She resents when people blame former public housing residents for their problems. Wells high-rise with her three children to a brick home with a manicured lawn that she is purchasing with CHA assistance on a quiet street in Roseland. Charlene Jones, 42, moved from the Ida B. When you've got more transients, you don't get a chance to know your neighbor." Some former CHA residents, however, have worked hard to be an asset to their new neighborhoods. "Outside investors are going for the guaranteed rent, voucher rent, instead of selling them to homeowners," Sawyer said.
Roderick Sawyer, the alderman-elect whose 6th Ward includes Chatham, said the neighborhood has "more of a transient nature" over the last decade, though he could not attribute all of it to CHA residents moving in. Chatham went from one voucher household in 1999 to 117 by the end of last year. Others moved into working-class African-American communities such as Chatham and South Shore, saturating formerly stable neighborhoods of single-family homes with renters. However, the majority of them moved to neighborhoods such as Englewood, Woodlawn, Auburn Gresham, Roseland and Greater Grand Crossing, communities that already were burdened with high crime and poverty. Former residents now live in 71 of Chicago's 77 neighborhoods, according to the report. "We help them make the best decisions for themselves, but most stayed in areas close to where they were." The CHA, however, acknowledged that it has lost track of 2,202 families that once lived in CHA housing, and another 1,307 households found housing without CHA assistance. "People move where they are comfortable and have formal and informal support systems such as family, jobs and church," said Lewis Jordan, chief executive officer of the CHA. Only 60 of those families have rented or purchased homes in the suburbs, a finding that challenges long-held beliefs that crime had followed former residents from the high-rises into their communities. In the 12 years since the CHA began its Plan for Transformation, an ambitious effort to overhaul public housing, the number of families receiving CHA housing subsidies has been cut in half, with only 56 percent - or 9,388 households, excluding senior citizens - in the system, according to a study prepared by the CHA. The Chicago Housing Authority high-rises that once towered over the Dan Ryan Expressway and parts of the Near North Side have vanished from the city's landscape, but most of the former residents remain clustered in low-income neighborhoods in Chicago rather than spreading out to the suburbs, the CHA said Thursday.