Editor’s note: This story was republished from Block Club Chicago.
ROGERS PARK — Finally feeling better after a few weeks of illness, Georgette Flowers thought she would make some brownies.
But as she preheated her oven, a mouse scampered out.
“This critter must have been hungry and smelled the butter and everything,” Flowers said.
It was just the latest rodent Flowers had been forced to deal with at her Chicago Housing Authority building. She’d heard them scurrying in the walls off and on for years. She’d even found one in a cabinet. But this was the first time she’d seen one coming out of her stove.
Disgusted and traumatized, Flowers stopped cooking for weeks.
In the meantime, Flowers said she made little “treats” for the mice, mixing rat poison with peanut butter and cheese. In all, she killed at least four mice from June to August.
Flowers said she called Manage Chicago, the property manager hired by the CHA to take care of her Rogers Park building, to ask for a new stove.
Manage Chicago staff told her they would put in an order, but they didn’t tell Flowers when the replacement stove would arrive. She called back every week hoping to get an update on the delivery and kept getting the same response — a date couldn’t be provided.
In August, fed up after nearly two months of waiting, Flowers finally called the CHA’s emergency number. A new stove was delivered within a few hours.
By then, tired of setting traps and dispatching the pests caught in them, she had adopted a cat, Luna. Though Flowers can still hear the mice in the walls, neither she nor Luna have caught any more. But now she’ll have to pay her property manager $150 to keep Luna at the apartment, exacerbating what Flowers considers a “ridiculous” situation.
For Flowers, the rodent and stove issues — along with broken locks and other problems at her building — are part of a larger trend. The CHA and its property managers haven’t properly maintained her building for the last 15 years, causing headaches and safety concerns for her and her neighbors, she said.
Flowers’ experience highlights larger, ongoing management failures by the CHA — problems agency officials have said multiple times over the past year they’re working to address.
Her home is one of about 2,800 in the CHA’s scattered-site program, intended to provide low-income families with housing options in small and mid-size buildings across the city. But the agency has struggled for decades to maintain and manage the scattered sites.
Last year, after Block Club and the Illinois Answers Project began asking questions about the program, the CHA announced plans to upgrade its buildings and improve day-to-day conditions for existing residents.
Under a $50 million campaign, the agency would fix up dozens of vacant properties within 18 months so they could be rented out or sold. And officials said the CHA aimed to seek new private property managers for its occupied buildings “to provide greater oversight and better service for residents.”
A year later, the agency has made minimal progress, Block Club has found.
The CHA has finished rehabbing only a few dozen empty properties, barely putting a dent in its goal.
And most property managers remain unchanged, while thousands of residents at scattered sites and other buildings have requested help with mold, rodents and other problems. Response times are often plodding at best.
Flowers and other residents of her building have repeatedly called their private management company, the CHA and the city’s 311 center to report maintenance and safety issues. They’ve contacted their alderwoman, Maria Hadden (49th), who has demanded more accountability from the CHA.
Their issues still haven’t all been resolved.
CHA officials acknowledge the agency has substantial work to do.
Matt Aguilar, a spokesperson for the CHA, said in a written statement that construction takes time but the agency is making progress on fixing up its properties. Still, he said, the CHA “must do a better job” of holding itself and its property managers accountable.
“This is a new day at CHA,” Aguilar’s statement said. “We are listening to the concerns from residents and are laser-focused on making changes and improving the level of service that we offer. CHA’s 2025 budget will include investments in occupied public housing units, including updates to fixtures, flooring, appliances, hot water tanks, furnaces and appliances where replacements are required.”
While Flowers is grateful for her apartment, including the new stove, she’s still frustrated. Though she’s been asking for help for years, she says her building continues to be neglected, exposing her and her neighbors to health and security risks.
“You’d think it would get better with time, but only wine gets better with time,” Flowers said.
‘Something opposed to nothing’
Flowers’ three-story, brown-brick building is on a one-way street in Rogers Park. Its courtyard, dotted with bushes and other plants, appears to be maintained with care.
Restaurants, salons and other businesses line Clark Street just a few blocks away. The lake is less than a mile east. Records suggest the CHA acquired the building in the late 1980s.
Flowers ended up in the neighborhood a few years later, when she and her two children stayed in a nearby homeless shelter for about six months.
So she was already familiar with the area when she was shown the Rogers Park building in 1993. It was the first and only apartment Flowers looked at.
“I figured I’d take something opposed to nothing,” she said.
The apartment had three bedrooms, enough space for her family. Her kids could walk across the street to school, and the area seemed nice at the time.
“When you’ve never had [an apartment], this one looked like a castle to me,” Flowers said. “Opposed to living with relatives and living on the street, I said I could make it whatever I wanted to.”
When Flowers and her kids moved in that December, they “didn’t have a stitch of furniture,” she said. But as she worked over the years, that changed, and now Flowers has “a house full of things I’m trying to get rid of,” she said, laughing.
At the same time, long-festering problems have gone unaddressed.
She’s repeatedly alerted officials about the rodent problems. Five years ago she told them that an intercom at the building’s front door was broken. Flowers said it still hasn’t been fixed.
Since Manage Chicago took over day-to-day management of her property in late 2022, the upkeep of the grounds has been better. But Flowers had to call the company multiple times before anyone showed up to make repairs to her plumbing. She’s also told their staff over and over that the lock for the gate around the building hasn’t worked consistently. For protection, Flowers now keeps a baseball bat by her front door.
Manage Chicago didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Other residents appear to have raised concerns as well. Records show CHA officials have submitted work orders for addressing rodents, “mold-like substances,” malfunctioning radiators, broken locks and water leaks, among other problems.
Her requests for repairs and other help are among nearly 116,000 the agency has received this year from about 12,600 families in its public housing buildings, records show.
Help from an alderwoman
People have also called the city via 311 to report plumbing problems and rats at the property.
Some of those calls came from the office of Ald. Hadden, who lives a few blocks away and often passes the building while walking her dogs.
Frustrated with the CHA, Flowers and other CHA residents have asked the alderwoman for help.
Hadden has demanded changes at the CHA before. She described the property where Flowers lives as a “stable building with a lot of long-term tenants.” She said she’s tried to follow up with the CHA and its private property managers without exposing the residents, who often fear retaliation for speaking up.
“The tenant is afraid of escalating because the management company may already know who it’s coming from,” Hadden said.
Last year, on a tour of the scattered sites in her ward with property managers, Hadden pointed out needed maintenance and repairs, she said. And CHA officials have told her to reach out directly to them about buildings in her ward, which the alderwoman took as a positive sign.
Still, resident needs are often addressed slowly if at all, prompting Hadden to question the CHA’s oversight of its private property managers and their ability to address issues new and old.
“When it comes to holding them accountable, that’s CHA’s job, but I don’t know if they’re doing it,” Hadden said. “I’m constantly wondering who’s at fault.”
CHA’s Aguilar acknowledged the agency “must do a better job.”
“Our obligation and responsibility is to hold our property managers accountable for responding to these issues in accordance with our standards, particularly in cases of life safety concerns,” Aguilar said in his statement.
Slow progress for CHA restoration program
The CHA’s oversight of scattered sites has been so poor that by last year it was sitting on hundreds of empty, deteriorating homes, even as Chicago grapples with a shortage of affordable housing, Block Club and IAP found.
CHA officials announced plans to repair or rehab more than 171 of the vacant apartments and 37 single-family homes; the houses would then be sold to CHA residents. The agency said it would all be done within a year and a half. Tracey Scott, then the agency’s CEO, called the timetable “an aggressive target.”
Agency officials say they’re making progress. But it’s slow. As of December, construction has been finished on 36 units, 19 of them currently occupied, Aguilar said.
Of the 37 single-family homes marked for repair and possible sale, three were completed and occupied by December, Aguilar said. Thirteen others are under construction.
All the other properties slated for rehab are “in some phase” of the construction process, Aguilar said.
“We are working through what can be a complicated construction process and pushing hard to achieve the timeline,” he said.
Flowers considers herself lucky to have a home, but she questioned who came up with the list of properties that would undergo rehabs, saying it’s “unfair” to residents like her living in buildings that are occupied but often overlooked.
She said CHA officials told her she could get a transfer to a different building, but she questioned why she should leave her home, especially when conditions might be worse elsewhere.
“I already know what I have with this one,” Flowers said. If she moved to another home, “I might have to work even harder to get them to take care of it.”
