the reserves, the fund was still sitting on at least $440 million at the end of 2013, according to its most recent audited financial report.

In a statement, CHA spokeswoman Wendy Parks noted that federal rules allow the agency to maintain some reserves, which CHA plans to use to finish developing 25,000 new units of housing.

“The increase in reserves was driven by the significant downturn in the real estate market that slowed the expenditure rate of funds,” Parks said, adding that the pension contribution and bond purchase will help the agency save money on interest payments or otherwise reduce costs in the future.

The decision to hoard cash while tens of thousands of families are in need of housing appears to be a strange one only if the goal is to find housing for the people the agency is supposed to serve. Yet developers, bar and restaurant owners and other interests who want to see the city of Chicago continue to gentrify have little interest in assisting the poor, black and brown single moms who populate the waitlist. Instead, they’d prefer the women and their children leave the city and find housing somewhere in the distant suburbs or beyond. The trend was underway before Emanuel took office, with the 2010 census finding 182,000 fewer African-Americans living in the city than a decade before, when Chicago began demolishing its public housing.

The agency’s massive cash reserves were first noticed by the Chicago Housing Initiative, a coalition of tenants. The Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, a Chicago-based watchdog group, later produced a report on the stockpile, leading to a spate of news coverage over the summer. But the fate of much of the money the housing agency has stashed away has so far gone unreported. Through a series of open records requests, the Chicago Housing Initiative and the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability obtained internal documents revealing that under Emanuel, the CHA has become as much an investment fund as a housing agency.

Several days after providing its initial statement to The Huffington Post, the CHA, through the mayor’s office, provided a new statement from CHA CEO Michael Merchant. While reiterating that the massive surplus was the result of the real estate downturn, he added that CHA was going to spend much more of it this coming year.

“CHA’s mission is to create strong, sustainable and inclusive communities throughout Chicago and I’m committed to ensuring that low-income families have access to quality housing options. The increase in CHA’s reserves was driven by the significant downturn in the real estate market‎ however ‎this year CHA will invest $240 million ‎to build affordable housing units across the city on top of the $135 million spent last year to develop affordable housing for low-income families and seniors,” Merchant said in the statement. “Additionally, last year we issued more than 3,000 housing vouchers and are on track to exceed that in 2015. Through paying down our pension liabilities we’ve saved more than $2 million and used those savings to directly invest in new and revitalized affordable housing helping families in need increase their potential for long-term economic independence and success.”

By the end of 2015, he said, the surplus would be down to $50 million, assuming every penny is spent. That figure doesn’t include, however, the $115 million reserve the CHA says the Department of Housing and Urban Development allows for, meaning the cash on hand will be closer to $165 million. Still, if the investment happens as Merchant forecasts, it would represent a dramatic turnaround and a boon for low-income residents in Chicago.

The CHA’s long-term goal, set 15 years ago, was to dismantle its high-profile public housing high rises and replace them with 25,000 new units of affordable housing. The city received extra funds to pull off the task and succeeded in knocking down many of the high rises, yet hasn’t managed to create all of the 25,000 new units. Each year from 2008 through 2012, the agency issued 13,000 fewer vouchers than it could have, according to the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability’s analysis.

Emanuel, who faces a runoff against Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, was elected mayor in 2011. In the four years before he took office, the CHA delivered an average of 843 new affordable units each year, either through new construction or rehab. The year Emanuel took office, the number plunged to 424. In 2012 it dropped to 112, and in 2013 it fell again to 88, according to the agency’s annual reports. For 2014, the CHA set itself a goal of 40 new units. Meanwhile, it was stockpiling unspent cash.

“It might be that a desire to reduce the number of low-income and minority families in Chicago is what motivates those who control CHA to withhold available housing assistance,” said Leah Levinger, the executive director of the Chicago Housing Initiative. “Chicago activists have long questioned whether Emanuel’s ‘world class city’ is contemporary code for rich and white — a way to name development strategies that have obvious racial impact without all the racial overtones.”

The reverse Robin Hood strategy implemented by the CHA is not an aberration when it comes to Emanuel’s politics. The deregulation that the agency has exploited was made possible by a law passed in 1996, the same year President Bill Clinton signed welfare reform legislation that capped federal welfare spending and gave states more leeway to administer benefits. It was part of a strategy of triangulation that Emanuel, then a top Clinton aide, pushed as a way to win back working-class white voters and distance the party from traditional liberalism. The pinnacle of the new approach involved “ending welfare as we know it,” a move Emanuel aggressively lobbied for as an aide.

The separate housing deregulation, approved by Congress with much less scrutiny, is called “Moving to Work.” It allows a small number of city housing agencies to be part of a “demonstration project” that gives them more leeway to shelter the poor. Instead of having to inspect every apartment where a poor person wants to use a housing voucher, for instance, landlords in participating cities can be allowed to vouch for themselves. Crucially, separate federal funding streams for rental assistance, capital improvements and maintenance of existing housing stock can slosh together in an agency’s general fund, instead of remaining segregated in separate accounts. And an agency’s annual allotment from the federal government is no longer based partly on how many vouchers it distributed the prior year, removing an incentive to help as many people as possible.

While he was a White House aide, Emanuel was a close political ally of Andrew Cuomo, who was secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development during Clinton’s second term. Cuomo and Emanuel share a hard-charging style and a rejection of traditional liberalism in favor of a more business-friendly politics.

When Emanuel left the White House, he became vice chairman of the CHA from 1999-2001. Those were pivotal years for the agency, during which it applied for the special status that allows it the flexibility it is now using to short its would-be clients. The application to deregulate was approved by Emanuel’s friend Cuomo. In 2000, Emanuel was also appointed by Clinton to sit on the board of Freddie Mac, stepping down the next year to run for Congress.

While Emanuel was on the CHA board, he was also working for the private equity firm Wasserstein Perella, where he made $18 million in just over two years. In 2002, he was elected to the House, before going on to become Obama’s chief of staff and then Chicago mayor.

The Obama administration wants to extend the Moving to Work program to 2028, beyond its planned 2018 sunset. Republicans in Congress have proposed increasing the number of agencies eligible to participate in Moving to Work, which currently stands at 39.

The inspector general for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which oversees Moving to Work, reported in 2013 that HUD’s oversight of the initiative had been insufficient, and that the department was basically in the dark about whether the deregulation had allowed housing agencies to serve more families.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal D.C. think tank, reported in January that in 2013, the most recent year for which data is available, Moving to Work agencies issued 86 percent of the vouchers for which they had received funding, compared to 99.5 percent for agencies that are not part of the program. In 2013, Moving to Work agencies diverted more than $350 million of rental assistance to other purposes or left it unspent, with Chicago accounting for just under a third of the total.

HUD spokesman Brian Sullivan said in an email that HUD is working with Chicago to accelerate the pace of spending so more families could get help.

“While CHA enjoys greater flexibility under the Moving to Work Program, we believe it’s critical to get this housing assistance in the hands of the very people who need it most,” Sullivan said.

On Nov. 20, 2012, according to a CHA document obtained as the result of an open records request and provided to HuffPost, the agency sought authorization from its board to use $185 million from its “existing MTW excess reserves” — the Moving to Work slush fund — in order to pay down its debt.

The national average wait time for a Housing Choice Voucher is 12-24 months. In Chicago, the average wait for the rent subsidy is 10 years, according to CHA’s 2012 Moving to Work report.

CHA’s reserve hit $349 million in 2010 and ticked up to $471 million in 2011, when it began diverting money to its pension fund. In 2012, despite the pension fund payment, it was still at $432 million.

In September 2013, the CHA, its coffers having grown to unmanageable heights, put out a request for an investment portfolio software package to help manage what it said was a $500 million fund, according to one internal document obtained through the records request.

In November 2014, the agency authorized itself to increase its municipal investments by 50 percent, so that it can now make up 7.5 percent of its total, according to another document.

The CHA gets tens of millions each year for apartments it controls but leaves vacant. One of the CHA’s larger sites, Lathrop Homes, has a staggering vacancy rate despite the fact that the most recent November 2014 housing lottery saw more than 282,000 applicants. Lathrop Homes has 925 units, but according to longtime resident and co-chairman of the Lathrop Leadership Group, Miguel Suarez, only about 150 of them are occupied today.

“In 2000, CHA froze all leasing in Lathrop with the promise that in 2001, they would start rehabbing,” Suarez told HuffPost. “And of course, that never happened.”

Suarez said that by 2007, developers still hadn’t made improvements, though roughly 45 families were still living on the north end of the site. Shortly after, those remaining families were moved to the south end of the site and CHA “went in and boarded all of the north end up.”

Suarez, who has lived in Lathrop Homes for 25 years and is a chairman for the residents’ leadership team, said some families left after years of what he characterized as neglect by CHA.

“There are apartments that have mold issues, leakage from the outside, and things of that nature,” Suarez said. “When I first moved in, it was totally different: [Lathrop Homes] was fully occupied. Along [North Hoyne Avenue] had a canopy of trees. It was beautiful. Somewhere along the line they got rid of it. Ladies had their flower gardens up front, vegetables in the back. People would even hang their laundry.”

“It was a very different thing — it was a true community,” Suarez noted.

But as the surrounding neighborhoods of Bucktown, Lincoln Park and Roscoe Village hit new levels of prosperity, Suarez called the situation with Lathrop Homes “gentrification at its worst.”

“It’s no secret that today, Lathrop Homes is on some of the most valuable property in the city,” Suarez said. “For developers to come in and say, ‘We want to make this a revitalized community,” well, it already is. They want to move the current residents out to give this property to people with greater means.”

Suarez said that knowing the agency is sitting on hundreds of millions of unspent dollars while Lathrop deteriorates is a clear sign of the city’s priorities. “Knowing very well that CHA has $400-some-odd million stashed, knowing that money is there, and seeing that Lathrop Homes has had no major rehab done to it, it’s evident that the CHA as a whole is not willing to make these units [livable] that could be made available,” he said.

For its Investing in Justice campaign, the Chicago Bar Foundation (CBF) has profiled our Youth Futures mobile legal aid clinic. CBF helped launch Youth Futures a decade ago. Backed by private attorneys and law firms that sustain Investing in Justice, CBF continues to support our work each year.

By Angelika Labno, CBF Administrative & Communications Coordinator

Being a teenager already can be a struggle at times…but imagine being a homeless teenager. The constant worry of having to figure out where you’ll sleep that night is a fraction of your worries. Imagine struggling to stay in school because you’re doing homework on a couch in your friend’s noisy living room. Imagine breaking your leg but not having the legal identification records needed to get medical attention.

Homeless youth need someone to fight for their basic rights to overcome these challenges, and your support of the Investing in Justice Campaign is helping to make that possible.

More than 22,000 homeless students were identified by Chicago Public Schools during the 2013/2014 school year. Many of them faced issues with education, such as school enrollment, residency, fee waivers, and access to special education, tutoring, or transportation. They confront a plethora of civil issues, too, including food stamp appeals, social security, family law, and access to healthcare.

“These are complex legal issues they face, and often times they have no place to turn to understand what their rights are,” said Patricia Nix-Hodes, Director of the Law Project for the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless — a project you are helping to support through the Campaign. “Given their circumstances, it can be difficult to access legal service, so we try to be a gateway for these kids to get legal resources.”

In 2004, a CBF-sponsored Equal Justice Works Fellow started Youth Futures, a mobile legal aid clinic for homeless youth through the Law Project at the Coalition for the Homeless. It is the only project in Chicago that provides dedicated legal services to homeless and unaccompanied youth, with attorneys assisting about 200 clients a year. Associate Director and Youth Futures Attorney Beth Cunningham, who has been with the program since 2007, conducted outreach to more than 1,100 youth last year and offered 20 legal aid clinics at 10 CPS high schools with high homeless enrollments. Also in the last year, CCH legal staff ran 26 professional trainings on educational or youth issues for 1,665 attorneys, school staff, and social workers; and 27,800 flyers, brochures, posters, and door hangers were distributed through street outreach to more than 100 venues such as churches, stores, and social service groups.

“There’s been a lot of good progress made in terms of resources, but there is still such a huge service gap—so many young people are turned away every day,” said Cunningham, noting a need for funding for youth-specific housing and services.

Youth Futures strives to make its services as accessible as possible for a hard-to-reach population. Attorneys and volunteers travel by van to locations throughout Chicago communities and offer weekly outreach in school and street programs, homeless shelters, and drop-in centers. These include the Center on Halsted, La Casa Norte, and Teen Living Programs. In July 2014, Youth Futures added cell phone texting for easier communication. Most recently, Youth Futures came out with a Homeless Youth Manual with the help of attorneys from Baker & McKenzie and United Airlines. The manual, which is available in print and online editions, outlines legal rights and resources and is intended to be a comprehensive tool for youth and professionals working with youth. Its topics range from complex legal information to something as practical as obtaining a birth certificate or state ID, and a glossary breaks down legal jargon in easy-to-read terms.

Cunningham and her colleagues working on Youth Futures also handle cases and lead policy efforts impacting homeless youth. Cunningham has bolstered Youth Futures’ advocacy work in recent years, particularly with her recent position as co-chair on the Education Committee of the Chicago Task Force on Homeless Youth. Youth Futures secured an amendment to the Minors Consent to Medical Procedures Act, which allows unaccompanied minors, ages 14 to 18, to consent to their own non-emergency medical care. Authored by Equal Justice Works Fellow Graham Bowman and put into effect October 1, 2014, the law is projected to help more than 7,000 unaccompanied minors in Illinois each year. Graham and Cunningham will continue to research and pursue legislation on managed care, care coordination, and access to care.

“We’re moving in a positive direction,” Cunningham continued. “We’ve been able to tailor the work that we do and the different target outreach sites that we visit depending on the needs of the youth.”

During Cunningham’s first year at CCH, she met a 16-year-old pregnant girl at a high school. She had been kicked out of her home and was struggling to access benefits for herself and her unborn child. Cunningham’s advocacy was successful in securing medical and other assistance for the two of them. The girl came back for help in re-enrolling in school, and again with a housing issue a little while later. And each time, the legal help she received empowered her to stay on track amidst challenging circumstances, and she did that and more. She was honored at a CCH event last year when she graduated from college, which she was able to help pay for with a scholarship from CCH.

“Her life is a lot different than when we first met her,” said Cunningham. “Even if you had a small role in that, you’re providing something valuable and needed. Through people like her, it’s apparent to us that our services are needed and appreciated.”

If you’re trying to turn your life around, a decent job is everything.

But a wave of zero-tolerance laws enacted in Illinois in recent years has made that awfully tough, even for people who have kept their nose clean for many years. Several bills pending in Springfield, which we urge the Legislature to get behind, would do something about that, giving ex-offenders a way to at least appeal a state ban on their being hired for certain jobs.

EDITORIAL

As the law in Illinois now stands, a person convicted of a forcible felony is barred from a wide range of medical and therapy jobs that require a state license, including dentist, dental hygienist, nurse, occupational therapist or assistant, optometrist, pharmacist, physical therapist or assistant, physician assistant, psychologist, social worker, podiatrist and speech pathologist.

Young people with such criminal records who want to go into one of those fields are shut out. If they’ve picked up a college or trade school degree in one of those fields, it’s a worthless. They are barred for life from that kind of work.

But a bill pending in the state Legislature, sponsored by Sen. Iris Martinez, would create an appeal process for getting a state license. The ex-offender would be given a chance to make the case that he is now leading a law-abiding and honorable life and would be of no danger to anybody. Nobody would have to hire him, of course, but he could make a pitch for a license.

Clearly, it’s in the public interest for the state to continue to deny professional licenses to ex-offenders who might pose a real threat — even years or decades later — to patients and clients. But not all felons or felonies are equal, especially since the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation appears to take a questionably wide view of what constitutes a forcible felony. Should a person convicted of pushing a police officer when he was 18, for example, be forever denied a job as a social worker or speech pathologist?

If the punishment is supposed to fit the crime, that doesn’t fit.

Gov. Bruce Rauner’s criminal justice reform agenda is built around the goal of moving more offenders out of jails and prisons and into productive lives. Widening the range of job opportunities is an essential part of that. Myriad studies and common sense tell us that people who have committed a crime are much less likely to do so again if they have structured lives to return to, beginning with a job. And not just for the paycheck. A job is a way a person knows he belongs.

Two related bills in Springfield, sponsored by State Rep. Kelly Cassidy, would ease restrictions on employment with schools and parks, a reform that also has merit. At the moment, for example, anyone with a drug conviction is barred forever from working even as a maintenance person in a school. It’s one of those rules that hurt poor people most because they can’t hire the expensive lawyers who know how to keep a drug rap off a permanent record.

The zero-tolerance law for health care workers was enacted in 2011 after several highly publicized incidents of doctors sexually abusing sedated patients. The General Assembly responded by prohibiting anyone convicted of a sex offense, battery against a patient or a forcible felony from holding a health care worker license. But “forcible felony” can mean many things, not all equally outrageous. It includes physical contact “of an insulting or provoking nature” against a police officer, a person over the age of 60, a teacher, or a school employee.

A recent New York Times/CBS News/Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that about a third of nonworking men age 25 to 54 have criminal records. The rapid proliferation of online databases makes those records easily accessible for employers. If more of these men — and women — can find a place in the legitimate working world, without compromising public safety, society as a whole will be better for it.