As Chicago struggles with homelessness and an affordable housing shortage, Block Club Chicago set out to investigate how the Chicago Housing Authority was meeting its responsibility of providing housing to the city’s most vulnerable families.
Collaborating with our partners at the Illinois Answers Project, we examined the agency’s scattered-site program, which was originally conceived to decrease housing segregation.
Through our reporting, we learned that 500 of the CHA’s 2,900 scattered-site units — about one in six — were sitting vacant even as 200,000 people were on the agency’s waiting lists.
Our work started with data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, but it did not end there. Our reporting team visited properties and talked to residents and neighbors across the city. We dug through property records, analyzed crime data and examined police reports. We not only found that many of the housing authority’s properties were vacant, but that they had become neighborhood health and safety threats.
