Laura Donaldson rides a courtesy bus to her church each Sunday for weekly services. When it pulls onto the Dan Ryan Expressway, she sees the swelling encampments under the on-ramp, where some of the more than 125,000 Chicagoans who are currently homeless seek shelter under the concrete overpass. Mattresses, shopping carts, and furniture grow in number each week. Donaldson knows about housing insecurity: she is living in a shelter herself.



Donaldson has a disability, uses a wheelchair and is living on limited income. “You have to decide between living day-to-day and rent,” she told me. Finding an accessible home that she can afford is a challenge, and the struggle is compounded by landlords who turn her away because she is in a wheelchair. “When you look for housing you face discrimination because you’re a person with a disability,” Donaldson said, exasperated.

The Chicago Housing Authority, charged with managing more than 21,000 of units of public housing, could provide Donaldson with a place to live that is both safe and affordable, a place where her daughter could have her own room and where the facilities would be wheelchair-accessible. Public housing in Chicago suffers from stereotypes born of high-profile 90s-era social ills in projects like Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor homes, and many Chicagoans would rather turn their gaze away from the institution and those who rely on it. They shouldn’t. As the city looks elsewhere, the Chicago Housing Authority has been quietly and steadily perpetrating some of the most disturbing institutional mismanagement in a city where jaw-dropping corruption is a spectator sport.

In 2000, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development approved a proposal for Chicago to take part in the national Moving to Work Demonstration Project, leaving the city largely exempt from federal oversight in how it operates the CHA—and newly endowed with $1.5 billion dollars in federal funding. The money was to be used over the course of a decade to rehabilitate or replace 25,000 units of public housing. The mayor at the time, Richard M. Daley, touted the so-called Plan for Transformation as a pathway to more than just better housing. “We’re not just building homes,” he said in 2006, as the Plan was underway. “We’re building lives and building communities. And I’d describe it as we’re rebuilding souls.”

Decaying basketball hoops stand outside the last Cabrini-Green Homes building to be occupied. The infamously violent housing complex was demolished in the spring of 2011. Scott Olson/Getty Images

Today, five years after the Plan was supposed to be completed, few low-income Chicagoans would say that salvation has been achieved. While over 18,000 units were demolished within the first decade of the plan, the pace to rebuild or renovate has been slow—and particularly slow since Mayor Rahm Emanuel took office in 2011. Between 2007 and 2010, the CHA rebuilt between 700 and 900 units each year. In 2011, that number plummeted by about half, to 424. The following year, only 112 units were built. Only 49 new units were constructed last year. In a report submitted to HUD this August, the CHA promised that in the coming year it would “continue to make progress toward the 25,000 unit goal of the original Plan. CHA plans to deliver an additional 1,040 in FY2015, for an overall total of 23,141 housing units or 93% of the overall unit delivery goal.” In some cases, land set aside for public housing has instead been allocated to private developers; this summer, residents protested as construction workers broke ground for a Mariano’s grocery store on the land where the Ida B. Wells Homes once stood.