This story was produced by Block Club Chicago, a nonprofit newsroom focused on Chicago’s neighborhoods, and the Illinois Answers Project, an investigations and solutions journalism news organization.
HUMBOLDT PARK — On a block of frame houses and workers cottages, 849 N. St. Louis stands out: It’s the only home with its windows and front door boarded up. While most of the lawns on the street are well tended, its backyard is littered with tree branches and trash; over the summer, the heap grew nearly as high as the neighbors’ fences.
Neighbors call the West Humboldt Park home a magnet for danger, a “scourge” of the block, a “drug den.” They’ve complained to the city dozens of times in the last two years about trouble at the property including garbage, rats, drug sales, open drug use and even gunfire.
“I just want to get rid of this house,” said one neighbor, who didn’t want her name published because she fears for her safety.
The neighbor was even more outraged after learning the owner of the property — the Chicago Housing Authority, a government agency responsible for providing safe, affordable homes to low-income people.
That house is part of a CHA program that’s supposed to help families access new neighborhoods and opportunities. Instead, the property has become emblematic of a broader problem: The agency owns vacant, deteriorating homes like it all over the city.
Block Club’s Rachel Hinton discusses why homes remain vacant:
An investigation by Block Club Chicago and the Illinois Answers Project has found the CHA is sitting on nearly 500 empty homes that are part of its scattered-site program — even as Chicago struggles to address housing crises on multiple fronts, from historically high rents that many families can’t afford to a surge in homelessness to a stream of migrants who need shelter.
In all, the CHA owns about 2,900 scattered-site residences dispersed through dozens of neighborhoods. But one out of every six of the homes is empty, and dozens of them have been unoccupied for years, records show.
The CHA’s neglected scattered sites can be found on every side of town. For example, on the North Side, a handsome yellow-brick apartment building in Lakeview was renovated for $1.5 million in the mid-2010s, yet the building was never completely filled. On the West Side, several multifamily buildings in North Lawndale have been vacant and boarded up for years. And in South Shore, blocks from where the Obama Presidential Center is being built, more than a third of a 51-unit apartment building is vacant. The CHA says it will soon rent out most of those South Shore apartments.
The properties are unused even though more than 200,000 people are on the CHA’s waiting lists for housing assistance, including 50,000 who want a scattered-site unit.
In addition to the lost opportunity to house families, long-vacant units can spark crime and lower property values in the surrounding neighborhoods.
Alderpeople with scattered sites in their wards expressed exasperation that the CHA is letting so many of the homes remain vacant.
“That’s ridiculous,” said Ald. Walter Burnett Jr. (27th), whose ward includes the boarded-up house on North St. Louis. “That’s affordable housing. That doesn’t make any sense. We need these houses filled up.”
The scattered-site homes are “drastically” needed for people searching for safe, affordable options, said Ald. Jessie Fuentes (26th). The alderperson noted that dozens of people are living in tents in Humboldt Park, in the middle of the 26th Ward, and rents have skyrocketed in surrounding communities.
“We can use some of those abandoned CHA units if they were rehabbed,” Fuentes said.
CHA officials repeatedly declined requests from Block Club and the Illinois Answers Project to discuss the scattered-site program in an interview.
In a statement, CHA spokesman Matthew Aguilar said the CHA “is not satisfied with this vacancy rate and has prioritized funding to bring vacant units and buildings back into service.”
After Block Club and Illinois Answers began asking about the program, Aguilar said the total number of vacant units had decreased from 505 earlier this year to 484 by the end of September. The agency has spent more than $16 million on renovations of scattered sites this year and is developing a plan to bring “nearly all” of the vacant units back online, according to Aguilar.
That includes “up to $50 million” the CHA is planning to earmark in 2024 for renovating and rehabilitating 176 of these properties, he said.
In addition, the CHA is planning to sell about 40 scattered-site units to CHA residents through a new program called “Restore Home.” That will include 849 N. St. Louis, Aguilar said.
The CHA also plans to seek new property managers in 2024 “to provide greater oversight and better service for residents,” Aguilar said in an email.
At the same time, Aguilar’s statement highlighted the “operational challenges” and higher costs of maintaining a portfolio of smaller properties spread throughout the city. And it blamed the high vacancy rate on decisions by previous agency leaders to defer maintenance and keep certain units unrented. The agency’s current CEO, Tracey Scott, took the position in 2020.
While the CHA declined to make Scott available to Block Club and Illinois Answers reporters, the CEO spoke with the Chicago Sun-Times about plans to renovate scattered site housing. This was after Illinois Answers and Block Club made the CHA aware that they were planning to publish their story imminently.
A Blight On The Block
Most of the yards on the 800 block of North St. Louis are tidy and surrounded by fences. American and Mexican flags and pennants hang from front porches. On one recent fall afternoon, a man in a black T-shirt worked under the hood of a car parked on the street.
“Most of the people are working class, just minding their business,” said the outraged neighbor who spoke with Block Club and Illinois Answers.
The CHA has owned 849 N. St. Louis since 1983, but the home has been vacant for at least seven years, records show. Since 2019, neighbors have called 911 more than 80 times to report a burglary in progress, a person with a gun and, on dozens of occasions, drug sales, according to city call logs. Seventeen of the 911 calls were made in one three-week stretch in the fall of 2022.
Zach Caddy, who formerly lived on the block, said people involved in the drug trade “discovered the house was very much a place where you could do business without interruptions.”
Caddy said police cars would sit outside the property for a few hours at a time but he rarely saw officers take any action.
He also never saw property managers stopping by. The CHA has contracted with at least four firms to manage the property since it became vacant in 2016; Hispanic Housing Development Corp. is the current property manager. The company did not respond to multiple requests for an interview about the home on St. Louis or other properties.
For a time, Caddy looked into buying the vacant house, but it was “outrageously difficult” to figure out the right person to talk to, he said.
Later, he installed security cameras that captured part of the troubled property. But he said a man later approached him and threatened to set his car and his partner’s car on fire if he didn’t remove the cameras.
Caddy sold his house and moved out in May.
If the CHA had rented out, demolished or sold the home, the whole block would have been safer, he said.
After Caddy left, the troubles continued. In June, police received another series of calls about drug traffic, including one complaining that sellers were in the alley behind the house conducting a “pass out,” meaning they were giving away free samples. “Line is long,” the caller reported, according to the dispatcher’s notes.
From January through October, police made more than 70 arrests for drug sales or possession on the block, though records don’t show how many were tied to the house. Workers from other city departments have visited the property and cleaned out the backyard on occasion, records show. But garbage continued to accumulate, and people keep gathering in the back.
“Everybody knows it’s a drug den,” said the neighbor who calls the home the “scourge” of the block.
The neighbor didn’t realize the house was owned by the CHA until informed by a reporter.
“The other night I heard someone shooting at the house,” the neighbor said. “My partner and I were awakened at 3 in the morning. That’s not a good feeling.”
“It’s appalling that the agency [the CHA] owns that property and they’re not doing anything and Hispanic Housing isn’t doing anything,” the neighbor said. “It’s a blight on the neighborhood.”
“The mayor says he loves the West Side — let him prove it. Fix things on this block.”
Hobbled From The Start
The scattered-site program was intended to help desegregate the city’s public housing and expand residents’ access to opportunities. But from the time of its origins decades ago, political opposition and poor management have limited its reach.
From the 1930s through the 1960s, white politicians ensured that most of the CHA’s large, high-density developments like the Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini-Green were kept out of white neighborhoods. That left them concentrated in low-income Black communities.
In 1966, civil rights activists led by Martin Luther King Jr. called on the CHA to add more low-density housing in neighborhoods around the city. Three years later, in the landmark Gautreaux case, a federal judge blocked the CHA from building additional high-rise, high-density developments. He also ordered the agency to place future public housing outside of segregated Black areas.
“Going forward, all CHA development was supposed to be scattered sites,” said Julie Elena Brown, an attorney for the public interest firm Impact for Equity who began working on the Gautreaux case 33 years ago.
But the CHA stalled, and in 1987 a federal judge authorized a private real estate development firm, the Habitat Co., to take charge of the scattered sites. The CHA never put large numbers of scattered sites in affluent white areas; instead, they often ended up in Hispanic, racially mixed or even Black neighborhoods with cheaper real estate and less political resistance.
The CHA also struggled to maintain and manage the properties, though it hired private management companies in the 1990s. Because the homes were spread out, with no property managers at the locations, the scattered sites cost more to keep up than apartments in larger developments.
“Even in the best of circumstances, there are significant operational challenges that come with maintaining a geographically diverse portfolio of single, small and medium-sized buildings that do not exist in larger public housing complexes,” said the CHA’s statement to Block Club and Illinois Answers.
Little has changed in the program over the last several decades.
In 1999, when the CHA launched the Plan for Transformation, its citywide public housing makeover, 522 of its 2,922 scattered site units were vacant, according to agency records. That’s about 18 percent.
Twenty-four years later, the CHA has slightly fewer scattered-site units: 2,853. And the number of vacancies has stayed almost the same: 484, or 17 percent.
‘Raccoons Are Harboring In The Property’
The vacancy rates are highest in what the CHA calls scattered site Region 2, which includes much of the West and Northwest sides, from Little Village through Lawndale, Austin, Montclare and up to O’Hare. As of earlier this year, about one in every four units in this part of the city was unoccupied — an “excessive” rate, the CHA’s inspector general determined in a 2023 audit.
Tracey Champion has lived in a West Side scattered-site building for more than two decades, and for nearly half that time, one of the building’s eight apartments was empty, she said. The CHA finally rented it out this year.
As the former president of the West Side scattered-site residents’ group, Champion blames the private property managers for neglecting maintenance work — and she blames the CHA for not monitoring the managers. The CHA has switched property managers several times since she moved into her apartment. Currently her building is managed by Hispanic Housing.
Champion said changes in managers have not led to substantive changes in occupancy rates or living conditions in her region. The managers rarely respond to calls from tenants, she said. She believes the managers have essentially decided, “This is the Black West Side of Chicago — we can do whatever we want.”
The property managers are required to fill empty units within a month, Aguilar said in his statement, though in units with extensive damage, “this process obviously takes much more time.”
Still, the CHA previously acknowledged the high vacancy levels were linked to property management turnover.
“Once new firms took control of properties, they found that units that were said to be occupied were not and that residents who moved out were not taken off the resident list,” a CHA official wrote in response to an inspector general audit published in 2017.
That year, the CHA committed to addressing the problem. But when the inspector general conducted a second audit based on 2021 occupancy numbers, auditors found that the scattered-site vacancy rate had actually inched up.
In that audit, published earlier this year, the inspector general also found that 174 scattered-site units had been vacant for more than two years, and some for as long as 15 years. Allowing properties to sit vacant for extended periods of time, the inspector general cautioned, can speed up deterioration, causing problems for neighbors and increasing the cost of renovations down the road. In some cases, the audit found, the CHA broke city laws by failing to register, secure or maintain its vacant buildings.
One of its vacant units is a single-family home on the Northwest Side that the agency purchased in 2010 and never rented out.
The CHA paid $252,000 for the four-bedroom, two-bathroom home, which is on a quiet residential street in Montclare, within walking distance of schools, a park, shops and restaurants.
According to CHA records, the house is empty because it is one of 408 units undergoing or awaiting a rehab. In 2013 and again in 2023, the agency conducted physical needs assessments of the home that found structural defects and a need for extensive renovation, records show. Yet the renovation work was never done, the CHA confirmed.
While the CHA failed to rent the home, raccoons moved in.
Neighbors noticed signs of a raccoon infestation in summer of 2021 and started calling the city’s 311 service request line. Les Kniskern, who has lived kitty-corner from the vacant house for more than 12 years, also started reaching out to CHA board members and other public officials to request assistance.
“The building has been vacant 10+ years, and is overrun with raccoons and rodents,” an unidentified resident wrote in a July 2021 service request through the city’s online 311 portal. “Currently we are experiencing an odor in the neighborhood (dead raccoon? Dead human?). The smell outside is so bad it is causing headaches.”
In March 2022, someone called 311 to tell the city that the problems had not been resolved. As a report of the call summarized: “Siding is peeled back and raccoons are harboring in the property.” The home was “open all over,” the report stated.
Within a few weeks, the service request was “closed” with an acknowledgement that it was a CHA property: “Pending case no date CHA,” a report stated.
Another year passed. Then, in June, the office of Ald. Gilbert Villegas (36th) forwarded a service request to the Department of Buildings.
“There are 8 raccoons living in this yard and going up to the second level and probably into the house,” stated a summary of the service request. The report added that the raccoons were likely “getting into [the] building by the sliding glass doors.”
That month, nearly two years after Kniskern first contacted the CHA, the agency finally arranged to meet with him. Shortly after, CHA staff secured the property, he said. “To the best of my knowledge, the problem has been resolved,” Kniskern said.
But Kniskern remains frustrated that the CHA let the home go unused for so many years.
If the CHA won’t commit to renovating and reoccupying the house, he added, they should sell it or tear it down.
“This building is supposed to be used for low-income housing, and they’re just sitting on it,” Kniskern said.
In November, Aguilar said the agency plans to renovate the home and sell it to a CHA resident as part of the “Restore Home” initiative.
Bed Bugs And Rats
Many scattered-site residents express appreciation for their homes. But some rented-out buildings are mismanaged, creating unsafe living conditions for the residents and their neighbors on the block.
One woman who lives in a Logan Square scattered-site apartment said she has repeatedly suffered from headaches over the last decade when dealing with unhelpful property managers and CHA officials. The woman doesn’t want her name used because she’s concerned the CHA could retaliate in some way.
About 10 years ago, she was on the CHA’s waiting list when she received a call from the housing authority. She said she considered herself “blessed.”
CHA employees showed her three units and let her choose which one felt right. A friend encouraged her to move to Logan Square, and she was drawn to the schools and neighborhood amenities. She chose a three-bed, one-bath apartment not far from the square itself.
She grew to love it there, using her flair for decoration to brighten the apartment. She painted the walls a turquoise blue, hung lights around the windows and redecorated her Christmas tree for other holidays, with hearts for Valentine’s Day and yellow and orange adornments for Easter.
She said she knows all of her neighbors in the multiunit building, and she attends a church across the street.
But in April a leak in her upstairs bathroom dripped through the ceiling of her living room, damaging the floor, furniture and clothes.
Maintenance workers from Hispanic Housing, which manages the property, put plastic and tape over the hole under her bathroom sink, she said. But they didn’t dry out the wet ceiling. She said CHA officials promised to compensate her for the damage to her property but never did.
Then came the fruit flies, followed by an infestation of roaches, which repeatedly fell on her while she slept. In February, she noticed mold growing under a bathroom sink. She wondered how this might impact her 13-year-old son, who has asthma, and whether it has contributed to her headaches. She’s now working with CHA officials to move into another home.
“I wouldn’t recommend CHA to anyone anymore because I’d hate for someone to be going through what I’m going through,” the tenant said. “[CHA] is real careless and careless people shouldn’t be running a program like this. They’re obviously not doing a good job.”
In general, management companies should be responsive, said Aguilar, the CHA spokesperson: “It is unacceptable for property managers to fail to address complaints from residents.”
He said residents can call the CHA emergency services line day or night if managers aren’t helpful. He added that the CHA plans to seek new property managers and to rewrite management contracts with higher performance standards and accountability mechanisms.
‘People Are Just Desperate’
Caroline Dodge, 84, said the scattered-site program offered her and her family stability, community and a sense of purpose.
Dodge lived in the CHA’s massive Cabrini-Green development for 19 years. But the elevators broke down frequently, and walking up five flights of stairs to her apartment aggravated her asthma. In 1983 she decided to move with her adult daughter into a scattered-site apartment a few blocks away on North Avenue. The unit was in one of three identical buildings the CHA had built in Lincoln Park during the first wave of scattered-site construction in 1969.
Dodge loved her first-floor apartment at 430 W. North Ave. The neighborhood gave her greater access to nature and the lake, and her building was set back from the street, with ample yard space on all sides. She grew vegetables under the shade of a half dozen oak and maple trees.
But the CHA didn’t properly maintain the 12-unit complex, even after it hired private management companies in the 1990s. Water leaked into Dodge’s apartment when it rained. The CHA fixed the roof in 2010, but that didn’t stop the leaks. Mold grew behind the walls, she said.
In 2017 the CHA spent $52,000 to renovate a unit in Dodge’s complex that had been vacant for two years, records show. Yet CHA officials soon started relocating tenants from the building.
Dodge said a squatter moved into the unit above her, even after management secured the stairway. “People are just desperate,” she said. “They’re desperate for shelter.”
By 2018, the entire complex was empty.
Dodge was one of the last to leave. After insisting she stay in the neighborhood, she moved to an apartment on Sedgwick a few blocks away. Built in the same style as the apartments on North Avenue, Dodge’s building is nestled between avant-garde multimillion-dollar homes, historic structures protected by preservation laws, and parks lined with fountains, chess boards and sculptures.
Three of the six apartments in the building were vacant when she moved in. Four years later, they still are, she said.
Manage Chicago, the company hired to manage the property, declined to comment on Dodge’s building. After inquiries from Block Club and Illinois Answers, Aguilar said a contractor has been assigned to rehab the vacant units there.
Dodge’s former home is also empty, four years after she was the last resident to move out. The CHA is considering razing the old buildings to put up a larger, mixed-income development with up to 100 units — ending the 54-year experiment there with low-density, scattered-site homes.
Dodge has another proposal for the historic properties.
“Open them back up,” Dodge said. “Get better management. Don’t let them run down.”
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