Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his allies on the City Council have effectively quashed a Chicago Housing Authority accountability ordinance meant to preserve the total number of public housing units in the city, grant the council some oversight of the agency, and affect future and ongoing public housing developments, including the redevelopment of the Lathrop Homes.
After it was introduced, the bill languished until July 2015, when it was reintroduced by First Ward alderman Proco Joe Moreno. This time, however, the ordinance was lacking a notable cosponsor: 49th Ward alderman Joe Moore, who had just been appointed to chair the Committee on Housing and Real Estate.
Moore also argues that the CHA no longer needs oversight from the City Council, because its days of mismanagement are over. The organization’s new CEO, Eugene Jones Jr., has made numerous improvements towards completing the Plan for Transformation and distributing Section 8 vouchers, Moore says. He’s even started to spend the surplus, which was down to $221 million by the end of 2015.
Despite this, Levinger and other advocates believe that opposition to the ordinance is founded not in worries over the CHA’s flexibility or confidence in Jones’s accomplishments, but rather in a classic power struggle between the mayor and the people.
But if these politics play out as they have over the past year, it’s not likely to happen anytime soon.
