Connecting the Data Dots: What City Agencies Did and Did Not Divulge

There is a wide range of theories about how much, and in what ways, the dismantling of concentrated public housing might have affected crime rates in neighborhoods across the city.

But data is difficult to pin down, and city agencies have refused to share key information with the public.

Though elected officials, journalists and neighborhood residents have claimed for years that the demolition of public housing led to spikes in violence, officials at the Chicago Housing Authority and the Chicago Police Department told the Chicago News Cooperative that they have not tracked crime linked to tenant relocation.

Both agencies have declined repeated requests from the CNC for detailed crime and housing data for the 12 years since the CHA’s Plan for Transformation went into effect. The CHA released information showing what neighborhoods some former tenants have moved to, but denied requests for block-level or census track-level data.

The CHA said it wanted to protect the privacy of former tenants. But it has provided the information to academic researchers, including Susan Popkin of the Urban Institute. At the CHA’s behest, Popkin is conducting a study of possible links between the Plan for Transformation and crime rates, which could be released by this summer.

The CHA did release data showing how many families have moved to each of Chicago’s 77 official community areas with the help of rental subsidy vouchers. The top Chicago community was South Shore, with 259 voucher-holders. That represents less than 1 percent of the housing units in that community, according to a CHA analysis.

All told, 4,026 families have secured leases from private-market landlords in Chicago with the help of federal vouchers in a program administered by the CHA, and another 71 live outside the city.

There were about 24,800 households in public housing when the Plan for Transformation was launched in 1999, according to the CHA. About a quarter of those–8,300–were in senior citizen buildings and had to move only temporarily, officials said. Of the remaining 16,500 families, about 5,400 have returned to rehabbed public housing units, officials said. The CHA knows of about 6,500 others living in private-market apartments. In addition to the families with subsidy vouchers, about 2,500 live on their own without CHA subsidies.

The whereabouts of thousands of others who once lived in public housing are unknown, according to CHA officials. Some did not have leases with the CHA and essentially lived as squatters in the former projects, CHA officials said. “We don’t track squatters,” said Kellie O’Connell-Miller, a CHA spokeswoman. “They’re not legal residents.”

Other former residents have been eliminated from the CHA’s rolls. About 1,200 former lease-holders have died. Another 1,500 have lost their leases because of noncompliance. Among other requirements, public housing tenants and voucher holders must pass a criminal background check. The CHA no longer tracks these families.

Another 2,200 families left the system by choice: They found housing and work on their own or became discouraged and dropped out, according to the CHA. “We can’t help them if they don’t tell us where they are,” said O’Connell-Miller.

It is nearly as difficult to determine precise crime patterns over long periods of time. The Chicago Police Department releases annual reports analyzing crime statistics down to the community-area level, but routinely rejects requests for more detailed information.

Police officials refused to provide the Chicago News Cooperative with block-level crime data for a year or more, though the department does post such information for six-week periods on its website.

Even if such detailed housing and crime data were available, experts said it would be unfair to draw any conclusions from apparent linkages.

In 2008 the Atlantic magazine published an article about two researchers in Memphis who noticed a correlation there between growing crime rates and subsidized housing vouchers after public housing developments were torn down. The article subsequently was criticized by social scientists and housing analysts who said it failed to identify any specific incidents linking voucher-holders with violent crime and neglected to analyze poverty rates and other adverse conditions.

Jens Ludwig, director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab and an expert on gun policy and poverty, cautions against assuming connections between the CHA Plan for Transformation and neighborhood crime trends.

“A lot of those families with vouchers ended up in neighborhoods that were already on the way down,” said Mr. Ludwig. “Before and after crime rates wouldn’t account for that.”

In a 2005 study, Mr. Ludwig and two partners found that young people who moved with their families out of public housing with the help of federal vouchers ended up being arrested for violent crimes much less frequently than those who stayed behind.

Reporting for this series was supported in part by a grant from the Center on Media, Crime and Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.