Bullet holes. A dead mouse. Broken trash chutes. Boarded-up windows and a door frame.
These are some of the conditions at the Chicago Housing Authority’s Dearborn Homes, a 668-unit development with 16 multistory buildings in the Douglas neighborhood.
CHA residents and housing advocates gathered in the rain outside the property on Thursday to call attention to conditions at the development after CHA CEO Tracey Scott visited earlier in the week. Residents were met with lackluster responses to their concerns, according to the tenants and advocates.
Residents said at a news conference that tenants often get stuck in their units, unable to get groceries and attend doctor appointments, because the elevators are consistently broken. They also spoke about a rat infestation at the development, overflowing and inaccessible trash bins and safety concerns due to crime.
“It is past time for CHA to do what they are supposed to have done for these communities of ours who have been suffering for many years,” said Etta Davis, an 11-year resident and vice president of the building’s advisory council. “We are tired of being neglected.”
The concerns from housing advocates and public housing tenants Thursday echo long-standing complaints from residents and their supporters for CHA to improve conditions at its properties and create more housing, as well as enduring calls for the agency’s CEO to step down or be fired by Mayor Brandon Johnson. Meanwhile, CHA said it is addressing the issues at Dearborn Homes.
CHA’s Scott said her walkthrough at the site earlier this week was not her first at the Dearborn Homes in her four years at the helm of the authority, as residents’ claimed.
“CHA values our residents and we take their concerns seriously. We are committed to addressing any issues that are reported in a timely manner,” a CHA statement to the Tribune said. “That’s why it is important for our senior leadership (including our CEO) to regularly walk through our sites and meet directly with resident leadership,” noting the meeting on Tuesday at Dearborn.
Residents and advocates said CHA is not working quickly enough. Davis, 69, said around a third of the development’s units are occupied by older adults . She told the story of a 94-year-old resident who tried walking up to the fifth floor because her elevator wasn’t working.
“We are tired of elevators being down,” Davis said to the crowd of around 20, which included five to six Dearborn residents, at the news conference.
Dearborn Homes was constructed in the late 1940s, with only one elevator in each of the buildings. Modernizing the existing elevators requires they be taken offline for months, which is why CHA has said it will add a second elevator to each building on the campus so that it can update the older elevators and increase accessibility, according to the agency’s statement.
The modernization effort is included in CHA’s five-year capital plan and estimated to cost $40 million, with planning scheduled to begin this year, the statement said. For now, CHA contracted elevator companies to provide “maintenance and repair services.”
Davis and another resident, Brenda Moore, said the buildings began to deteriorate after the property’s management changed hands from The Habitat Co. about eight years ago.
A sign on Moore’s fourth-floor trash chute reads, “STOP leaving garbage here. Take it down or drop it in the chute! Thank you.” The trash chute’s door was locked. Moore, who is a building president and is disabled and needs an elevator to get to and from her unit, said the trash chute has been broken for more than two years.
CHA said on the Tuesday walkthrough that staff noticed issues with the trash compactors and “have committed to fixing them as soon as possible.”
The agency also noted in the statement ongoing or recently completed investments at the site, including installing new doors on all buildings to “improve security and reduce vandalism” — a response to concerns raised by residents — refurbished basketball courts, updated electrical work and many renovated units within the last 10 years. The Tribune observed contractors on-site Thursday, taking measurements for the door replacements. Davis said she had been waiting for the new doors for years.
Moore, 66, has lived at Dearborn Homes for 14 years, moving to the property with her kids after her husband died to “start from scratch.”
“Everything was beautiful,” she said. But for the last few years, her maintenance requests have gone unanswered and her quality of life has diminished, Moore said.
In early June, as she prepared a playlist in her living room for her birthday party the next day, a bullet flew through her kitchen, shattering her window. She said no one came to check on her, and while maintenance workers came to temporarily shore up the window, a permanent fix has yet to be put in place. The Tribune saw numerous bullet holes and boarded-up windows on other buildings at the Dearborn campus.
In addition to the hole in her window, her apartment has mice, with one dead on her floor on Thursday. She said her dog runs away scared when the critters scurry about her unit. She said she has put in work orders multiple times and received no assistance.
“When I moved down here, it was so pretty,” Moore said. “I love my apartment, but the rats, the roaches.”
