The Chicago Housing Authority is getting ready to overhaul one of its oldest public housing sites — the 925-unit Julia C. Lathrop Homes development, located along the east bank of the Chicago River near Diversey Parkway.

Residents there have called foul on the agency’s decision to reduce the number of public housing units at the complex by more than half and have rallied to keep the construction of market-rate homes out of the redevelopment. The CHA has maintained that no details of the project are set in stone, and has promised that the tenant community at Lathrop will have a pivotal voice in the planning for the historic development.

Last year, CHA selected a multi-firm venture known as the Lathrop Community Partners to oversee the redevelopment of the 76-year-old housing complex. Comprised of Related Midwest, Heartland Housing, Bickerdike Redevelopment Corp., Magellan Development Group and Ardmore Associates, the group, along with Ald. Proco “Joe” Moreno (1st), officially began the planning stage for the project with a kick-off meeting in mid-November.

Skyline recently caught up with James Isaacs, director of the CHA’s Office of Development Management and Development Manager Veronica Gonzalez to talk about the agency’s goals for envisioning the future of Lathrop Homes.

Skyline: It seems like CHA is putting a bit more leg work into the community outreach portion of the Lathrop redevelopment than usual. Has the agency placed an added emphasis on resident inclusion for this project?

James Isaacs: CHA has always had community planning meetings, community charrettes — all of this stuff happened a long time ago, so a lot people may not remember. But we did this at developments like Roosevelt Square [and] Oakwood Shores. We still have the videos from the meetings at Oakwood Shores.

We’ve learned from those past experiences and we wanted to make sure that the public housing residents know what is happening in advance, so we’re doing extra meetings for that. We’re also using the Internet. In 1989 and 2000, those kind of tools were not as dominant in our lives, but now we’re using those things. But we always did this kind of public outreach.

Veronica Gonzalez: [Ald. Moreno] did make that claim, and I think that may have resonated with people. The truth is we always spend money on master planning.

SKY: Is CHA footing the bill for the community meetings and general outreach efforts, or is Lathrop Community Partners contributing to the financing for that aspect of the project?

VG: These are project costs. At the end of the day, we provide a loan for the cost of building public housing units. These meeting costs are a portion of what goes into the overall project, and it’s never a really big portion.

The bulk of the cost really comes from figuring out how many units we are going to be building, what type of technologies and efficiencies are going to be put in, etc. That’s the driver of the cost. The public meetings, the master planning … all of these are nominal expenses in the bigger scheme.

SKY: What is CHA’s financing model for this project?

JI: This is a mixed-income development, so it’s a lot different than how a traditional public housing redevelopment is done, where the housing authority owns the future buildings. The way we do mixed-finance development is, at the end of the day, the financer owns the building. We’re not the only ones putting money into this deal.

We have board authority to enter into a pre-development loan to pay for a portion of the costs of redeveloping this, because we are only going to pay for the costs that are attributable to the development of our units, [which] we will use through a master lease. At the time of closing, when we start construction, we are going to get that money back.

SKY: Is CHA working under a budget for the Lathrop project at this point?

VG: For big picture budgeting, we use HUD [U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development] guidelines, but we really try hard to never spend to that level.

SKY: Early estimates put the overall costs of this project at between $340 and $722 million. Is that an accurate figure?

JI: I can’t anticipate what the public housing residents and neighbor are going to want, and without having that interaction we can’t really throw a number at it.

We have parameters that we have to abide by which are the HUD guidelines and total cost. But without the community planning process we do not know what this is going to cost, and that’s typical of how we do these redevelopments — it isn’t a failure on the housing authority’s part that we don’t know at this point. You must agree that if you are going to have an open process, you have to do it this way.

LCP will hold its first workshop, “The Greening of Lathrop,” on Dec. 8 at New Life Community Church, 2958 N. Damen Ave. from 6 to 9 p.m. According to the partnership’s website, the meeting will address the issues of sustainability and green building options for the upcoming redevelopment at Lathrop.

Two additional workshops are scheduled for December, and a master plan for the Lathrop project is expected to be complete by summer 2012.

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By Andrew Schaefer from River North
Posted: 12/10/2011 12:23 PM

The only thing the CHA should be doing is working to reintegrate these tenants back into mainstream society. Public housing, however well-intentioned, has simply created a dependant underclass. Now that the projects have been dismantled the last thing anyone should be trying to do is perpetuate the same social divisions that the projects helped create.