Poor Families Recieve 'Supervouchers' To Rent In City's Priciest Buildings (Chicago Gold Coast)

[Gormy Cuss]

38. If the middle class apartment owners would take vouchers, there'd be no need for these.

Where there is tone deafness is in the link at the OP, presenting this as if CHA actually wants to house people in expensive lake shore units. Far from it. They want to house people in all city neighborhoods, not just the racial and economic ghettos. Chicago had an ugly history of this and was one of the first big cities to try novel remedies (Google "Gautreaux v. Chicago.&quot

One of the biggest problems with housing vouchers is that after waiting for years to make your way to the top of the waiting list, many potential tenants find no housing available. It's a crisis and that's exactly how it should be presented to Mr. $900 in Cleveland who probably thinks HUD pays too much in all the expensive metros. Comparing Cleveland rents to Chicago rents is an apples to oranges exercise. There's need for many, many more affordable housing units in most of the country. Currently housing voucher programs are the largest programs by HUD to address that.

There is no public or political interest in the government developing low income housing on a wide scale again because of the failures of some high density, post-WWII public housing developments in Chicago, St. Louis, and a few other big cities. All agree that lower density public housing is better for communities and most agree that mixed income, lower density housing is the current best practice. The problem is lower density housing costs more per unit to produce and maintain than high density, and that means that even in the existing programs to replace old high density housing, the newer subsidized housing contains far fewer units.