CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) — Housing advocates continued to push hard on their lawsuit to block the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) from using public housing land for a training facility for the Chicago Fire soccer team.
As traffic moved by the building that houses the Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) offices in Chicago, Don Washington, head of the Chicago Housing Initiative, said HUD should never have allowed the CHA to give the Chicago Fire land from the old ABLA Homes for a soccer training complex.
“HUD didn’t carry out its civil rights review; that’s negligence,” he said. “The CHA did not follow any of its protocols. It didn’t follow any of its procedures.”
Antwain Miller, with the Lugenia Burns Hope Center, said his group and others have sued the CHA and HUD for forging a deal with billionaire team owner Joe Masueto to build that training facility.
“Too long, CHA has been used for everything but public housing,” Miller said. “Too long, we have not been heard. Too long, we have been pushed out of the city with these anti-Black policies, so we’re here to say, ‘No more.’”
At Monday’s news conference, Iliana Haven, a housing organizer with Access Living, said the agency didn't do its job — including a required civil rights study.
“This deal further harms the people this city is supposed to house,” Haven said. “How many more press conferences and lawsuits will it take to halt this and other pending dispositions of public housing?”
CHA officials, previously, have said there will be public housing on the land and jobs for the community. Rod Wilson, director of the Lugenia Burns Hope Center says look at the track record.
“There’s still housing owed at Ida B. Wells,” he said. “There’s still housing owed at Robert Taylor; there’s still housing owed at Ickes and at ABLA. All four of those developments have private things on there, as well.”
Wilson said CHA hasn’t kept other promises that it’s made over the nearly past 25 years.
“CHA came out in 2000 and said, ‘We’re going to tear down the high-rise, rebuild them up as mid-rises, and in 10 years people can come back … You’ll have the right to return,” he said. “We’re in Year 23 of this program.”
The lawsuit calls for an injunction and a moratorium on turning over CHA property to private developers.
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