Families In Contaminated Complex Decry Chicago Relocation Plan
Remaining residents of a lead-contaminated public housing complex in East Chicago are gearing up for a fight about the city’s plans to relocate them.
Sixty-seven families still lived in West Calumet Housing Complex as of Wednesday. It’s less than a quarter of the original residents in the neighborhood, which sits in a federal Superfund site and is slated for demolition, pending federal approval.
On Thursday, the Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority announced it had secured $2 million in state and federal funding to help with that effort, “once residents have been safely relocated,” a spokesman said in an email.
In order to empty the complex, the city can move remaining residents to temporary housing after next Friday, March 31. That was in the terms of a November fair housing settlement.
But residents searching for housing in Indiana say they were told they’d be relocated in-state. Instead, about a third of families learned Tuesday night from hand-delivered letters that they’d been assigned temporary housing in Chicago.
East Chicago native Keeshea Daniels says that’s not an option for her family.
“Putting me on the south side of Chicago is like putting a deer in the middle of Cline Avenue. You know? You don’t belong there,” she says. “I don’t belong in Chicago, ’cause I’m from Indiana.”
Daniels says even a short-term move would be a nightmare for her and her sons’ school, health care and transportation to keep house-hunting in Northwest Indiana.
The East Chicago Housing Authority and mayor’s office did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
But a spokeswoman for the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development says the city will pay to transport kids whose families are relocated to Chicago to and from school in East Chicago.
Families will have to pay rent at those temporary units, but could sign permanent leases and apply their Section 8 housing vouchers there if they choose.
The HUD spokeswoman says officials hope more units will open up in East Chicago for families who don’t want to move away.
But, she said in an email, “any family with extenuating circumstances that does not want to move out of Indiana into Illinois should avail themselves of the grievance process as soon as possible.”
Attorney Emily Coffey of the Chicago-based Shriver Center on Poverty Law is encouraging residents to do that, too. And she says city and federal housing officials are rushing these moves unfairly.
“This is just not the outcome that we have been working with the residents to get to,” she says. “It was our objective … to be able to give residents choice on where it is that they’re gonna go.”
Residents can file grievances for the next week. They have until March 31 to finalize their plans.
This story has been updated to include comment and clarification received Friday, March 24, from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Indiana Public Broadcasting’s Lauren Chapman and Nick Janzen contributed reporting.
