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Christine Klepper: Integration brings equality

Christine Klepper is the executive director of Housing Choice Partners of Illinois Inc., a non-profit organization that assists families enrolled in the housing choice voucher program (formerly Section 8) with the process of moving into the private rental market. As a contract agency for the Chicago Housing Authority, HCP encourages families going through the Plan for Transformation to move to areas with better schools, lower crime rates and better job opportunities.  Part of their mission is to help undo the century of racial and economic segregation that has divided Chicago and the fears and stereotypes that accompany that history.

Here, Klepper explains the history of the fair housing movement, what she’s learned from her 30-year career as an affordable housing advocate and how the Plan for Transformation is working for those her agency helps.

 

How did HCP get started?

HCP has been around for about 11 years.  The organization was started by the fair housing community in Chicago because the suburban voucher program was highly concentrated in the south suburbs. I think at the time, the south suburbs had 25 percent of the housing but 75 percent of the voucher holders. In the entire suburban part of Cook County, they lived in just a handful of communities in the south -- those that had the highest black populations and the highest poverty populations. The idea was to work with families in public housing to expand options and de-concentrate some of that poverty and racial segregation. 

What was the Gautreaux program?

The Gautreaux program was a result of a lawsuit against the Chicago Housing Authority and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for concentrating public housing in black areas of Chicago. The facts of the case were that there was other land available at the time and that it was a very deliberate attempt on the part of the City and the CHA at the time to concentrate that housing in predominantly black areas. It was a deliberate [attempt] to contain the black population: They were isolated in the least desirable parts of the city, isolated from where the jobs and better schools were and it was a very deliberate act and it was in violation of the Fair Housing Act.

It was a ground-breaking lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court and there was a demonstration program that grew out of the lawsuit that was called the Gautreaux program. What’s so interesting about the Gautreaux program is that it has been around for thirty years so you can really look at how those families did who moved out of public housing and into the private market. They moved out of racially segregated areas into integrated areas, mostly in the predominantly white areas in the suburbs and they moved from high poverty concentrations to very low poverty areas and over time the results were very good. The families did really well, the children in particular did really well.

 

A study by the Heartland Alliance found that the demand for housing vouchers is greater than the supply. Is this a problem for those moving out of public housing?

 It’s not an issue for families coming out of public housing, it’s a total issue for everybody else.  For public housing families, if their building is being torn down, CHA has an obligation to either provide another housing unit or give them a voucher. So all of the families that we work with have a voucher. And they can choose to stay in public housing, stay in the development that they’re in and just move to another unit, go to a scattered site housing, move to another development or they can take a voucher. And they can take a temporary voucher or a permanent voucher. So they have a lot of choice so to speak, within the market of public housing.

And in all honesty, the market has been pretty good for all rental units. Affordable housing overall is in very short supply but vouchers open a lot of doors. Families can afford units they couldn’t otherwise afford. The market in Chicago has been reasonable. I would say from 1996 up to 2002 or 2003, it was very tight but it loosened up. We had that big home ownership movement and so a lot of renters moved into the home ownership area and it left rental units. We’ve been able to do pretty well.

Where are people going?

About half of our families have gone to low-poverty or higher opportunity areas.  About half have stayed in traditional areas.  I just did an overview of our performance and families moved from census tracks with about 60 percent poverty—that’s pretty high – before a move and after a move it was about, about half, 26 or 28 percent poverty. I was pretty happy with that.

With racial segregation, we haven’t done as well. I think it was eighty percent African American before a move and about 60 percent African American after the move. So it’s movement in the right direction, maybe not as much as we’d like to see but the other thing is that these are public housing families going into the private market. This is the first move for many of these families, so I don’t think that’s too bad.  Overall, I think we’ve done pretty well. I think families are living in much better places, with better options than where they came from.

What about those people who have moved to the suburbs? How have they been doing?

We haven’t found that many people who wanted to go to the suburbs and not many people who have gone to the suburbs and those who did move did so because they had a family member or there was some reason why they wanted to go to the suburbs. We don’t make decisions for families. We provide the choices and they make the decisions so for those who did go to the suburbs, that was a choice that they made.

I know of one woman who went to Naperville and it’s been hard for her. She wanted to go there, but it’s not easy. Transportation is an issue for her, but she wanted to get into a better place. The idea is to provide the choice and support the choice to the extent that we can. Our agency doesn’t do any of the social service work – we are partnered with Heartland Alliance and they do the social service work – but it’s only for a short period after the move. And I think for the families that do go to the suburbs that long-term support that’s available in the city is not available in the suburbs.

Are people getting the support they need?

I think what happens to families over time should be tracked because there are families who are now in private housing and there is an expectation: You can’t be moving extra people into these units and if you do, the landlord’s likely to evict you. If you get evicted, you’re likely to lose your voucher. I think the long-term in terms of what’s happening to these families is important. They do get long-term assistance from the service connectors in the city, but I’m not sure what the levels of engagement are. Are people asking for help if they need it? Are they getting the help when they ask for it? I don’t know the answers to that.

How are those who have made the move doing now?

We care about the families that we’ve moved, we want to know how they’re doing. We did a special project at Wentworth: We moved a couple of hundred families out of Wentworth in 2003 and 2004 and we got a grant from the MacArthur Foundation to do some follow up with them and we did find a lot of families in danger of losing their voucher because of paperwork that they hadn’t turned in. We did intervene in a lot of situations and people did get their renewals and they were fine. But it did raise that whole notion of eviction, and what would happen to somebody if they get evicted, lost the voucher, would they get back into public housing? There’s not so many units left any more. I think those are valid concerns and valid issues that ought to be followed up by somebody.  And I know there’s a whole variety of studies and initiatives and CHA does a lot of tracking on their own but we’re just one little piece of this giant urban renewal program so I don’t really know who’s doing that but somebody should be doing that.

Why are people getting evicted?

You have to abide by the terms of the lease. If there are two people on your lease and you have four people in your unit, you’re violating your lease. If you’re too noisy or there are police called to your unit or somebody in the family is convicted of a drug offense, all of those things are a problem with the voucher whereas they might not have been a problem with public housing. And every year your voucher is renewed. You have to submit your income again, the unit has to be re-inspected, so it’s kind of an ongoing paperwork issue with CHAC and it’s also an ongoing maintenance issue with your landlord, who has to keep up the property. And you have to abide by the terms of your lease. There are a variety of pitfalls. For example, if you can’t pay your utilities, your utilities get shut off. That’s a major problem for a lot of these families because they never paid utility bills in public housing. Now they’re faced with electric rates that are just exorbitant and heating bills in the winter and if you can’t pay those bills, that’s a very, very big problem.

If there’s someone working with the family, there are things that can be done. The problem is that the family often doesn’t ask for assistance until it’s too late. So it’s an ongoing issue and something we all have to be aware of.

Is the rent too expensive for people to afford?

Whether it’s public housing or a voucher, the client pays 30 percent of their income, whatever their income is.  It would be nice if families could find units in the private market where at least the heat is included but increasingly, that’s not the case. Landlords don’t want to pick up that bill, either. We try very hard to find rental units where the heat is included but it’s increasingly difficult to find those units and the voucher program has a utility allowance, but it doesn’t cover the cost of utilities. It does provide some allowance, but we have lots of clients who want a home -- they don’t want an apartment -- they want a home. They get into a home and they find out the heating bill’s $200, they don’t have $200 and while we try to tell them a home is very expensive, sometimes they don’t want to hear that. So then they run into a problem with a utility bill and then what are you going to do? If you don’t pay your utility bill, the utilities are going to be shut off and you’re going to be evicted because the landlord can’t have a unit with no utilities. And you can’t live there either. It’s a safety issue.

Once you have a problem with utilities, they’re not going to give you an account again for electric or gas – maybe if you get on a payment plan and you pay it off – but it’s just a very big issue. The cost of utilities in the private market and budgeting for that and understanding that, conserving energy, there are some built in safeguards but it isn’t enough.

Do people have the skills they need to survive outside of public housing?

Public housing families run the gamut. We have two who work here but they just don’t have enough money. Housing is very expensive, especially in the city of Chicago and they don’t have enough money.  One woman has six children and takes care of a baby (that she adopted from a woman who wasn’t taking care of her child). It’s her and her husband and they can’t afford something in the private market. She’s very capable, she’s very responsible, she just doesn’t make enough money.

Other common problems are mental illness and substance abuse, whether it’s alcoholism or drugs. Those conditions are extremely difficult. That’s a huge part of the public housing population so that tells you something right here. These are people who find responsibility kind of tough. Even on a good day.

And then you have yet another group that doesn’t know how to problem solve. Maybe they have learning disabilities, or are not very educated, but they don’t know how systems work. You know, maybe you should get on a payment plan for your utilities, they would never even think of that because they don’t know. There’s just such a lack of education, whether it’s from growing up in an isolated environment or from not getting through school. 

There’s no one skill that’s lacking or one situation. It just runs the gamut from one end to the other, but the vast majority of the problem is that people don’t have enough money to live on and no matter how responsible you are, if you don’t have enough money, it’s hard to pay the bills.

How does living in an area with a lower level of poverty help someone moving out of public housing?

I would say the most important aspect is lower crime rates.  Families feel safer and that’s huge, that’s the number one reason why people want to move to an opportunity area. If it’s a mom, she can let her kids play outside: She doesn’t have to worry about them being approached by gang members or being shot by a bullet that’s flying around the neighborhood. Lower crime rates, that’s critical.

And health issues. People’s health increases so much in a safer environment. There’s lack of depression, less stress and asthma and other conditions like that improve when they live in better neighborhoods.

And then there’s the school issues I would also say. One way to break generational poverty is to get kids into a good school system so that they can compete, so that they can learn something, so that they’re not distracted by gang shootings or gang recruitment or the allure of drugs.    So many public housing families, don’t really realize there are really good schools and really bad schools and their kids are in the really bad schools. They just don’t think about it maybe because they’ve never had a choice before.  One thing our neighborhood needs to know is that there are neighborhood schools and if you move into this neighborhood, your kids will go to this school and this is a good, high performing school.

Middle class families consider schools number one on their list. They wouldn’t make a choice without knowing what the school was like, but I think low-income families don’t do this because it’s not on their radar screen so we want to put it.

Does introducing low-income residents into a higher-income community create isolation and segregation?

There’s some of that. I’m reminded of a development in Hoffman Estates where there was one apartment complex where a lot of people lived in a small area. A lot of voucher holders lived there, although the vast majority of them weren’t, but they were African-American so everybody assumed they were all Section 8. And it did get to be very visible and a problem for the community and for the families because they were isolated and stigmatized within the community. We don’t want to see that happen, so that’s something we try to avoid.

If someone is involved with crime, no matter where they are, do they bring that crime with them?

I’m not an expert on that kind of thing, but the voucher program does do a criminal background check. And anybody that has any violent crime, any drug crimes on their record is not eligible for a voucher. So that population is screened out of the voucher population to begin with. Which is not to say that some family might not put someone on the lease, or bring someone along who does have a crime issue, but they’re risking their voucher if they do that.

Isn’t that a terrible barrier for a lot of people?

Yes, it’s very difficult. And that’s why a lot of people don’t tell anybody if they have a family member who has been incarcerated, because where is that person going to go? Incarcerated people have to go somewhere, they have to live someplace but according to the voucher program they should stay in public housing.

But isn’t it against the law for someone with a felony conviction to live in public housing?

In the new, mixed-income developments, that’s true.

What happens to those people?

It’s a very serious problem, especially in this day when we know that so many black men have been locked up for drug offenses.There is a real underground, where people don’t say and don’t tell about family members that are in that category.

I think for the crime issue the bigger piece of it is that there are a lot of squatters in public housing, people who are not on leases, who just live there and as the buildings come down, all of those families are going someplace too. They’re not getting vouchers because they’re not formally part of public housing, but they’re a pretty big population and Sudhir Venkatesh of Columbia University has tracked some of those families from Robert Taylor homes.

I don’t know this but I suspect that the crime issue is a bigger issue for that group than for the voucher group that we tend to deal with. But it is a problem. Until people have jobs and incomes and aren’t substance abusers, crime will always be an issue.

If you could solve just one part of this puzzle what would it be?

If we had integrated neighborhoods instead of separate areas for people -- because separate is not equal -- then I think we could do away with the isolation, the disinvestment, the poor schools, lack of jobs, all of that stuff.

To me, it’s the cornerstone, it’s the most important thing, even though if you look at the Brown decision, it’s about schools, but how do you get integrated schools without bussing? It’s integrating the neighborhoods, but of course, nobody wanted to go there.

While blacks and whites work together more, go to school together more, they still don’t live together and if they do it tends to be for a very short period of time while the neighborhood changes. There are a few examples of stable integration, but not very many.  So it’s something that will take a long time. It took a long time for us to get to the place where we are now and it’s going to take a long time to undo that damage.