The City of Chicago Battles Blight—By Paying for Granite Counter Tops in a Gentrifying Neighborhood

Since 2009, the city of Chicago has received $169 million from
the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, a federal effort to help
state and local governments ease urban blight by redeveloping
foreclosed properties. Chicago has spent $140 million of that money
demolishing and rehabbing homes—but not the homes you might
expect.

Writing in the Chicago Reporter, Angela Caputo
notes that

in the city’s poorest
neighborhoods, where vacant homes can be bought for the price of a
car, the hope was that [the funds] would go a long way.

But records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show
the city spent money on buildings with luxury finishes in
gentrifying areas while distressed properties in some of the city’s
hardest hit neighborhoods were left to languish. In their grant
proposal to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development,
city officials pledged to rehab 2,800 units, a combination of
apartments, condos and single-family homes. Less than one-third
were completed.

Among other details, Caputo reports that the rehabilitation of a
single house in gentrifying Albany Park—complete with federally
funded granite counter tops and stainless steel appliances—received
more money than all of Roseland, a low-income neighborhood hit
especially hard by the foreclosure crisis. Noting that the program
funneled funds through the state government as well, she observes
that it “cost an average of $65,000 more to rehab a single-family
home or two-flat when it was done through the city.”

So Chicago officials spent more money than was necessary to
rehab fewer properties than they promised, with much of the benefit
going to communities that needed help the least. Ladies and
gentlemen, your government in action.