Charges of racial discrimination have haunted the Chicago Housing Authority since its creation more than 50 years ago. Now the voices of protest speak Spanish.
Cases like Sypien’s are not many. That’s not because other Latinos are processed more promptly, but because so few Latinos who need public and assisted housing apply for it.
Since last June the two sides have tried to find an agreement out of court. “We have put together a remedy proposal,” DeJesus said. “We are basically telling [CHA] what it will take to settle the suit.”
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The CHA’s lack of responsiveness to Latino housing needs was argued in a 42-page report published a year ago by Latinos United before the suit was filed. “Latinos and Public Housing” described a serious disproportion between Latino population increases and poverty status and Latinos’ participation in CHA programs.
“If the process was fair, the logical thing would be to allocate 25 percent of [public housing] benefits to Latinos,” DeJesus said. “That would make 15,000 units instead of the 1,000 currently available to them.”
Besides, he said, a Section Eight voucher can be used anywhere a landlord will accept them, and elderly housing units are found all over the city, with several of them in heavily Latino areas. Yet Latino participation in these programs is very low.
One of the primary goals of the agreement, signed by CHA chairman Vincent Lane, was 25 percent Latino occupancy in CHA housing by 1995. (The agreement specifically stated that 30 percent of the 2,000 new Section Eight vouchers the CHA was asking HUD for at the time would go to Latinos. But HUD, protesting that this smacked of a quota, turned down the request.) The CHA agreed to develop new outreach strategies to attract Latino applications, such as a Spanish-language phone line and Spanish-language advertising.
