Tracey Scott said it’s not her fault.

The Chicago Housing Authority CEO on Wednesday touted the agency’s efforts to help thousands of people find affordable places to live — and blamed its well-documented failures on “historic challenges” that predated her four-year tenure.

“I’ve heard you,” Scott said to critics during a meeting of the City Council’s Committee on Housing and Real Estate, her first City Hall appearance in more than a year. “We have been addressing historic challenges. … We have much to celebrate, but there is much more work to do.”

Some alderpeople and almost all members of the public who spoke at the meeting agreed with that last part.

Scott faced withering criticism and calls to resign from residents and even a member of the CHA’s governing board. They said the agency has let its properties deteriorate while failing to build additional homes during a citywide affordable housing crisis. Several resident leaders ripped Scott for rarely visiting CHA properties.

“Tracey Scott, you seem to have forgotten that you are a guest here at CHA — you have outstayed your welcome,” said Francine Washington, speaking directly to Scott. 

Washington, a longtime CHA resident, has served on the CHA board since 2014.

“Miss Tracey Scott may be smart, but she has contempt for the residents,” Washington said. “Miss Scott, everybody’s complaining. They’re talking about what they need. The bottom line: She has to go.”

Alds. Gilbert Villegas (36th) and Byron Sigcho-Lopez (25th), the housing committee chair, had called the hearing partly in response to reporting from the Illinois Answers Project and Block Club Chicago that found hundreds of homes in the CHA’s scattered-site program are sitting empty, often for years.

While the homes go unused, agency officials said more than 120,000 people are on the CHA’s own waiting lists.

Some of the CHA’s vacant properties have become magnets for crime, including one in West Humboldt Park that’s used as a drug stash house.

Villegas cited those findings again during the hearing Wednesday.

“This is unconscionable,” Villegas said. “The status quo is not working and we need answers … This is not just a housing issue. This is a crime issue. This cannot stand.”

Villegas noted that his family had lived in the CHA’s Lathrop Homes for eight years when he was growing up. Their time in public housing helped his family get ahead, he said.

“I worry others aren’t getting the same opportunities,” Villegas said.

But Scott highlighted the CHA’s Restore Home initiative, a pledge to spend up to $50 million in 2024 to rehab dozens of vacant properties. 

Over the past four months, the CHA has finished fixing up five apartment buildings and three houses, Scott said.

Despite that modest start to the program, a number of alderpeople accepted Scott’s argument that the CHA is making progress on preserving and constructing more housing.

Though residents and neighbors have been “very unhappy with CHA historically,” officials seem to be making “some big improvements on some core areas,” said Ald. Maria Hadden (49th).

Still, Hadden suggested CHA officials provide more data to back up their testimony.

“It would be good to see the numbers,” Hadden said.

Ald. Jessie Fuentes (26th) noted the CHA had turned over 23 acres of its property to the billionaire-owned Chicago Fire soccer team — one of a series of deals the agency made to sell off vacant land even as it struggled to build new housing.

“The CHA has given away land through dispositions like the soccer facility,” Fuentes said. “What [other] dispositions are in the queue?”

Scott said the Fire agreement was “a rare opportunity.” Though she previously opened the door to additional deals, Scott told alderpeople, “We do not have plans right now to do any dispositions for [things like] a soccer facility.”

The CEO also told the committee the CHA plans to accelerate its pace of housing construction and launch a “customer call center” so residents, applicants and others “can get in touch with us.”

While most alderpeople gave Scott the benefit of the doubt, CHA residents and neighbors were far less charitable during the public testimony part of the meeting. Residents spoke of coping with roaches, mold, and sewage and plumbing problems in their apartments. 

“I have had people who have died from elevators not working, firemen not getting there in time, we drink brown water because the galvanized piping has not been changed since 1970,” said Lindsay Graves, a resident leader at the Vivian Carter Apartments in Englewood. “I would say it’s time for change at the head of CHA — we need something much better than this.”

Les Kniskern has lived kitty-corner from a scattered-site home in Montclare for more than 13 years. The home has been empty and unused that entire time — except when it was infested with raccoons. He suggested the CHA was squandering money from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.

“How has this been an effective or responsible use of the HUD funds, sitting on it for more than 13 years until it’s unusable?” Kniskern said.

The CHA is formally an independent government body with its own board responsible for providing oversight. But last month, alderpeople advanced a measure to increase oversight of the agency, and Scott agreed to testify before the housing committee.

“That is important not only for council members but more importantly for residents,” Sigcho-Lopez (25th) said at the time. “I think it’s important that we have checks and balances and accountability in every delegate agency.”

In October, the city’s top environmental official told City Council members that Chicago is “laser-focused on collaboration and bold solutions” to help homeowners battle flooding problems. 

Angela Tovar then pointed council members to the program RainReady, created in Chatham to provide grants to homeowners in the South Side neighborhood to install flood-control devices on their properties that can significantly reduce susceptibility to flooding. 

RainReady is the brainchild of a local environmental nonprofit group the Center for Neighborhood Technology. The program has had several iterations in Chatham since its development more than 10 years ago by CNT and a group of residents.

RainReady works, according to homeowners — including residents in west suburban Oak Park who benefited from the low-cost flood prevention fixes including rain gardens, backflow valves and cisterns. It is so successful that there is a waiting list, officials said. 

But it didn’t get the chance to work for most Chatham residents, the Illinois Answers Project learned. Despite Tovar’s assertions and the city’s promise to launch it in 2019, RainReady has yet to get off the ground. The few Chatham residents who did receive RainReady grants worked directly with CNT prior to 2019. 

The different outcomes potentially highlight the difficulty of administering the RainReady program at a larger scale.  

While CNT walked away from the city’s project in 2021 — citing a lack of “staff capacity” in an email to Sean Wiedel, then an assistant commissioner at CDOT in charge of citywide services — the nonprofit group found a way to work with government agencies outside of Chicago on similar projects.  A CNT official suggested that Chicago presents unique challenges.  

The village of Oak Park made the project work on a smaller scale. Data shows that its RainReady program that ran between 2017 and 2021, administered by CNT, left neighbors satisfied with the results. 

“People were looking for solutions. And this is one of the things that we were trying to … provide,” said Oak Park Neighborhood Services Manager Jeff Prior. 

Despite its success, the future of RainReady is unclear in both communities. The village is looking for a new administrator for the program and is uncertain whether grants will be awarded this year, despite opening applications in March.  

The city also is searching for a new partner to run its RainReady program. Until it finds one, Chatham will benefit from other programs that the water department has implemented, said Brendan Schreiber, chief engineer of sewers at DWM. Those include Green Alleys and Space to Grow, Tovar said in a statement.  

“They’re getting resources that we spread across all 50 wards,” Schreiber said.  

Read More From This Series:

• Flooding: Illinois’ Most Threatening Natural Disaster
• ‘Green Alleys’ Prevent Flooding, But Vulnerable Neighborhoods Must Wait
• For Many Illinoisans, Buyouts Are the Only Way Out

Why Chatham Floods 

Chatham is flat, low-lying and sandwiched between two of the city’s big reservoirs that collect rainwater, making it one of the last neighborhoods to empty into a sewer system that can often already be full. 

A confluence of topography, aging infrastructure and limited funding have made the neighborhood — known for its distinct architecture and history of Black art and culture — a point of struggle for the longtime residents who’ve invested in it.  

In a 2017 analysis of flood insurance data by CNT, Chatham was ranked highest in insurance payouts for flood damage. One-fourth of residents affected by flooding surveyed by CNT reported flooding damages cost them at least $20,000.  And in 2023, Chicago’s 8th Ward — where most of Chatham is located — had the fourth highest number of 311 calls for flooding in the city.  

Ora Jackson has lived in the historic community for 47 years. She still remembers the first time her basement flooded several years ago after a day of heavy rainfall. Her grandson, who had converted the basement into an apartment, called her from upstairs in a panic.  

She rushed to the basement to find him standing on his mattress surrounded by water. He was terrified to wade his way to the stairs, fearing he could be electrocuted.  

“It was frightening because I’d never seen anything like that before,” said Jackson, who told Illinois Answers she had no clue how severe the flooding problem in her duplex would grow over the years.  

After enduring multiple floods in her duplex — and continually replacing rugs and furniture and paying out of pocket to repair damages — Jackson finally found some relief when she joined the resident steering committee for RainReady in 2014 and received a grant. 

“We were just desperate for anything,” said Jackson, who got her downspout disconnected and a rain barrel installed through the program. “It was an education for everybody.”

Harriet Festing, an environmental activist who worked for CNT when RainReady was designed, said she was shocked to hear widespread “horror stories” of flood damage were in Chatham. 

“People couldn’t live in their homes anymore because the mold was so bad,” she said.  

RainReady’s early steps in Chatham were successful, Festing said, because the program tackled urban flooding by focusing on small measures that could direct rainwater away from homes to reduce or avoid the basement seepage that resulted from water pooling around the home. 

Long-time Chatham resident Lori Burns received a free inspection through that early program. She paid for the installation of a rain garden and backflow valve at her home and another garden at her mother’s home in Calumet Heights.    

The results: the basements at her two properties never flooded again, she said.  

Burns, 50, called the result “fantastic” in an interview with Illinois Answers. 

“And that’s why we thought we were going to be able to expand again. Really bring it to the city and say, ‘Look, we have proof of concept,��” said Burns, who was among the group of residents working with CNT to develop the program in 2014.  

But the city’s program sputtered and Chatham residents in recent years faced some of the most significant flooding damage in years.   

“We needed for it to work, so that 2023 didn’t have to be as bad as it was,” said Burns.  

For Oak Park resident Nicole Chavas the flooding wasn’t as bad. 

Chavas said that when her neighbors were struggling with flooding in July, the RainReady-subsidized rain garden helped prevent water basement seepage in her Victorian home. In contrast, she and her husband found their basement flooded with rainwater after a torrential storm in 2020.

Chavas says that the rain garden along with other flood prevention devices the couple installed on their own make them more prepared for serious rain.  

“It was all like doing what it was supposed to be doing and that was a really rewarding feeling,” said Chavas. 

The village is susceptible to flooding for many of the same reasons that Chatham is – including aging infrastructure and low-lying topography. 

Bill McKenna, the village engineer and co-director of the Public Works Department, said that after spending several years studying flooding patterns in the community, the city determined that a home-based solution program would work best.  

 Testing resident interest, Oak Park launched a pilot program in 2016 that granted $1,300 each to 10 homeowners in the village. In 2017, the village expanded the program to include 30 homes and concluded the pilot in 2019. 

“By doing those projects on private property … we can relieve the burden on the village’s sewer system and reduce the likelihood and severity of sewer backups in people’s basements,” McKenna said. 

What Happened to RainReady Chatham? 

The city’s plans floundered for years in bureaucratic back-and-forth and delays due to the pandemic, records show.  

Years of negotiations and bureaucracy slowed RainReady’s implementation to such an extent that not a single Chatham resident of the 40 planned participating households received grants from the program, according to records from the city. 

The city’s water and transportation departments in August 2016 began negotiating an agreement with the MWRD to test a pilot program in Chatham, due to outreach  by CNT and residents.

In 2019, the city’s Water and Transportation departments struck a deal with the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District to funnel $600,000 from the city and the MWRD into a pilot expanding the program. The City Council and MWRD’s board of commissioners signed off on the agreement and it went into effect that year. 

The plan included a $400,000 commitment from MWRD and $200,000 from the city. CNT would administer the program and be reimbursed by the city for any costs associated with running the program.  

Under the agreement, the program participants would receive assessments to determine the appropriate flood control devices for their homes. Those devices included rain gardens, which use native plants to collect and absorb rainwater runoff from roofs, driveways, and other surfaces, and backflow valves which prevent sewage from backing into basements when the system is at capacity.  

The program empowered CNT and its contractors to coordinate inspections and installations. CNT was also responsible for surveying participating households for feedback over time.   

Invoices from CNT acquired through a Freedom of Information Act Request show that CDOT paid CNT at least $36,000 for work related to the program between October 2019 and May 2020. 

After progress on pilot study halted due to the pandemic, the three agencies agreed to revamp the program and extend its deadline to the end of 2022. But shortly after the amendment passed, CNT’s then-CEO Robert Dean, told the city in an email that it could no longer continue as program administrator. 

“CNT no longer has the staff capacity to administer construction related programs of this nature. We remain strong supporters of the concept… but playing the role described in the above agreements is no longer within our organization’s skills set,” the email read. 

Illinois Answers asked CNT why the organization no longer has the capacity to run the program in Chatham but is still doing so in other neighborhoods. 

“We continue to talk to [the city] on a regular basis to try to explore ways to make things happen,” said Ryan Scherzinger, a project manager at CNT overseeing the $6 million RainReady project recently funded by Cook County for six suburbs in the Calumet City Corridor. “Working with the city… has its challenges. I’m not sure that we’ve cracked that nut, so to speak.”  

Still, Tovar boasted about the program’s future in that October meeting and told aldermen that the city is energized to “protect our most vulnerable Chicagoans.”

A November memo from Tovar to a City Council committee shows that $800,000 was budgeted for the RainReady Chatham program. Nothing had been spent. 

Reporting on equity issues by the BGA is supported by Joel M. Friedman, president of the Alvin H. Baum Family Fund.

Read in English

La electricidad de la casa de Mary Buchanan en West Garfield Park no funcionaba, otra vez. 

El corte duró cuatro días, justo después de que un grupo de trabajadores excavara en su jardín delantero para instalar una válvula de retención a finales de marzo, con el fin de evitar que las aguas residuales entraran en su sótano. Se dijo a sí misma que esta obra de 12,000 dólares valdría la pena si con ella se acababan las inundaciones.

El verano pasado, cuando unas lluvias récord cayeron sobre el condado de Cook, Buchanan se quedó en el sótano de la casa de su infancia con agua sucia que le llegaba a las rodillas. Desde entonces, cada día ha tenido un nuevo problema: descubrir moho negro esparcido por el sótano, tener que sustituir el calentador de agua y que le denieguen los fondos federales de emergencia. 

La tormenta de julio de 2023 fue uno de los fenómenos meteorológicos más costosos de la historia de Chicago. Azotó con más fuerza el lado oeste de la ciudad y los suburbios cercanos. La tormenta trastornó la vida de los habitantes de Chicago y dejó al descubierto la prolongada vulnerabilidad de la ciudad a las inundaciones. Tras la tormenta, la Agencia Federal para el Manejo de Emergencias (FEMA, por sus siglas en inglés) inspeccionó 63,000 viviendas y distribuyó hasta 375 millones de dólares en ayudas federales a propietarios de viviendas y negocios.

También dejó traslucir un futuro preocupante: Las consecuencias del cambio climático son inevitables: el invierno y la primavera serán más húmedos en Illinois, mientras que el verano será aún más caluroso. Es probable que los aguaceros sigan siendo más intensos y de menor duración, y que los lugares donde se produzcan estas tormentas repentinas sean menos predecibles, según el climatólogo del estado de Illinois, Trent Ford. 

El Illinois Answers Project entrevistó a una serie de expertos en inundaciones, clima e infraestructuras para examinar hasta qué punto Chicago y el estado están preparados para combatir las crecientes amenazas ambientales a las que se enfrentan sus residentes, en particular por el problema de las graves inundaciones. En esta serie, que se desarrollará a lo largo de las próximas semanas, Illinois Answers Project explorará cómo Chicago está tratando de mejorar el drenaje en los barrios, cómo un prometedor proyecto de prevención de inundaciones se quedó estancado en la burocracia, y cómo un programa estatal de compra de viviendas está ayudando a los residentes cuando no tienen a quién recurrir. 

Las inundaciones son la catástrofe natural más amenazadora del estado y afectan a todos los rincones de Illinois, pero las comunidades de color y las zonas más pobres suelen ser las más expuestas, sobre todo en la ciudad de Chicago y el condado de Cook. Las infraestructuras de alcantarillado y pluviales a menudo ya no pueden hacer frente a la avalancha de agua procedente de estas lluvias torrenciales, según explicaron los expertos. Chicago también tiene uno de los mayores números de propiedades en riesgo de inundación en las próximas décadas, según muestra la investigación.

Mientras que un grupo de trabajo estatal ha desarrollado un plan a largo plazo para mitigar las inundaciones en todo Illinois, Chicago carece de una estrategia. 

Uno de los desafíos de la ciudad es que varios organismos comparten la responsabilidad de mitigar las inundaciones en Chicago y el condado de Cook. En un intento de coordinar esfuerzos, el Distrito Metropolitano de Reclamación de Aguas  ha elaborado planes de nuevas infraestructuras contra las inundaciones para los lados sur y oeste, pero la agencia se ha negado a hacerlos públicos a Illinois Answers Project, alegando que los diseños no están listos para su aplicación, a pesar de que se terminaron hace dos años.

Ángela Tovar, que dirige el recién reconstituido Departamento de Medio Ambiente de Chicago, declinó las solicitudes de entrevista con Illinois Answers Project, pero en un comunicado enviado por correo electrónico dijo que su oficina «colaborará y asesorará» a otras agencias de la ciudad sobre las políticas relacionadas con las inundaciones a medida que continúa la contratación de personal, y que su equipo está trabajando con la oficina del alcalde en “delinear una dirección estratégica para las cuestiones de política de agua en la ciudad”.

Ha pasado casi un año desde que la devastadora inundación azotó el lado oeste, y Buchanan se encuentra entre los muchos residentes que aún luchan por reparar casas que han pertenecido a familias de varias generaciones. En las cinco décadas que su familia lleva viviendo allí, sólo recuerda que el sótano se inundara una vez, con un mínimo de agua que se calmó en una hora más o menos.

“Mi madre se moriría si lo viera así”, dijo Buchanan. 

El apartamento del sótano, donde vivía la hija adulta de Buchanan, ha sido destruido hasta los cimientos. Ha tenido que sustituir el calentador de agua y la caldera, además de rellenar las minuciosas solicitudes de la FEMA, que Buchanan tardó horas en completar. Por no hablar de las posteriores denegaciones y apelaciones. 

Casi nada de lo que había en el sótano se pudo salvar tras la tormenta: La alfombra roja de felpa está destrozada. El baño y la cocina ya no existen. Hubo que tirar los muebles antiguos de madera que pertenecieron a su madre. 

El moho negro que supuró en las paredes del sótano durante meses fue eliminado por fin en diciembre. Pero Buchanan no puede librarse de la tos. La tos es tan fuerte que a veces está a punto de ahogarse. A sus 68 años, sufre ataques de asma por primera vez en su vida.

Buchanan dice que sus ingresos fijos le impiden afrontar los costes de reparación de su casa y evitar futuras inundaciones. 

“Quiero que esta casa siga siendo de mi familia”, dijo. “Mi madre trabajó muy duro”.

Por Qué Illinois es Tan Vulnerable a las Inundaciones 

Tormentas como las del verano pasado ya no se dan una vez cada diez años. 

Scott Lincoln, hidrólogo jefe de servicio de la oficina de previsión del Servicio Meteorológico Nacional en Chicago, dijo que no recordaba la última vez que el condado de Cook sufrió dos catástrofes por inundaciones declaradas por el gobierno federal durante el mismo año, refiriéndose a las tormentas del 2 de julio y el 17 de septiembre del año pasado. 

Esta década, aunque todavía está en sus inicios, ha sido testigo de tres episodios de precipitaciones extremas, el mayor número conocido desde 1950, dijo Lincoln. 

“No se trata de un si ocurrirá, sino más bien de un cuándo”, dijo Lincoln sobre el próximo episodio de lluvias extremas. 

El clima del estado se ha vuelto más húmedo en primavera, lo que combinado con el rápido deshielo y las precipitaciones más intensas significa que los ríos de Illinois baten a menudo récords de máximos, dijo Ford, el climatólogo que proporciona datos meteorológicos y climáticos a los agricultores de Illinois, los responsables políticos y las agencias gubernamentales.

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Las inundaciones no fluviales, o pluviales, “son un problema igual o incluso mayor” para Illinois, dijo Ford. Esto se debe a que las fuertes precipitaciones, que pueden durar desde una hora hasta un par de días, pueden “desbordar el paisaje”. 

Este tipo de inundaciones también son menos predecibles, dijo Ford. Por ejemplo, los científicos y las autoridades estatales podrían determinar con días de antelación si el río Misisipi va a inundar la ciudad de Quincy, lo que daría tiempo a prepararse, explicó.

Pero con las inundaciones no fluviales, es mucho más difícil, dijo Ford. Estas lluvias torrenciales suelen producirse fuera de las zonas en las que las llanuras aluviales están cartografiadas con diligencia. 

Resulta difícil predecir cómo responderán las infraestructuras de una ciudad o pueblo a las inundaciones provocadas por una serie de tormentas. 

Los humedales y las praderas, que en otros tiempos constituían gran parte de Illinois, funcionaban como una esponja para absorber el agua de lluvia, lo que en última instancia reducía el riesgo de escorrentía de las aguas pluviales y de inundaciones extensas. Pero ahora muchas de estas zonas se han convertido en granjas y ciudades y pueblos, llenos de carreteras, estacionamientos y viviendas. 

Como resultado, estas zonas impermeables impiden que el agua se infiltre fácilmente en el suelo, dijo Glenn Heistand, jefe de unidad del programa Water Survey que investigan diversos problemas relacionados con el agua en el estado. En su lugar, se crea aún más escorrentía que abruma los sistemas de aguas pluviales.

Heistand y su equipo trabajan para identificar las zonas de Illinois con mayor riesgo de inundación y evaluar los riesgos. El equipo también trabaja con pueblos y ciudades para ayudar a los gobiernos locales a comprender los riesgos de inundación a los que se enfrentan. 

Según Heistand, los sistemas de aguas pluviales se diseñaron y construyeron para gestionar una determinada cantidad de agua. La frecuencia y la intensidad de las tormentas han alterado la eficacia del sistema. La capacidad de los pueblos y ciudades para mantener sus viejas infraestructuras también varía. 

En Chicago, con más de 6,000 km de alcantarillado que supervisar, el Departamento de Gestión del Agua se enfrenta a constantes dilemas sobre qué tuberías principales debe modernizar o sustituir la ciudad con sus limitados recursos, dijo Brendan Schreiber, que supervisa la gestión del alcantarillado para el departamento. 

Schreiber comparó el sistema de alcantarillado laberíntico de la ciudad con su red de calles y carreteras, diciendo que una tormenta es como la hora pico: “El agua entra en el sistema e intenta llegar al mismo punto al mismo tiempo, lo que provoca atascos. En lo que nos centramos es en reducir ese riesgo”.

El departamento tiene como objetivo mantener todas las alcantarillas de la ciudad hasta el punto en que puedan hacer frente a una “tormenta de cinco años”, tal como se define en el informe de 2020 de la Encuesta sobre el Agua, dijo Schreiber. A modo de comparación, algunas partes del lado oeste experimentaron una tormenta de 50 años cuando recibieron más de 7 pulgadas de lluvia en un solo día, según los datos de lluvia de PRISM Climate Group, una base de datos meteorológica nacional operada fuera de la Universidad Estatal de Oregón.

El Departamento de Gestión del Agua no mantiene mapas que muestren la edad o la capacidad de sus alcantarillas, dijo la portavoz Megan Vidis. En su lugar, los funcionarios se basan principalmente en las quejas de inundación recibidas a través del 311 para decidir qué alcantarillas deben sustituirse, dijo Schreiber.

Qué Hacen Chicago y el Estado Contra las Inundaciones

Chicago es la segunda ciudad del país con mayor número de propiedades en riesgo de inundación, según la fundación First Street, una organización sin fines de lucro que investiga el riesgo climático.  

Se prevé que la situación empeore aún más: El condado de Cook tiene unas 172,000 propiedades en riesgo sustancial de inundación, según los datos que First Street facilitó a Illinois Answers. Este grupo prevé que aumente alrededor de un 10% de aquí a 2053.

Estas cifras son mayores que las de la FEMA, ya que la organización sin fines de lucro tiene en cuenta el riesgo de inundaciones pluviales, algo que la agencia federal no hace. 

En 2022, el estado actualizó su plan hidrológico por primera vez en 35 años, según Terra McParland, directora del programa de vigilancia de inundaciones de la Oficina de Recursos Hídricos del estado. 

El informe estatal se centró en los problemas del agua más urgentes y el grupo de trabajo formuló 15 recomendaciones para mitigar los daños causados por las inundaciones. Entre ellas: actualizar los datos de predicción de precipitaciones del estado, que se utilizan para diseñar infraestructuras; identificar las comunidades insuficientemente atendidas que necesitan ayuda para planificar las inundaciones; y crear un sistema piloto de alerta de inundaciones urbanas. 

McParland, que supervisó la sección de mitigación de daños por inundaciones, dijo que este era el primer año en que el plan discutía explícitamente el impacto del cambio climático y se centraba en la justicia social y ambiental. Añadió que está previsto que el plan estatal se actualice cada 10 años. 

El planteamiento de Chicago es más complicado.

Varios departamentos de la ciudad han emprendido iniciativas relacionadas con el control de las inundaciones. El Departamento de Gestión del Agua de la ciudad, por ejemplo, tiene previsto construir este año un par de tanques de almacenamiento subterráneos en el lado oeste capaces de contener un total de 1.6 millones de galones de aguas pluviales, dijo Vidis. Un proyecto a más largo plazo añadiría un túnel de 16 km a finales de la década para aliviar las inundaciones de los sótanos de unos 30,000 residentes de las zonas sur, dijo.

Pero la ciudad está peor por la falta de un plan unificado e interdepartamental para buscar financiación y priorizar el gasto en este asunto, dijo la concejal Maria Hadden (49), presidenta de la Comisión de Protección Medioambiental y Energía del Consejo Municipal. 

El pasado otoño, Hadden introdujo una resolución pidiendo que se añadiera una pregunta no vinculante a la papeleta de las primarias de marzo de 2024 preguntando si Chicago debería desarrollar un “plan integral de mitigación de inundaciones”.

La resolución de Hadden para un referéndum en la papeleta no fue aprobada, pero la concejal dijo que espera utilizar su comité para ayudar a coordinar los departamentos de la ciudad en un plan unificado de control y prevención de inundaciones. La responsabilidad también recae en el alcalde Brandon Johnson y el Departamento de Medio Ambiente, dijo.

“La cuestión es... ¿podemos ponernos todos de acuerdo e identificarlo como una prioridad?”

'Me Siento Excluida'

Durante la tormenta de julio, la mayoría de las llamadas al 311 sobre inundaciones de sótanos se concentraron en barrios predominantemente negros del lado oeste, según muestran los datos de la ciudad.

En la primera semana de julio de 2023, la ciudad registró quejas por agua en los sótanos procedentes de casi 7,000 direcciones. Más de la mitad eran de cinco áreas de la comunidad: Austin, West Garfield Park, Belmont Cragin, Humboldt Park y North Lawndale.

Queen Jackson, de 83 años, dijo que llamó al 311 durante la tormenta de julio para informar de la inundación de su casa de West Garfield Park. Jackson se ha sentido decepcionada por la falta de ayuda de la ciudad. 

En su lugar, ha recurrido a Princess Shaw, una veterana organizadora del barrio Lawndale que formó el grupo, West Side Long-Term Recovery Group para ayudar a los residentes que están tratando de limpiar sus casas y que tienen que lidiar con la burocracia federal. 

Shaw también se ha reunido con funcionarios municipales, abogando por mejoras más agresivas de las infraestructuras. En su opinión, la ciudad sólo ha proporcionado “curitas”, como barriles para la lluvia y revestimiento de tuberías, y en su lugar quiere soluciones a más largo plazo. 

Shaw calcula que el grupo está trabajando con 250 familias, ayudándolas a eliminar el moho de sus casas dañadas por las inundaciones y a rellenar los papeles que deben presentar a la FEMA para recibir ayuda federal. 

En la casa de Jackson, donde crió a sus hijos y nietos durante más de seis décadas, hay salpicaduras de moho de color naranja y marrón en las paredes del sótano. La madera está deformada por los daños del agua y todavía hay trozos de azulejos rotos por todas partes. Huele a humedad. Su nieto sigue viviendo en el sótano. 

Un contratista calculó que se necesitaban 46,000 dólares para reparar el sótano y el tejado de Jackson. Ella dijo que sólo recibió una fracción de eso de FEMA. 

“Trabajamos toda nuestra vida”, dijo Jackson sobre su decepción por la respuesta del gobierno. “Nunca tuve que pedir nada. No pedí nada gratis. He pagado por todo. Y ahora que estoy jubilada, ya no recibo ese cheque cada semana como antes…”.

“Me siento excluida, y punto”.

Buchanan no está segura de cuándo el sótano de su casa de West Garfield Park volverá a ser habitable para su hija. Le han aprobado unos 32,000 dólares de ayuda federal, justo la mitad de lo que, según ella, es el daño estimado para su sótano. Pero ha tenido que recurrir a la FEMA varias veces.

Cuando llovió en marzo, Buchanan bajó corriendo a ver si había agua en el sótano.  

“Sólo rezo”, dijo, “para que no haya más problemas”.

Contribuyente: Alex Nitkin

Traducido por Alma Campos.

Este reportaje ha sido posible gracias a una subvención de la Fundación Richard H. Driehaus al Illinois Answers Project.

Meredith Newman es reportera de investigación de Illinois Answers Project. Antes de trabajar en la redacción, trabajó en The News Journal de Wilmington (Delaware) y The Capital de Annapolis (Maryland). Es licenciada por la Universidad de Siracusa y originaria de Evanston, Illinois.

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DIETERICH, Ill. – Every day, Berdeena Leturno checks her email for an update on when the state of Illinois will finally pay her $80,000. 

It’s been over two months since she signed the paperwork to sell her flood-damaged home as part of a buyout program, and over a year and a half since the creek across the street rose so high that it filled her home with water. 

Now, she’s waiting to close and get the check for her old house – a white-paneled ranch where she and her husband raised their four kids, spent nearly 20 years and planned to retire. 

The family moved out in January of last year and have been struggling to afford two mortgages since, she said. They paid a little over $155,000 for their new property, using the money her husband had saved for when he retired as a mechanic. 

“We are drowning in debt because of this flood,” said Leturno, 58, a retired nurse who now works as an elementary school teacher. 

The buyout has taken too long, she said, but it was their only option. “I was desperate. I wanted to get out of there.” 

For many Illinois residents who live in flood-prone areas, government buyouts provide an option when there is no other way out. Buyouts are intended to mitigate future flood risk by removing buildings that repeatedly flood and turning the land into open space. 

In Illinois, there are two buyout programs: one run by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and funded through state legislative allocation, and another run by the Illinois Emergency Management Agency and funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. 

Buyouts offer people in distress significant help, but they often come with long wait times and bureaucratic complications. And they often don’t prevent people from moving into other flood-prone areas, experts who evaluate these programs told the Illinois Answers Project.  

Buyouts also don’t relieve residents of the social, emotional and economic toll of losing a home to a flood, local government leaders say. Some residents don’t want to leave their community. Others want to leave but can’t afford to, even with the state’s help. And those left behind are forced to live among vacant lots and with the fear of future flooding. 

Read More From This Series:

• Flooding is Illinois’ Most Threatening Natural Disaster. Are We Prepared?
• ‘Green Alleys’ Prevent Flooding, But Vulnerable Neighborhoods Must Wait in Line

Despite its limitations, the state’s buyout program has prevented future damage and made people safer, said Ron Davis, who runs the program at the Department of Natural Resources. Buyouts also save significant amounts of money. The National Institute of Building Sciences estimates that federal flood buyouts save $7 for every $1 spent. 

If buyouts didn’t exist, “a lot of times these people would have nothing,” Davis said. For homeowners who can’t sell their property on the private market, their options are limited: stay in a damaged house and risk future flooding, or abandon the property and forfeit any future equity from a sale. 

“I would never try to claim that we’ve solved the problem in Illinois,” he said, “but we have made a big difference in it.”

How Buyouts Became a Solution 

In 1937, the Ohio River flooded Shawneetown, a shipping community on the southeastern border of Illinois. After it was flooded with nearly 25 feet of water, the federal government moved the community in one of the first relocations of an entire town. 

The government continued one-off relocations until buyouts became more of a “regular program” for both IDNR and IEMA in the 1980s, said French Wetmore, who ran IDNR’s program at the time and now owns a floodplain management consulting firm. The program picked up after a flood in 1981, Wetmore said, and the agency relocated three communities: Peoria, Thebes and Kampsville. 

After the Great Flood of 1993, which inundated 75 towns and killed 50 people in the Midwest, local leaders and the federal government relocated Valmeyer, a town in southwestern Illinois on the Mississippi River. After the town’s levees failed, floodwaters damaged 90% of the town’s structures, and local leaders decided to move 24 homes and the town’s business district to higher ground about 2 miles east. It’s one of the most well-known examples of community relocation, Wetmore said. 

Since 1981, IDNR has bought out roughly 900 properties, Davis said. The agency received $10 million for buyouts in the most recent state budget, which it’s allocating to projects in eight communities: Dieterich, DePue, Downers Grove, East St. Louis, Ottawa, Freeport, Roanoke and Romeoville.

IEMA’s buyout program picked up in 1993, and the agency has purchased 3,295 properties since then, according to the agency’s spokesperson. 

How Buyouts Work

Davis said he sometimes visits communities after flood events to let them know about the buyout program, but communities also seek his help. 

The process requires local government involvement. Homeowners can’t apply directly to the state – the local government has to submit an application to IDNR, he said, because the ownership of the land is transferred to the local government. 

After the local government submits an application to IDNR, Davis conducts a review to make sure the purchase is cost effective and demolition would be safe for the surrounding habitat. The community’s chief elected official must approve the agreement. 

The local government then has the property appraised. If the owner believes the suggested value is too low, they can hire an appraiser, and IDNR will take that appraisal into consideration. 

IDNR conducts the final review and also considers what other assistance the homeowner has received, such as flood insurance or FEMA assistance, before making the final offer.

Once the owner accepts the offer, the attorney general must sign off on the buyout before IDNR schedules a closing and a demolition is booked. 

Local governments pay for the buyouts and then are reimbursed 100% by IDNR, Davis added. FEMA grants require the local government to pay for 25% of the buyouts. 

While the state-funded program has fewer resources, it avoids some of the bureaucratic slowdowns that come with federal funding. An IDNR buyout can take about a year, Davis said, although it can take more than five years for larger projects if the community doesn’t have the initial funds to buy properties. FEMA-funded buyouts have an average wait time of more than five years, according to a report by the National Resources Defense Council. 

Some city officials say IDNR’s application process is more straightforward than many federal programs. 

“It was one of the easiest grant applications I’ve ever done,” said Brittny Gipson, economic development coordinator for the Village of Dieterich, where IDNR is working to buy out nine homes and an apartment building for $1.4 million. With federal grants, there are “more hoops to jump through,” she said. 

She noted that it’s been a long process because other areas flooded in 2022 and IDNR had to wait until the following year to get more funding. 

But IDNR had experienced, responsive staff members to answer questions along the way, Gipson added. “It felt like they actually, truly wanted to help,” she said. “I’ve never had grant staff email and call me back the same day, and they always did.” 

In Watseka, a city of roughly 4,600 people that sits at the convergence of the Iroquois River and Sugar Creek, local government leaders have been working with IDNR to buy out about 120 homes since 2018. That year in February, hundreds of homes were damaged in the fourth large-scale flood to hit the city in the last 10 years, according to FEMA. 

The city’s mayor, John Allhands, met with Davis at IDNR to work out a buyout project, and the following year, IDNR allocated over $5 million to purchase and tear down the structures and make the land open space. 

As of March, IDNR has closed on 74 homes, Allhands said. There are no plans yet for what the open space will become, he added, although there have been talks of using it for recreation like disc golf. 

Allhands said one concern he has with the buyout project is population loss, which means less tax dollars to pay for services like the police and fire department. 

But while he would love to retain residents, he said, “I don’t want to see them stay here and suffer every time.”

“I sat in on some of the initial closings, and you could see a burden being taken off these folks’ shoulders,” he added . “…But then you see the traditions, the memories, and all that, and it’s kind of melancholy, bittersweet.”

Buyouts Can ‘Exacerbate Inequities’

In July 2022, major rainfall inundated East St. Louis, a low-lying city of about 18,000 in the floodplain of the Mississippi River. In one six-hour period, roughly 7 ½ inches of rain fell, according to the National Weather Service. 

The ensuing flood resulted in “heart-wrenching” damage, said East St. Louis City Manager Robert Betts, who was part of the rescue effort. Residents had to be rescued in row boats and he found some people standing on top of their dressers. 

“It was anybody’s worst nightmare,” Betts said, “having to lose everything you own in the world.”

Emergency management agencies came together to respond, and Betts connected with IDNR to work out a buyout project. The agency allocated $2.25 million in its fiscal year 2024 budget to buy out 39 homes and fund other flood mitigation projects in the county, according to data from Davis. 

The buyout application should be approved in the next few weeks, Davis said, and the project will begin then. Davis said there’s interest in using the future open space for water detention or wetlands.

But Betts said residents are frustrated that it’s taken nearly two years to get answers about what’s next for their homes, and some don’t want to leave the homes they have worked for years to pay off. 

For many people in East St. Louis, their home is all they have, Betts said. Over 30% of the population lives below the poverty line, and the median household income is just above $28,000.

The situation reflects another complication with buyouts: For many low-income residents, moving – even with the government’s help – is not feasible. 

Because buyouts are based on home values, they “exacerbate inequities in social vulnerability and wealth,” said Dan Abramson, associate professor of urban design and planning at the University of Washington. 

People with lower valued homes often can only afford to move to other vulnerable locations, Abramson said. “It’s not necessarily solving the vulnerability problem with respect to the hazard, and it creates greater instability for and precarity for people who don’t have high-value homes.” 

Abramson added the buyout program isn’t structured to help residents carefully select a new home, so they may end up back in a flood-prone area, which is a “huge blind spot.”

Betts said most East St. Louis residents who take the buyout will likely move to surrounding communities like Cahokia Heights, Fairview Heights, Belleville and Collinsville, many of which still are at risk of flooding. His goal is to try to retain the residents in East St. Louis, and the city is looking to identify ways to build more affordable housing. 

He added that communities of color tend to be in higher flood risk areas due to a history of discriminatory housing policies. 

An analysis by real estate company Redfin found that formerly redlined neighborhoods face higher flood risk. Redlining was a 1930s-era discriminatory practice that deemed neighborhoods where Black residents lived risky for mortgage lending. Neighborhoods where Black residents lived were likely to be coded red or yellow, while neighborhoods where white residents lived were likely to be coded blue or green. The practice made it impossible for Black residents to qualify for mortgages. 

In Chicago, 12.6% of homes in red- and yellow-lined areas face high flood risk today compared with 7.9% of homes in green and blue-lined neighborhoods, Redfin found. 

Buyouts are “tied to the systematic issues we have in this country of dealing with poor people and people of color in these harmful areas,” said Jonathan Remo, an associate professor of geography and environmental resources at Southern Illinois University. “It’s not really the programs, it’s the bigger picture of how the economic system works.”

How Buyouts Can Be Improved

Three climate policy experts told the Illinois Answers Project that buyouts can be improved in a few ways: better land development decisions, more funding and staffing, and a holistic approach to the process of moving communities. 

With increased rainfall and flooding, buyouts will remain inevitable, but better development decisions should be made to prevent future buyouts from happening, said Anna Weber, a policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C. 

“We always say that the best buyout, the most successful one, is one that never has to happen,” she said. 

When a buyout does have to happen, steady funding sources and more staff can help make the process smoother, said A.R. Siders, an assistant professor at the University of Delaware who studies climate change adaptation.

“One of the biggest things states can do is have a consistent pot of money, a consistent source of funding, that is available for buyouts year after year after year,” Siders said.

For Illinois’ state-funded buyout program, Davis is the only person on staff in the Flood Hazard Mitigation Program. The Realty and Environment Planning Office handles closing paperwork and other tasks related to property sales, he said. 

Some experts say buyouts shouldn’t be the answer in the first place. Shirley Laska, professor emerita at the University of New Orleans and co-founder of the Lowlander Center, a nonprofit that helps communities in Louisiana adapt to climate change, said that relocation can have a damaging effect on culture and community. About half the groups the Lowlander Center works with are Indigenous, she said. Her organization aims to help communities stay in place and build up more resilience to flooding, so they can preserve their culture.

Government agencies need to take into account the important social role that communities play, Laska said. 

“If you dismiss the culture, the connection, the support systems … you do harm,” she said. “… Just physically moving their bodies so they’re not hit by flooding just isn’t enough.”

Leturno, whose closing is finally scheduled, said she feels the emotional weight of relocating. She misses her neighbors and her old house, even though they’re just down the street. 

“I do have a lot of memories at the other house that we can’t take with us,” she said. “They’ll just live in our hearts.” 

But the health of her family is what’s most important to her, she said. 

Even though the buyout has taken too long, Leturno said she’s grateful the state could help. 

“Life goes on. You’ve got to take what you can get done and move on.” 

Editing for this story was made possible by a grant from The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation to the Illinois Answers Project.

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The electricity in Mary Buchanan’s home in West Garfield Park was not working – again. 

The outage lasted four days, starting just after a crew dug up her front lawn to install a check valve in late March, in order to stop waste water from pouring into her basement. She told herself this $12,000 construction would be worth it if it means no more flooding.

Last summer, as historic rain pelted down on Cook County, Buchanan was left standing in the basement of her childhood home with dirty water wading up to her knees. Every day since has presented a new problem: discovering black mold scattered throughout the basement, having to replace the water heater and then getting denied for federal emergency funds. 

The July 2023 storm – one of the costliest weather events in Chicago’s history – hit hardest in the city’s West Side and nearby suburbs. The storm upended Chicagoans’ lives and exposed the city’s longstanding vulnerabilities to flooding. In the wake of the storm, FEMA inspected 63,000 homes, and distributed up to $375 million in federal aid to home and business owners.

It also provided a look into a concerning future: The grip of climate change unyielding, winter and spring are expected to be wetter in Illinois while summer becomes even hotter. The downpour of rain will likely continue to be more intense for shorter durations and the locations where these flash flooding storms hit are less predictable, said Illinois State Climatologist Trent Ford. 

The Illinois Answers Project interviewed a range of experts on flooding, climate and infrastructure to examine how prepared Chicago and the state are to combat the growing environmental threats its residents face, particularly from the problem of severe flooding. In this series over the next several weeks, Illinois Answers will explore how Chicago is trying to improve drainage in neighborhoods, how a promising flood prevention project got mired in bureaucracy, and how a state buyout program is helping residents when they have nowhere else to turn. 

Flooding is the state’s most threatening natural disaster and touches every corner in Illinois, but communities of color and poorer areas often face the greatest risk – particularly in the city of Chicago and greater Cook County. Sewer and stormwater infrastructure can often no longer handle the onslaught of water that comes from these heavy rainfalls, experts told Illinois Answers.  Chicago also has one of the largest numbers of properties at risk for flooding in the coming decades, research shows.

While a state task force has developed a long-range plan for flood mitigation across Illinois, Chicago has no equivalent roadmap. 

Part of the city’s challenge is that multiple agencies share responsibility for flood mitigation in Chicago and Cook County. In an attempt to coordinate efforts, the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago has developed plans for new anti-flooding infrastructure for the South and West Sides, but the agency has refused to release them to Illinois Answers, saying the designs are not ready for implementation – despite their completion two years ago.

Read More From This Series: ‘Green Alleys’ Help Prevent Flooding, But Vulnerable Neighborhoods Must Wait in Line

Angela Tovar, who leads the newly reconstituted Chicago Department of the Environment, declined interview requests with Illinois Answers but in an emailed statement said her office will “collaborate and advise” other city agencies on flood-related policies as it continues to staff up, and that her team is working with the mayor’s office on “outlining a strategic direction for water policy issues in the city.”

She is “committed to climate justice and climate resiliency in Chicago,” she wrote. “We know that climate change will only exacerbate long-standing flooding challenges in many of our neighborhoods. Too often those Chicagoans impacted by flooding are also overburdened by other environmental harms.”

It’s been almost a year since the devastating flood hit the West Side, and Buchanan is among the many residents still struggling to repair homes that have been in families for generations. In the five decades that her family has lived there, she could only recall the basement flooding once, with minimal water that receded in an hour or so.

“My mother would die if she saw it like this,” Buchanan said.

The basement apartment, where Buchanan’s adult daughter lived, has been gutted down to its studs. She has had to replace the water heater and furnace and also fill out the painstaking FEMA applications, which took Buchanan hours to complete. Not to mention the subsequent denials and appeals. 

Almost nothing in her basement was salvageable after the storm: The red plush carpet has been torn up. The bathroom and kitchen are no more. The antique wood furniture that belonged to her mother had to be trashed. 

The black mold that festered in her basement’s walls for months was finally removed in December. But Buchanan can’t seem to shake a cough. It gets so bad, she said, she finds herself nearly choking. At 68 years old, she is having asthma attacks for the first time in her life.

Buchanan said her fixed income means she’s struggling to afford the costs to repair her home and prevent future flooding. 

“I want this house to stay in my family,” she said. “My mom worked too hard.”

Why Illinois is So Vulnerable to Flooding 

Storms like those from last summer are no longer once in a decade. 

Scott Lincoln, senior service hydrologist for the National Weather Service forecast office in Chicago, said he could not recall the last time Cook County had two federally declared flood disasters during the same year, referencing storms on July 2 and Sept. 17 of last year. 

This decade, though still in its infancy, has seen three extreme rainfall events –– the highest known number since 1950, Lincoln said. 

“It’s not an if, it’s more of a when,” Lincoln said of the next extreme rain event. 

The state’s climate has gotten wetter in the springtime, which combined with rapid snowmelt and heavier rainfall means rivers in Illinois are often breaking records for highest peaks, said Ford, the climatologist who provides weather and climate data to Illinois farmers, policymakers and government agencies.

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Non-river flooding, or pluvial flooding, “is equally or maybe even more so a problem” for Illinois, Ford said. That’s because heavy precipitation, lasting anywhere from an hour to a couple of days, can “just overwhelm the landscape.” 

This type of flooding is also less predictable, Ford said. For example, scientists and state officials would be able to determine days in advance if the Mississippi River is going to flood the city of Quincy, allowing time for preparation, he said.

But with non-river flooding, it’s much more difficult, Ford said. These heavy rainfall events often occur outside of the areas where floodplains are diligently mapped. 

How a city or town’s infrastructure will respond to flooding from a series of storms is complicated to predict, he said. 

Wetlands and prairies, which once made up much of Illinois, work as a sponge to soak up rainwater – which ultimately reduced the risk of stormwater runoff and widespread flooding. But now many of these areas have turned into farms and cities and towns, filled with roads, parking lots and homes. 

As a result, these impervious areas prevent water from easily infiltrating into the ground, said Glenn Heistand, section head of the Illinois State Water Survey’s Coordinated Hazard Assessment and Mapping Program. Instead, it creates even more runoff that overwhelms stormwaters systems.

Scientists with the Water Survey, housed at the University of Illinois, conduct research on various water issues. Heistand and his team work to identify areas in Illinois that are at high-risk for flooding as well as assess flood hazards. The team also works with towns and cities to help local governments understand the flooding risks they face. 

Stormwater systems, Heistand said, were designed and built to handle a certain amount of water. The frequency and intensity of rain storms have upended the system’s ability to be effective. Towns and cities also have a varying ability to maintain their aging infrastructure. 

In Chicago, with more than 4,500 miles of sewer lines to oversee, the Department of Water Management faces constant dilemmas over which mains the city should upgrade or replace with its limited resources, said Brendan Schreiber, who oversees sewer management for the department. 

Schreiber likened the city’s labyrinthine sewer system to its network of streets and highways, saying a storm event is like rush hour: “Water goes into the system and it’s all trying to get to the same point at the same time, and that causes it to back up. … What we focus on is reducing that risk.”

The department aims to maintain every city sewer to the point where it can handle a “five-year storm,” as defined by the Water Survey’s 2020 report Schreiber said. For comparison, parts of the West Side experienced a 50-year storm when they received more than 7 inches of rain in a single day, according to rain data from PRISM Climate Group, a national weather database operated out of Oregon State University.

The Department of Water Management does not maintain maps showing the age or capacity of its sewers, said spokesperson Megan Vidis. Instead, officials mostly rely on 311 flood complaints to decide which sewers to replace, Schreiber said.

What Chicago and the State Are Doing to Combat Flooding

Chicago is second in the country for the greatest number of properties at risk of flooding, according to First Street Foundation, a nonprofit that researches climate risk.  

It’s expected to get even worse: Cook County has about 172,000 properties at substantial risk for flooding, according to data First Street provided to Illinois Answers. This group projects it to grow by about 10% by 2053.

These figures are larger than that of FEMA since the nonprofit factors in pluvial flood risk, which the federal agency does not. 

In 2022, the state updated its water plan for the first time in 35 years, said Terra McParland, flood surveillance program manager for the state Office of Water Resources. 

The statewide report focused on the most pressing water concerns and the task force made 15 flood damage mitigation recommendations. Among them: update the state’s rainfall prediction data, which is used to design infrastructure; identify underserved communities that need help with flood planning; and create a pilot urban flood warning system. 

McParland, who oversaw the flood damage mitigation section, said this was the first year the plan explicitly discussed the impact of climate change and focused on social and environmental justice. She said the state water plan is expected to be updated every 10 years. 

Chicago’s approach to the issue is more complicated.

Multiple city departments have pursued initiatives related to flood control. The city’s Department of Water Management, for example, plans this year to build a pair of underground storage tanks on the West Side capable of holding a combined 1.6 million gallons of stormwater, Vidis said. A longer-running project would add a 10-mile tunnel by the end of the decade to alleviate basement flooding for about 30,000 residents on the South and Far South sides, she said.

But the city is worse off for the lack of a unified, cross-departmental plan to seek funding and prioritize spending on the issue, said Ald. Maria Hadden (49), chair of the City Council Committee on Environmental Protection and Energy. 

Last fall, Hadden introduced a resolution calling for a non-binding question to be added to the March 2024 primary ballot asking if Chicago should develop a “comprehensive flood mitigation plan.”

Hadden’s resolution for a ballot referendum did not pass, but the alderwoman said she hopes to use her committee to help corral city departments into a unified plan on flood control and prevention. The responsibility also lies with Mayor Brandon Johnson and the Department of the Environment, she said.

“The question is … can we all get on the same page and identify this as a priority?” she said.

‘I Feel Left Behind’

During the July storm, a majority of 311 calls about basement flooding were concentrated in predominantly Black neighborhoods on the West Side, city data shows.

The city registered water-in-basement complaints from nearly 7,000 addresses in the first week of July 2023. More than half were from five community areas: Austin, West Garfield Park, Belmont Cragin, Humboldt Park and North Lawndale.

Queen Jackson, 83, said she called 311 during the July storm to report the flooding of her West Garfield Park home. Jackson has been disappointed in the lack of aid from the city. 

Instead, she has turned to Princess Shaw, a longtime Lawndale organizer who formed the West Side Long-Term Recovery Group to help residents struggling to clean up their homes and navigate federal bureaucracy. 

Shaw has also met with city officials, advocating for more aggressive infrastructure improvements. She believes the city has provided only “Band-Aid” fixes, like rain barrels and relining pipes, and instead wants longer term solutions. 

Shaw estimates the group is working with 250 families, helping them get mold removed from their flood-damaged homes and fill out paperwork to submit to FEMA to receive federal aid. 

In Jackson’s home, where she raised children and grandchildren over six decades, splatters of orange and brown mold are on the walls throughout her basement. Wood is warped from the water damage and pieces of broken tile are still scattered throughout. A damp smell lingers. Her grandson still lives in the basement. 

A contractor estimated $46,000 was needed to repair Jackson’s basement and roof. She said she only received a fraction of that from FEMA. 

“We work all our lives,” Jackson said of her disappointment at the government’s response. “I never had to file for nothing. I asked for nothing free. I paid for everything. And … now that I’m retired, I don’t get that check every week like I used to…”

“I feel left behind – period.”

Buchanan isn’t sure when the basement in her West Garfield Park home will become livable again for her daughter. She has been approved for about $32,000 in federal aid, just half of what she said is the estimated damage to her basement. But it required her appealing to FEMA multiple times.

When it rained in March, Buchanan rushed down to check her basement – no water.  

“I’m just praying,” she said, “no more problems.”

Contributing: Alex Nitkin

This story was made possible by a grant from The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation to the Illinois Answers Project.

There’s not an important receipt that Nina Collier didn’t keep – especially when it came to her rent. The 50-year-old proudly maintained a system she called foolproof: She kept every invoice and record of payment tucked in a Bible at her apartment in Englewood, she said. If there was ever a question about whether she’d paid on time, Collier says she was ready to prove she did.

“That’s something I don’t play about: My rent and my car note,” she told the Illinois Answers Project in an interview. “I was never behind.”

Not even through the COVID-19 pandemic when Collier lost her full-time job and worked sparingly as a maid. She was approved for government rental assistance that covered more than two years worth of her $900 monthly rent, records show. And she said she maintained the same system – keeping every email, every invoice and every receipt.

So she was stunned when she faced eviction for allegedly being thousands of dollars behind. She found herself tearfully begging her landlord for relief in a court hearing over Zoom — hoping she’d be given a few extra days before getting kicked out. She was not.

“It turned my whole life upside down,” said Collier, who wound up living on the street.

Starting in the summer of 2022, about eight months after the state’s moratorium on evictions ended, Collier and six other tenants at 1150-1158 W 64th St. were all served eviction notices by Legacy Red, the company acting as manager of the building. Four were eventually evicted. 

In interviews with Illinois Answers at the 10-unit apartment building in Englewood, the neighbors all said they were surprised that they were dragged into court over allegations of unpaid rent because they’d collectively been approved for their rent payments, totalling tens of thousands of dollars, in assistance from the state, paid directly to their landlord. Under the program’s rules, tenants receiving those grants weren’t supposed to face eviction. What’s more, tenants complained they were subject to harassment or intimidation to get them to leave. 

Advocates for renters warn that what happened to these tenants has been part of a disturbing pattern of how, they say, many tenants were treated during the pandemic: Even after going through the complicated  process of applying for rental assistance – at times having to do interviews and take classes to qualify – tenants were left without a home, often at the whim of landlords, who put them out on the street. 

While federal and state programs received praise from some advocates for quickly delivering rental assistance, that speed came at the cost of little oversight and enforcement, critics say. 

Nicole Capretta, an attorney with Legal Aid Chicago, said she’s had several clients – two in the last month – facing issues similar to Collier and the tenants on 64th Street. According to Capretta, in these cases landlords often credit administrative error or mix-ups with housing subsidies to explain away disparities between rental assistance received and what’s claimed in eviction court. 

“That was really hot last summer,” Capretta said. “If I could wave my magic wand and propose a solution that would make things better all around, it would be that plaintiffs in a non-payment case should be required to file a rent ledger showing how and why money is owed.”  

Bob Glaves, executive director of the Chicago Bar Foundation, which handles Cook County’s Early Resolution Program that mediates eviction disputes between landlords and tenants, told Illinois Answers that “the rules of these programs make it clear that the money is to be used solely to cover the rent of tenants in need. But with thousands of tenants in need, agencies like [the Illinois Housing Development Authority] and the [city’s] housing department don’t have the capacity to follow up on whether landlords are playing fair.”

Conditions at the Englewood building have only gotten worse, according to city attorneys at court hearings, with the building going through the winter with little to no heat for tenants, and the city citing it so often that it has raised the threat of putting it into receivership.  

The landlord, Hosanna Mahaley, took over the building in the summer of 2020, signing a deal in the middle of a global pandemic to assume ownership of the property, according to a lawsuit she filed against the previous owner. 

The deed transfer could not be legally recorded because of a lien against the property for an unpaid water bill, according to court records. Who owns the building is still being litigated in court.

Since assuming control of the property, Mahaley has represented herself as the owner of the building and received over $50,000 in grants from the state to cover rent at the apartment building from January 2021 to March 2022, records show. Even after those grants were received, Mahaley contended in court at times that she hadn’t been paid, records show. 

Illinois Answers spoke with Mahaley’s current and previous tenants who say she encouraged them to apply for multiple sources of rental assistance as soon as a month after she said she took ownership of the building. Residents received multiple grants of up to $10,000 from IHDA during the time period Mahaley claimed they didn’t pay rent.

In interviews, Collier and her former neighbors said they wonder what their rental assistance was used for, saying such problems as rodent infestation, shoddy plumbing, leaky roofs and broken windows and doors were never fixed.

In a statement, Andrew Field, a spokesperson for IHDA, acknowledged that while the rules prohibit landlords from evicting tenants after receiving rental assistance, the state “does not track” whether that actually happens.

In a brief phone call with Illinois Answers, Mahaley said that she believed she had the right to evict her tenants even after receiving the assistance. “They don’t have the full story,” she said of her tenants. Mahaley said she needed to gather more records to answer questions from Illinois Answers but then never returned three phone messages. Neither Mahaley nor her attorney responded to a detailed list of questions from Illinois Answers. Mahaley has ties to Chicago, where she once worked as the chief of staff to Arne Duncan when he was the CEO of Chicago Public Schools.

‘Very aggressive’

When Dominique Henderson, 32, moved into the building five years ago, to take care of his ailing father who lived there, his rent was less than $1,000 a month. With his job at a nearby elementary school, Henderson said he could cover the rent and his father’s medical expenses. 

But as work slowed during the pandemic, and Mahaley raised rents, those payments became more difficult. Henderson told Illinois Answers that it was Mahaley’s idea to apply for rental assistance. 

IHDA records show that Henderson was approved for two rounds of assistance from the department, one in August 2021, the other in April 2022. In total, IHDA covered 10 months of rent totaling $8,075 paid directly to Mahaley.

But in December of 2021, Legacy Red sent Henderson a five-day notice demanding full payment of back rent totaling more than $4,000. If Henderson didn’t pay the full amount at the end of the five days, his lease would be terminated, the letter threatened.

Henderson says what followed was weeks of strangers knocking on his door at all hours, demanding Henderson pay up or be kicked out.

“It was very aggressive,” Henderson said. 

The tactics described by Henderson — something several other Legacy Red tenants said they experienced — are symptoms of a wider phenomenon of illegal or improper eviction attempts throughout the city – which were particularly prominent through the pandemic when state and federal moratoriums paused legal evictions.

Emily Metz, program director at the University of Chicago’s Inclusive Economy Lab, says despite these bans, residents like Henderson were still facing efforts to force a tenant out of a rental property through intimidation, harassment or other methods, at “somewhat surprisingly high rates.” 

The lab surveyed a quarter of nearly 75,000 Chicago residents who received rental assistance through the city housing department’s rental assistance program between 2020 and late 2021. 

In all, 7.9% of interviewees reported a forced move, lockout or paid move between March 2020 and November 2021, which overlapped with eviction moratorium. And while between 60% and 70% of housing applicants reported paying full rent during the month most recent to their response, the majority of respondents said they were still worried about eviction.

While Metz said that programs like the $185 million program run by the state were undoubtedly “helpful” throughout the pandemic, there’s more to be done. “It’s one-time cash assistance,” she said. “But it’s not solving chronic housing affordability issues.”

Another resident of the 64th Street apartments, Deesty Neal, 40, said initially that she wasn’t worried about being evicted. “I paid everything on time,” she told Illinois Answers. 

But she said that, after receiving a number of texts and emails suggesting the application was mandatory, she “felt forced” by Mahaley to apply for rental assistance and falsely state that she was behind on rent.

IHDA records show that Mahaley and Neal were approved for two rounds of the department’s Emergency Rental Assistance program in 2020 and 2021. Department records do not specify the dollar amount, but, according to an IHDA spokesperson, the fund typically paid out a flat grant of $5,000. 

According to court records, when Mahaley filed for eviction on June 3, 2022, she claimed Neal had gone an entire year without paying her $800 monthly rent. Neal told the judge that it was impossible for her to owe the $12,000 Mahaley was seeking because of the rental assistance.

“I was scared, I can’t lie,” Neal said. 

Like Henderson, the single mom recalled men showing up at her home, banging on the door, demanding rent. She said she received text messages that threatened to evict Neal and her children if she didn’t abide by what they’d asked. 

Rules of the state’s programs required landlords to return any money that exceeded the amount owed for rent back to the agency. Serving an eviction notice after receiving funds from the agency is considered a violation of the agreement made between landlords, tenants and the program. 

But housing advocates say that the immediate need of tens of thousands of Illinois residents didn’t allow programs to build the infrastructure for oversight. 

‘We’re living on broken promises’

Michelle Cooper moved into the building over a decade ago, and has had four landlords since.  When she first signed her lease, her rent was $650, and despite being promised a newly renovated unit, she moved in on the understanding that the landlord would continue to fix a number of problems. At the top of the list were a cardboard door in her bedroom, a closet door brought up from the basement to temporarily enclose the bathroom, and missing window screens. 

Still, Cooper and her family were excited about the move-in. She and her husband had owned a home in Englewood but lost it during the 2008 housing crisis. 

When Mahaley’s company Legacy Red began managing the building, Cooper’s rent was $670, she said. She told Illinois Answers that Mahaley told her that her rent would increase to $900. But Mahaley promised to fix the apartment, said Cooper, who was having nightmares about the continued worsening conditions her family was living in. 

In three years, nothing improved, Cooper said.

In the winter, broken radiators required the family to wear sweatsuits and blankets at all times. And when it rains, a hole in the roof from a storm years prior continues to leak. 

“We’re living on broken promises,” Cooper said.  

Jacqueline Hodges, who’s lived in the building since 2009, said that workers have come through the apartment building changing locks, shutting off the gas and leaving notices threatening eviction if she and her neighbors didn’t pay Mahaley sums of money they say they do not owe. 

Since November, residents have repeatedly called and filed reports with the police and fire departments and the city’s Buildings Department to report heat shut-offs. Even last month, as temperatures dipped as low as 12 degrees below zero, residents say they use space heaters or double up on blankets to stay warm. 

Hodges said this winter has been the worst she’s seen in her 22 years at the property. She uses pots of boiling water and a small space heater in her bedroom to keep the most important parts of her apartment warm. And sheets of plastic tarp cover windows and doorways to keep out cold air.  

“It’s been bad ever since they [Legacy Red] came on board,” Hodges told Illinois Answers as she prepared for another cold night without heat at the building, with temperatures dropping as low as 8 degrees. 

As recently as Jan. 9, city inspectors cited the building for not providing adequate heat for the fifth time since October. Despite the inspections, heat had not been restored to the building.

Illinois Answers asked the Buildings Department why the city has not intervened to get heat returned to tenants’ units. The department declined to comment, citing the city’s litigation involving building, as did the city’s Law Department. 

In a Jan. 23 court hearing, assistant corporation counsel Steven McKenzie chastised Mahaley and her attorney for the number of complaints the city received during January’s freeze, describing it as a “hot-button issue.” 

The city agreed to give Mahaley a sixth opportunity to prove to city inspectors that the heating issues at the building are being repaired, but warned that receivership would be the next step if the problem isn’t fixed.

Mahaley assured the courtroom that the problem would be resolved. “We welcome the inspection,” she told McKenzie. 

On the day of inspection, radiators were still cold in the units of tenants at home during the time city officials walked through the building.

Hodges says that she’s trying to find alternative housing nearby. But until she finds a viable option or the heating issues are fixed, she says she’ll keep bundling up near the space heater in her bedroom. “I’m just hanging in there. For now, that’s all I can do.”

Legal recourse for tenants

Four of the tenants who were served eviction notices by Mahaley, ultimately left the property. 

But in Neal’s case, Cook County’s Early Resolution Program allowed her to stay in her apartment while she struck a deal with the landlord. 

The program, launched in 2020 with the help of federal COVID relief grant money, connected Neal to a legal aid attorney who then negotiated an agreement with Mahaley’s attorney. Because Neal raised the question of her vanishing rental assistance, Mahaley agreed that if Neal paid a fraction of the $12,000 she initially claimed she was entitled to, the eviction would not happen. 

Glaves, of the Chicago Bar Foundation, said that a critical determinant in the future expansion of the program will be finding a new source of funding, as it was initially launched through a $1 million allocation from federal CARES Act money that will run out “in a few years for sure.”

“It’s a matter of investing in this as part of the homelessness prevention and as part of improving access to justice, generally. Things that are state, city, and county,” Glaves told Illinois Answers.

In June, IHDA became the administrator of the city Housing Department’s court-based rental assistance program. Unlike the assistance that Mahaley’s tenants applied for through 2022, this program requires that an eviction actually be filed before a tenant can qualify for the assistance. 

Michelle Gilbert, of the Law Center for Better Housing, one of the city’s partners in providing free counsel to tenants facing eviction, says that programs like the county’s Early Resolution Program and the Right to Counsel Pilot Program, recently renewed by Mayor Brandon Johnson, are so critical because IHDA does not have any formal way of making sure that evictions are thrown out once a landlord receives rental assistance. 

Gilbert, who represented a client last spring in eviction court after their landlord did not honor their rental assistance agreement, said that there are no safeguards for tenants before they get to eviction court. “If there isn’t an attorney present to make sure that it happens, there isn’t another mechanism to make sure that the case gets dismissed,” she said.  

Another onetime tenant, Collier, is now living in her car and scrambling to piece together the life she’d so proudly built and relied on. But she’s still maintaining her system — pulling together emails and text messages from her former landlord in hopes that she can rebuild her life. 

For now, she’s in and out of city-funded shelters and working cleaning jobs to pay for food and gas. 

“I have a friend that panhandles on 75th,” she told Illinois Answers. “I’m scared to do it because I’m terrified that someone will see me.”

Reporting on equity issues by the BGA is supported by Joel M. Friedman, president of the Alvin H. Baum Family Fund.

Every weekday at 7:45 a.m., Michael Craft is notified that a rideshare driver has arrived at his home in Aurora, Colorado. Craft walks outside to confirm the driver’s identity and then helps his foster teenager into the car, sending him off to high school about 15 miles away. 

The platform he uses, HopSkipDrive, notifies him that the ride has started, and soon he’ll receive another that the teenager has been dropped off. On the network’s app, Craft can track a live mapping of the drive. 

“It’s almost overboard but you sit comfortable knowing where your kid is,” Craft said in an interview with the Illinois Answers Project.

He repeats the same process for another foster teen, who attends school in a different district. 

HopSkipDrive is a transportation network company designed to take students ages 6 and older to and from school, extracurricular activities and internships. The company works with 600 school districts, nonprofits and government agencies in 14 states plus Washington, D.C.

The company has helped schools grapple with a national shortage of bus drivers by tapping into a driver network of independent contractors. 

The bus driver shortage is forcing districts to get creative in finding transportation solutions, including Chicago Public Schools, where officials have had early conversations with HopSkipDrive about the feasibility of bringing the service to Illinois and transporting Chicago students, said Kimberly Jones, executive director of student transportation services for CPS, in an interview with Illinois Answers in November. The state currently requires a school bus permit to transport students, even in passenger cars.

“We’re building the foundation right now” with HopSkipDrive and the state, she said. “We’re just beginning to have those conversations.”

Chicago Public Schools started the 2023-24 school year short of roughly 600 bus drivers, about half needed to transport all students. It has forced the district to prioritize students with disabilities and those experiencing homelessness, which totals to more than 11,700 students who either receive transportation or a monthly stipend, a district spokesperson told Illinois Answers. The district has not been able to provide about 5,500 general, magnet and selective enrollment students with transportation this academic year. 

School districts across the country are “all fighting for the same driving population,” Jones said at an October Board of Education about the competition to attract new bus drivers. 

CPS has used alternative transportation since 2004 to help fill in the gaps and contracts with eight companies to transport 1,356 students, district officials said. These companies use a variety of vehicles that may require a Commercial Driver’s License or a state-approved school bus driver permit.

However, HopSkipDrive’s independent contractors, called Care Drivers, aren’t required to have an additional license. They drive their personal vehicles and instead undergo a certification process, background and vehicle checks, and must have five years of care-giving experience. 

While companies like HopSkipDrive do not solve the need for licensed school bus drivers that many districts hope to hire, it has helped to provide supplemental support and relief for districts. 

“We are bringing people from the community – caregivers who are parents, former teachers, nurses, nannies – who don’t want to go through all the requirements to drive a school bus and get their CDL license,” said Joanna McFarland, co-founder and CEO of HopSkipDrive. “Maybe they don’t want a full time job but they are in the community, they are available to help out, and they want flexible ways to make money.” 

“We’re taking people from the community that could never contract directly with a district and providing this network of available drivers who have been highly vetted,” she added.

Craft, whose foster children attend schools in three districts, has been using HopSkipDrive for several years. His work as a foster parent would look different without the help of the ride-share company, he said. 

“I wouldn’t be able to (foster) the kids I have now if there was no HopSkipDrive,” Craft said. “I would have to take kids based on not their needs, but based on where they go to school and that’s not how you should do that.” 

How HopSkipDrive Fills the Gap

School districts can determine which student populations the network serves and how, McFarland said, including for students with individualized education plans and McKinney-Vento students. 

For example, an Indianapolis suburb contracted with the ride-share company last year to take a handful of students experiencing homelessness to and from school. Franklin Township Community School Corporation, a district of nearly 11,000 students, has just enough bus drivers to cover all routes but not to transport students who may be temporarily living several miles outside the district, said Todd Livesay, director of transportation for the district. 

“Without a company like HopSkipDrive, you have to go get the kid very early in the morning before all the other routes start,” he said. So a student might be on the bus for over two hours as other students are picked up, or have to wait several hours at school after the other routes are finished.

HopSkipDrive is “just a godsend because they give (students) a quick ride to and from school. It’s safe,” he said. “… I think about my kids and if my kids were in these situations, would I be comfortable? What would I want them to be doing? And I am comfortable,” he said of HopSkipDrive. 

“It’s better for the student in the long-run.”

The district pays the company a $19 base fee plus $1.99 per mile, or a $58 minimum, whichever comes first, according to its contract with HopSkipDrive.

Denver Public Schools, a district with 207 schools, uses HopSkipDrive to transport about 250 students to and from school everyday. The service is available to general education students, those who are experiencing homelessness and students with disabilities, said Albert Samora, the district’s executive director of transportation. Denver also uses EverDriven, an alternative model that employs drivers, for about 250 students, he said. 

Samora said the district initially used HopSkipDrive and other alternative transportation services for inefficient routes, or routes outside the district for students in foster care or who don’t have permanent housing. But amid the bus driver shortage, the district has turned to these companies for other routes. 

“HopSkipDrive and EverDriven and other contractors have become a side-by-side solution when we don’t have the drivers,” he said. “So now they’ve moved from being a supplemental service to being almost part of our primary service.”

Over the last several years, he said the district has been working to close the gap by, in part, increasing bus driver wages and offering bonuses. Samora said this has helped reduce the shortage from 100 bus drivers in 2019 to roughly 40 this academic year. 

Samora said the alternative services make up about a third of the district’s $30 million transportation budget. For comparison, Chicago Public Schools has a $146 million transportation budget and spends about $7 million on alternative services for companies to transport over 1,000 students, a district spokesperson said. 

Denver has been using HopSkipDrive since 2021, according to its contract, and currently employs 160 bus drivers, said Tyler Maybee, director of operations. A HopSkipDrive ride costs $2.99 per mile plus a $19 base fee for each ride, according to Denver’s contract with the service, obtained through a public records request.

Denver Public Schools, with nearly 90,000 students, and Virginia Fairfax County Public Schools, with nearly 180,000 students, are the largest districts that HopSkipDrive serves, McFarland said. CPS, for comparison, has over 320,000 students in the district.

A Local Option 

While CPS provides CTA Ventra cards for the 5,500 magnet and selective enrollment students and gives a monthly stipend of up to $500 to eligible diverse learners and students in temporary living situations, the rest of students must find transportation on their own. 

Maria Ugarte’s child does not qualify for district transportation, so she or her husband drive her daughter – and three other children in a carpool – 45 minutes one way to Inter-American Elementary Magnet School in Lakeview, she said. 

Ugarte, who serves on the Local School Council, worries that the lack of transportation, especially for low income families, will impact enrollment at her child’s dual-language school. As an immigrant, she said, it’s important for her children to maintain their heritage.

She said she’d be hesitant to use HopSkipDrive because she’s not familiar with how drivers are vetted.

“My daughter is 12. … My kids don’t walk anywhere on their own, so I don’t think I’d be able to put them in a car where I’m not 100% sure that everything has been checked for those drivers,” she said. “… At this moment, I don’t feel comfortable because it’s something so new.”

CPS parent Ismael El-Amin’s eldest two children also didn’t qualify for transportation because they are in selective enrollment schools and live about 8 and 17 miles away. In 2021, he co-founded a carpool service called PiggyBack Network that connects parents by matching routes to school or other activities.  

El-Amin said he founded the company because he understands how the lack of reliable transportation can hinder future opportunities. When he was in junior high school, he had to take a CTA bus to football practice and would arrive late. His coach discovered that El-Amin lived nearby and began taking him to practice.

“That led to being a leader in high school, that led to being recruited to play football in college and just changed the trajectory of my life,” El-Amin said. “I’m sensing how one person’s sacrifice changed my complete trajectory.”

PiggyBack has already partnered with the YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago to provide rides for some of its day camps last summer, for example, and operates in a handful of cities including Atlanta, Miami and Boston, he said. CPS has reached out to PiggyBack for information for a potential partnership, both El-Amin and the district said.

“You may not know each other, you may not even go to the same school, you might overlap and go to a school two blocks away, but PiggyBack is going to say, ‘family A, you all should talk to family B’,” El-Amin said. 

There’s a screening process where families meet before carpooling and drivers undergo a background check. 

To pay for rides, parents buy points based on mileage and time. Depending on peak times, families can expect to pay a base fee up to $4, between 32 and 75 cents per mile, or up to $5 per hour. The family that requests the ride pays with points and the drivers gain points when they complete rides. PiggyBack keeps a portion of the sale, he said. 

There is no direct payout for drivers, he said, in order to ensure it’s a true carpool. Instead, drivers can use points to pay for rides for their children. 

Jazmine Dillard, a pediatric dentist, learned about PiggyBack from other parents last summer after she found out that her second-grade son would no longer qualify for busing. She needs help in the mornings dropping off two of her sons and was able to match with El-Amin, who takes a similar route to his daughter’s school. El-Amin said the stop only adds five minutes to his commute. 

After being matched, they quickly discovered that Dillard’s husband and El-Amin both graduated from Whitney Young High School. Although strangers, that sense of familiarity and understanding of values is what sold Dillard to use PiggyBack, she said.

“I’m praying that this works for a long period of time because there are very few (transportation) programs dedicated for children,” Dillard said. “… What made me most comfortable was that (PiggyBack) vets their drivers. I don’t want to just put my kid in an Uber with some random person. … I felt very comfortable and reassured once I heard about how they went about their process of finding drivers.”

Could HopSkipDrive Operate in Chicago?

The main challenge in bringing HopSkipDrive to Chicago starts with the state.

Currently, Illinois Vehicle Code requires drivers who transport students to obtain a school bus permit, even in passenger vehicles, which can carry up to 10 people. To obtain a permit, a driver must pass a written and driving test, health exam, training course, and a criminal background check, among other requirements.

A spokesperson for HopSkipDrive told Illinois Answers that these regulations “don’t make sense” for their CareDrivers.

“In Illinois, the regulations require someone on our platform to follow essentially the same requirements of driving a 12-ton school bus,” according to a statement from the company. “… CareDrivers are driving a few hours a week, driving students just seven to eight trips a week on average, in a traditional sedan vehicle with one to three kids.”

The company supports a bill introduced in the Illinois House last year that would reclassify vehicles that are allowed to transport students and allow the Secretary of State to offer a separate permit for passenger vehicles. State Rep. Jaime Andrade (Democrat, district 40), who introduced HB 3476, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

There is precedent for states to change laws to accommodate HopSkipDrive.

In 2022 in Missouri, for example, legislators changed restrictions to allow vehicles other than school buses to transport students and repealed a requirement that drivers of these vehicles need a school bus driver’s license, among other changes. 

The same year, Colorado’s governor signed legislation that allowed the state’s Public Utilities Commission to regulate HopSkipDrive like other transportation networks. Opponents of the bill, which included competing bus driver companies and advocates for children with disabilities, argued that HopSkipDrive wouldn’t be held to the same safety standards since they are not only overseen by school districts, according to local media reports.

Wherever they operate, the ride-share company is also subject to city requirements for transportation network providers. In Chicago, requirements include having signage about 311 call information and providing up-front pricing to customers.

Given the vastness of Chicago Public Schools, HopSkipDrive may be more financially reasonable and equitable for districts with a smaller student population, said P.S. Sriraj, director of the Urban Transportation Center at the University of Illinois Chicago, in an interview with Illinois Answers.

But if CPS were to partner with the network, he recommended that district leaders test it on a small scale to fully evaluate how it could be used. The district should thoroughly communicate and make decisions with the input from parents, students and teachers, he added.

In the meantime, to attract and retain bus drivers to keep up with increasing transportation requests, CPS has increased wages by $5 over the last two years and is planning 15 hiring fairs, Jones said in October. The district is also trying to optimize routes to make sure they’re efficient, and is working with the Secretary of State to reduce the requirements to be a bus driver. 

“We are looking at all variables when it comes to alternative modes of transportation so we’re not just restricted to the school buses,” Jones told the Illinois Answer Project. 

Companies like HopSkipDrive may be a step in that direction. 

“Private companies in the world of student transportation is not new,” McFarland said.

What has changed, she said, is that students are no longer going to their neighborhood school. 

“There are magnet schools, schools of choice, and a lot more individualized needs. The idea of 70 kids sitting on a school bus route isn’t really reality in a lot of cases,” she said. “And so we need to think about giving districts the tools and the flexibility to solve the problems of this growing and individualized student body in ways that best meet their needs. I think of us as a tool in the district’s toolkit.”

“Reporting on equity issues by the BGA is supported by Joel M. Friedman, president of the Alvin H. Baum Family Fund.”

This story was produced with South Side Weekly, a nonprofit newsroom serving the South Side of Chicago.

It was early 2020 when Jay Davis realized his family was going to lose his childhood home, a red brick house in Rosemoor on the South Side of Chicago that had been in his family for generations. 

Davis’ great-uncle had been living there, and as his dementia worsened the one-story house began to deteriorate. When he died, he left it to his son who had serious health issues and could not maintain the home, Davis said. 

Davis, 41, wanted to keep the house from becoming another vacant lot on the South Side. He understood the significance of homeownership as a tool for building generational wealth that has been denied to many Black Chicagoans due to racist practices like redlining and predatory lending.

He experienced this first-hand when he was in his early 20s and made a foray into real estate investment. Davis was the proud new owner of a condo and another property that he planned to rent out when the 2008 financial crisis hit. He wasn’t able to make his mortgage payments – which he said he should have never been approved for – and lost both homes. 

“When I decided that I wanted to get back into real estate, it was to combat predatory practices and to provide stable housing for people that need it,” Davis said. 

With help from Courtney Jones, a real estate developer and leader of the newly established Community Receiver Program, Davis worked to fix up his cousin’s home for resale. 

The Community Receiver Program works with Black and brown real estate professionals on the South and West sides to rehabilitate vacant and foreclosed properties.

Typically, receivers are management companies brought in by the courts to address unsafe conditions in buildings that have been neglected before turning them back over to their original owners.

Private, for-profit actors in this space aim to maximize profits and often don’t have much of a stake in the long-term success of the neighborhood. In the past, some companies have used receivership to take ownership of occupied homes through foreclosure when owners could not pay for the cost of repairs, a practice that is now frowned upon by the courts, said Will Edwards, assistant commissioner for neighborhood development and housing preservation in the Department of Housing.

Today, the Department of Housing partners with nonprofit agencies to do this work in a more community-minded way through a program called the Troubled Buildings Initiative, but the need has outpaced the federal funding available to these agencies. 

With the Community Receiver Program, Edwards said the city hopes to “right historical wrongs” by playing an active role in training participants to responsibly rehabilitate abandoned properties.

The program works to empower local professionals – brokers, general contractors, mason workers and first-time investors – to reclaim receivership as a tool to uplift themselves and their communities by restoring affordable housing and keeping wealth generated from property sales circulating in the local economy, said Jones, who is executive director of the Black Coalition for Housing, which co-runs the program.

Sometimes they petition to be receivers through the courts, but they also make use of other opportunities and city programs like Chicago Neighborhood Rebuild that help investors acquire, remodel and resell abandoned properties that might otherwise have remained vacant. 

Since 2020, the program has trained about 520 people and helped rehabilitate 16 buildings, contributing nearly $4.5 million in restored property value, according to the program’s website.

In Davis’ case, he began working on the Rosemoor home after his cousin voluntarily forfeited ownership to him in 2021. Davis said he paid about $7,500 in fees and unpaid water bills to obtain the house, and made sure his cousin found housing.

With guidance from the Community Receiver Program, he assembled a team and repaired the exterior of the home, replaced the roof and some of the pipes, and remodeled the basement. He sold the house in 2021 to a family friend.

“My whole mission in doing this is really to build up the Black community and provide affordable housing for potential Black homebuyers,” Davis said, “and especially first-time Black homebuyers, so they don’t have to go through what I went through.”

The History of Receivership and Abandoned Buildings in Chicago

As the housing bubble burst in 2008, foreclosures spiked across the city but Black homeowners on the South and West sides were hit particularly hard due to heightened rates of subprime lending in segregated communities, according to a 2018 study published by the University of Illinois Department of Urban and Regional Planning. 

While other areas of the city stabilized by 2013, foreclosure rates remain high in communities on the South and West sides, according to data from DePaul University’s Institute for Housing Studies. This has led to the deterioration of smaller rental properties of two to four units, which make up the bulk of Chicago’s affordable housing, said Sarah Duda, the institute’s deputy director.

This contributed to a crisis of vacant lots and the displacement of more than 180,000 Black Chicagoans from 2000 to 2010 and another 75,000 in the subsequent seven years, many of whom left in search of economic opportunity and affordable housing, according to a report from the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

As foreclosures produced distressed and vacant properties, private receivers became more active. 

Private receivers oversee the rehabilitation of properties, the cost of which is ultimately paid for by the building’s original owner. If the owner cannot pay back the receiver, the cost becomes a lien – a debt held against the property – and the property may be entered into foreclosure and sold by the receiver, who can keep the profits. Receivers of occupied buildings collect rent on behalf of owners and can raise rents with the permission of the court to help cover repair costs. 

It can take months or years for private receivers to fully recover their investment and even then they could potentially lose money, said Anthony Simpkins, president and CEO of Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS) Chicago, a nonprofit that offers loans and other resources to support affordable housing and homeowners in underserved communities. 

That’s why private receivers usually only invest in properties that have a strong potential to generate income, he said.  

For renters, receivership is an essential tool when they have run out of options to compel their landlords to address poor, unsafe living conditions, said David Wilson, a community organizer with the Metropolitan Tenants Organization, a tenants’ rights advocacy group. 

But it comes with a significant risk. Tenants may be evicted when the receiver starts making repairs or displaced later on if the receiver or the building’s owner increases rent, Wilson said. 

In an effort to preserve affordable housing and protect residents from displacement, the Department of Housing, through the Troubled Buildings Initiative, works with NHS Chicago and the Community Investment Corporation to provide building owners with resources to try to avoid the need for receivership all together. 

When receivership is necessary, the two agencies act as receivers and use federal funding from Community Development Block Grants to cover repairs. This safety net allows them to address the “worst buildings in the poorest neighborhoods” that would not be economically viable for private receivers, Simpkins said. 

While owners are still charged the cost of repairs, those who live in their buildings – single-family homes or smaller multi-family homes – can apply for grants to have their debt forgiven over a period of five years, said Edwards, of the Department of Housing. 

For owners of larger buildings, they pay back the repairs via repayment plans or otherwise have a lien placed against their property. If they refuse or can’t make payments toward the lien, the property is entered into foreclosure and sold to a new owner, oftentimes a bank. 

As long as there is public money invested in a building through a lien or grant agreement, the Troubled Buildings Initiative restricts the rental price of units to rates that would be affordable to those who make 80% of the city’s area median income (AMI). 

Critics say this restriction doesn’t do much to ensure housing remains affordable because low-income neighborhoods have a much lower median income than the city’s AMI, which includes surrounding suburbs.

South Shore’s area median income, for example, is less than half of the citywide median income, according to the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning.

“When we do affordable housing, the question is affordable to who?” said Dixon Romeo, executive director of Not Me We, a community organization that fights gentrification in South Shore.

Using Receivership in a New Way

The Community Receiver Program brings together city, experts and nonprofit resources to train participants on how they might use receivership in a new way – often approaching the process as developers rather than temporary managers of properties, said Sanina Ellison Jones, president of the Dearborn Realtist Board, a trade association for Black real estate professionals that co-runs the program.

Instead of focusing solely on addressing unsafe living conditions, the Community Receiver Program seeks to fully renovate buildings and resell properties to local homebuyers of color or rent them out at affordable rates. 

Program organizers want to avoid turning properties back over to negligent owners – which is one way that both nonprofit and for-profit receivers have failed Black and brown communities in the past, Ellison Jones said. 

“There was this cycle that we noticed that was continuing, which impacted the residents of the community,” she said.

Courtney Jones, who is married to Ellison Jones, said instructors strive to create a culture that uplifts the surrounding community as well as the investor. The fact that community receivers take on properties in their own backyards naturally pushes them to be better actors, he said. 

“If you’re living in that community, how you manage that project is going to impact your own real estate,” he said.

Receivership training is free for participants and run by volunteers from city departments, the city’s two nonprofit lenders and the Dearborn Realtist Board. Community receivers are assigned mentors and work in pods, learning from their peers.

Over the course of the program, participants learn how to acquire and rehabilitate neglected buildings and how to leverage grants or city programs to help obtain those properties.

“Often the value of the property is actually less than the cost to rehabilitate it,” NHS Chicago’s Simpkins explained. “So they can then come to us and get grants toward the acquisition and closing costs to make that project feasible.” 

Beyond petitioning for receivership through the courts, community receivers can also acquire vacant buildings through the Cook County Land Bank Authority, which has partnered with the program to hear project presentations from graduating students. 

In this way, community receivers – much like public receivers – are empowered to fix up properties that would not normally receive attention from developers and sell those homes for affordable rates while still turning a profit, Jones said.

Jones said he hopes to continue expanding the network of graduates so that the Troubled Buildings Initiative can tap them whenever it needs work done on buildings, even if it is a smaller job like repairing a roof or fixing a boiler. 

What’s Next for the Community Receiver Program?

Many graduates of the Community Receiver Program struggle to file their first petition for receivership because of the financial risk associated with taking on this kind of project, Ellison Jones said. Moving forward, she hopes to continue to partner with the land bank and with entities like the Chicago Community Loan Fund to get more financial backing for graduates. 

Eventually, this might also allow community receivers to be assigned to larger, multi-family buildings, Courtney Jones said. Currently, the program is focused on single-family homes and smaller rental buildings.

The city will continue doing what it can to reduce barriers for community receivers and connect them with opportunities for monetary support, Edwards said. An ordinance passed last year by the City Council allows city debt to be waived on vacant or abandoned properties in low- to moderate-income neighborhoods for those looking to rehabilitate them.

Simpkins said there is always a need for more federal funding to support grant and loan programs that NHS Chicago helps facilitate for community receivers and homeowners. NHS Chicago had to stop accepting new applications for those programs in August due to budget constraints, he said.

The Community Receiver Program is “an important aspect of the [Troubled Buildings Initiative] process that I think is not being utilized enough,” Simpkins said. 

But it’s just one small piece in the puzzle of bringing about a reality where housing is regarded as a human right and where public policy affirms that, said Romeo whose organization, Not Me We, serves residents in South Shore and the surrounding area.

While Romeo understands the intention behind an initiative like the Community Receiver Program, he said the city needs to do more to safeguard affordable housing and address its history of discriminatory housing practices – to get at the root of the problem. 

“The reality is, it’s one program that’s got a pretty limited scope,” he said, adding that residents also need rent control, more paths to homeownership and additional rental vouchers. “We need all these things at once.”

The Rosemoor Home

When it came time to sell the Rosemoor home, Davis wasn’t out to turn a huge profit, he said. He invested $75,000 in remodeling the home and sold it to his best friend’s younger brother, LaMarr Brown, for $150,000 in August of 2021, Davis said.

“Now, my little brother is a homeowner,” Davis said. “… I’m very proud of him.”

Brown smiled as he stood outside of his home with his 10-week-old son, LaMarr Junior, on a sunny afternoon earlier this year. After completing his service with the U.S. Military in 2020, Brown said he was glad to buy his first home from someone he knew he could trust.

After graduating from the Community Receiver Program, Davis purchased an Englewood property from the land bank through Chicago Neighborhood Rebuild, a program in which developers can get loans to rehabilitate vacant homes in Englewood, Garfield Park and Humboldt Park. 

“It feels pretty great to be a homeowner because I basically went from barracks to barracks, so I never really lived in a home other than when I was a child,” Brown said.

Davis placed the Englewood home on the market in September. 

Now, he’s looking for a property on the South Side to take another shot at petitioning for receivership through the courts. He plans to continue this work of fixing up run-down buildings to support homeownership in his community.

Reporting on equity issues by the BGA is supported by Joel M. Friedman, president of the Alvin H. Baum Family Fund.

As the Illinois General Assembly’s fall veto session gets underway this week, advocates for independent cannabis operators are hoping to pass a list of rule changes they say would help ensure entrepreneurs of color finally get a foothold in the industry. 

It’s been four years since lawmakers legalized recreational pot sales in Illinois, but many  business owners from disadvantaged backgrounds have struggled to gain momentum. As of Oct. 17, state records show that 52 social equity dispensaries and 10 independent craft growers were operating, just a fraction of the nearly 300 combined licenses the state has awarded to date.

Earlier this year, a legislative effort aimed at jump-starting social equity in Illinois’ cannabis industry fizzled just short of the finish line. Now, social equity advocates and their allies in Springfield are trying again to loosen restrictions on independent growers, streamline background checks for job applicants and prevent large-scale cannabis transporters from monopolizing business, among other priorities.

“We’re not trying to move mountains with these policies �� these are some very straightforward rule changes proposed by folks who work in this space,” said Peter Contos, deputy director of the Illinois Cannabis Equity Coalition. “It could be a complete catastrophe if we continue to deny people these basic opportunities.”

Latest News: Illinois Doled Out Millions to Pot Growers. It Still May Not Be Enough to Save the Industry.

State Rep. La Shawn Ford (D-Chicago), who authored the failed omnibus cannabis bill during the spring legislative session, told Illinois Answers he hopes to revive those policies and to pass two additional bills that he says would push forward social equity in the cannabis industry.

But passing any pot-related legislation will be a heavy lift during the six-day veto session that began Tuesday. Gov. JB Pritzker has downplayed efforts to revisit state funding for migrant resettlement, predicting that the veto session will instead revolve around a rewrite of a nuclear energy bill he vetoed over the summer.

And Ford’s bills depend on cooperation from large-scale, multistate cannabis firms represented by the Cannabis Business Association of Illinois.

1. Lifting Cap on Grow Space

Craft growers are channeling their energy into one priority for veto session: a rule change raising the cap on their allowed canopy space.

The state’s 2019 cannabis legalization law already sets a maximum of 14,000 square feet for craft growers, but it requires them to first reach 5,000 square feet before asking regulators for permission to expand further.

The lower limit has been an albatross around the necks of growers as they look for investors, said Scott Redman, founder of the Illinois Independent Craft Growers’ Association.

“The amount of infrastructure you have to build — the offices, the transport bay, the vaults — is the same whether you have 5,000 or 14,000 square feet to grow,” Redman said. “And all of that costs millions of dollars.”

Giving licensed growers automatic access to up to 14,000 square feet of canopy space would make it much easier for them to pitch investors on higher revenue estimates, he said.

2. Restrictions on Hemp-Based Cannabinoids

Ford’s omnibus proposal stumbled in the spring after the Cannabis Business Association of Illinois, which represents large, multi-state cannabis firms, raised an alarm over a lack of restrictions on delta-8, a psychoactive cannabinoid derived from hemp. Many in the industry argue purveyors of delta-8 have an unfair advantage because the substance is not regulated as heavily as cannabis due to a federal loophole.

This month, Ford introduced a bill that would regulate hemp-based cannabinoid products like delta-8 . His proposal would require businesses to register with state agencies before they can sell, grow or manufacture those products. 

“Prohibition didn’t work for alcohol, it didn’t work for cannabis, and it won’t work for delta-8,” Ford said. “So we want to regulate, tax it and make sure it’s as safe for consumption as possible.”

A spokesperson for the Cannabis Business Association of Illinois, whose organizers raised objections in the spring that ultimately tanked the bill, said last week it was still reviewing Ford’s proposals.

“We acknowledge that these are complicated issues,” said Jeremy Unruh, the association’s spokesman who is also a senior executive with the interstate cannabis firm PharmaCann. “Our goal will be to work through the nuances of these policy proposals with legislators to come up with responsible solutions that foster small business and protect consumers.”

3. Employee Badge Policy Reform

Social equity organizers are also pushing to make it easier for employees to pass background checks to get state-approved ID badges to handle cannabis. Currently, applicants with felony records are automatically excluded from being licensed to work in the industry. Ford’s proposal would open a path for them to get cannabis jobs.

Background checks have been convoluted and inconsistently applied, which has excluded many people from the industry because of their criminal backgrounds, said Contos, of the Illinois Cannabis Equity Coalition. That has undermined the state’s goal of welcoming people into the cannabis industry who have been harmed by drug prohibition, he argued.

“If you have a [criminal] record, it is still far too difficult to get a job in the industry,” Contos said. “The longer we wait to update the background check system, the fewer people that can actually work in this industry.”

4. Curbside Access for Medicinal Patients

As the COVID-19 pandemic threw Illinois’ new legal cannabis industry into a tailspin, state regulators implemented temporary rules that allowed curbside pickup and drive-thru options for people who have medicinal cannabis cards.

It “immediately became apparent” that those accommodations should have been allowed all along, said Katie Sullivan, a nurse practitioner and co-founder of the counseling practice Modern Compassionate Care.

“It’s not just needed for people who are physically disabled,” Sullivan said. “How about parents who need to pick up their medicine? They can go through the drive-thru at Walgreens, but they can’t bring a child into a dispensary.”

State regulators have repeatedly extended the pandemic-era rule, partially in response to pressure from advocates like Sullivan. But she and other members of the Cannabis Equity Illinois Coalition say curbside pickup and drive-thru allowances should be written into the law.

5. Anti-Monopoly Rules for Transporters

As social equity dispensaries and craft growers struggle to open, advocates have complained of a growing backlog of social equity applicants who have received cannabis transporter licenses but can’t yet drum up business. Meanwhile, they have to keep paying fees to the state or risk losing their licenses.

Part of the problem, Ford and Contos say, is that a June 2020 executive order let large-scale cannabis cultivators transport their own products, which allowed those firms to dominate the industry and avoid doing business with license holders all together. A second bill proposed by Ford this month would change that.

Ford’s proposal would require all cannabis growers and dispensary owners use “third-party transporters” licensed by the state. It would only allow them to transport their own goods if they’ve exhausted all attempts to work with third parties.

“If the transporters can’t gain business from the big operators, they’re going to go away,” Ford said. “They’ll have wasted their money.”

The same will be true of social equity dispensary owners and craft growers if Ford’s other proposals are overlooked and kicked to next year’s legislative session, he said.

“If we don’t provide real, intentional help for these social equity dreamers, we’re going to let them down as a state,” he said.

Reporting on equity issues by the BGA is supported by Joel M. Friedman, president of the Alvin H. Baum Family Fund.

A gentle hum of movement filled a cannabis packing room on a recent Friday morning as hundreds of pounds of marijuana were prepared for market at Helios Labs manufacturing warehouse in west suburban Broadview.

Nearly two-dozen technicians sat at their stations, pre-rolling joints and slapping labels onto boxes. The next room over, a pair of workers measured out THC oil to drip into vape cartridges. They faced an empty corner where co-founders Ambrose Jackson and Alex Al-Sabah soon hope to infuse honey and sriracha products with cannabis.

“We’re trying to focus on things that differentiate us from the rest of the pack,” said Al-Sabah, chief strategy officer of Helios’ parent company, The 1937 Group. “There’s a lot of product out there, but a lot of it is the same.”

Helios Labs is one of 87 companies in Illinois with a “craft grow” license, which is targeted toward independent pot cultivators who, like Jackson, have suffered from the state’s decades-long criminalization of the drug. As a teenager, Jackson said he was arrested on charges of cannabis possession with intent to sell. Now, he’s the chairman and CEO of The 1937 Group, a cannabis company that holds several social equity licenses.

More than four years after state lawmakers legalized recreational pot sales in what they held up as “the most equity-centric law in the nation,” only Helios Labs and nine other craft growers were actually operating as of mid-October. 

That’s due to a combination of fundraising obstacles: Banks are still federally prohibited from lending, and many social equity operators face endemic discrimination by the finance industry. The job is made even harder by a controversial state cap on growing canopy space that Jackson and other operators blame for repelling investors. 

Helios owes part of its success to a state-backed loan fund designed to help minority-owned businesses.

This year, the company received nearly $1.3 million from the Cannabis Business Development Fund, which has delivered about $21 million of the $34 million in seed funding it had promised since 2021, according to data provided by the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity.

As regulators prepare to inject an additional $40 million into the program, they say they’ve learned how to leverage the fund into a fast and simple burst of cash for social equity licensees.

But with growers set to be left out of the next funding round, small cultivators say they’re struggling to see a path forward.

Advocates and participants in the program like Jackson say the funds helped, but it will take far more money — plus some key regulatory relief — before minority-owned craft grow operations start cropping up en masse. 

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Read More: How the ‘Most Equity-Centric’ Law on Weed Went Wrong

Why Is It So Hard to Open a Cannabis Grow Site in Illinois?

In mid-2021, nearly 90 applicants were awarded craft grow licenses to start opening small, independent cultivation spaces. Many licensees faced challenges raising capital.

Bobby Burns, founder of Herban Gardens, said he came to regret applying for a craft grow license instead of a license for a dispensary.  

“Dispensaries are just so much easier to stand up,” said Burns, a political consultant who became an Evanston alderman in 2021. “And they’re easier to get funding for because they can start making revenue on day one. You just need to get product on your shelves, and you’re ready to roll.”

Burns and multiple other cannabis business owners told Illinois Answers that it can cost between $1 million and $2 million to open a pot dispensary in Illinois. A grow operation, however, can cost at least $5 million and up to $10 million.

Compounding the challenge is that the typical path to starting a new business — asking a bank for a loan — is not an option for pot growers. Selling cannabis remains illegal under federal law, meaning banks are unable to touch the industry.

Borrowers can seek some creative workarounds that allow them to raise money through loans, but they’re almost always complicated and come with pricey interest costs, said Horacio Mendez, director of the nonprofit Woodstock Institute, a Chicago-based advocacy organization for fair lending practices.

“Trying to work your way around all these laws is almost like being an accountant for the mafia,” Mendez said. “That, plus the fact that cannabis is a brand-new [legal business], creates a situation where you’re asking the lending industry to be creative. And that’s not something they’re good at.”

Even if it were legal, many social equity applicants lack the financial and political connections that many of their white counterparts have, said Akele Parnell, whose 11th Level craft grow facility got operational approval to start growing pot in Rolling Meadows last month. 

Endemic discrimination in the financial industry can’t easily be overcome by a state law, Parnell said. Data published in 2017 by the U.S. Federal Reserve indicates that Black-owned businesses are more than twice as likely to be denied loans as are white-owned firms.

“It’s not like all these Black and brown business owners are getting loans to begin with for their businesses that are federally legal,” he said.

For those businesses that are able to creatively raise funds, like Helios Labs, there’s one final obstacle in Illinois to overcome: An initial 5,000-square-foot cap on the space for growing cannabis. 

Earlier this month, the Illinois Department of Agriculture shared new guidance on how growers can apply for permission to grow past 5,000 square feet, said , said Scott Redman, founder of the Illinois Independent Craft Growers Association.

But instead of listing specific benchmarks, he said, the language leaves many criteria up to regulators’ discretion, including “the market need for additional cannabis production” and “the craft grower’s ability to cultivate additional cannabis.”  

“The cap on canopy space has effectively created a scenario where no craft growers can get off the ground,” Jackson said. “Because we’re raising on a [revenue] valuation that takes 5,000 square feet into account, we can’t raise the money we need to build our facility.”

A measure to increase allowed canopy space to 14,000 square feet failed earlier this year when a trade group representing corporate pot firms raised objections over a synthetic cannabis substance that wasn’t addressed in the bill.

Parnell, Burns and Jackson all agree that if lawmakers could change this regulation, it would unleash growers’ fundraising potential.

Helios’ “bloom room” is a physical reminder of this challenge. The room is 40,000 square feet of empty space — nothing inside but Jackson’s voice, echoing from wall to wall. 

“We had to raise half-a-million dollars up front to build out this space before we could deliver even one dollar of product,” Jackson said. “We’re paying rent on all of this space. And we still can’t use 80% of it.”

Launching the Cannabis Business Development Fund

Lawmakers in 2019 envisioned a revolving loan fund, overseen by state regulators, that would help prevent the industry from becoming dominated by clout-heavy national firms. The Cannabis Business Development Fund was seeded by license fees paid by medicinal dispensary owners who sought to pivot to recreational sales once they became legal. 

But the law included few details on how the loan fund would operate — or how it would ensure money got into the hands of those who needed it.

In late 2021, the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity awarded loans to 32 social equity licensees: 10 craft growers, 11 licensed infusers and 11 transporters, according to state records. Dispensary owners were not considered for the loans because their licenses were tied up in litigation, said Emily Bolton, a spokeswoman for the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity.

The state recruited two third-party financing firms, Good Tree Capital and Credit Union 1, to facilitate the loans.  

The process ran into roadblocks almost immediately as the firms set rigid criteria for approval, said Redman, of the craft growers’ trade association.

“The problem was that Good Tree Capital and Credit Union 1 just wrote these loans as if they were just a standalone commercial loan from any other business,” Redman said. “They pulled in credit reports on these folks, many of whom had terrible credit.”

Even Burns, who went into the application process with a business track record, said he and his partners were told to amend their loan application six times.

Seke Ballard, founder and CEO of Good Tree Capital, said his company vetted each loan applicant’s financials and business plan to ensure they “pay the loan back and the taxpayers don’t lose money.”

“I can understand how that might be a bit overwhelming for them,” Ballard said. “But here’s a harsh reality: That is going to be the standard they face with any lender.”

Bolton acknowledged the bumps in the road.

“Our highest priority was to develop and execute a program that could provide capital as expediently as possible, while meeting the fiduciary standards required for use of state funds,” she wrote in an email. “As with any first-of-its kind program, DCEO learned a lot of important lessons along the way, and we understand that for many licensees, this was their first encounter with the criteria required to execute a state-funded loan. We are grateful to the social equity licensees whose feedback helped inform program improvements.”

State Changes Course

By November 2022, officials in the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity acknowledged that the program wasn’t working. 

They decided to cut out the third-party lending agencies and announced a new strategy: the state would directly underwrite the remaining capital, and the loans would be fully forgivable, meaning they would become grants if the recipients could demonstrate the money was being put to proper use.

Would-be growers rejoiced. After more than a year, Burns’ Herban Garden received $500,000 from the state in March and another $750,000 over the summer. If all goes according to plan, he won’t have to pay the money back.

“It was beautiful,” Burns said. “Before, when we were trying to raise money, all we had was the promise of a loan. Now we had something to work with.”

Burns and his partners still aren’t done fundraising. The $1.25 million infusion was a significant boost, but Herban Garden needs to raise more than $5 million from equity investors before they can start growing cannabis flower at a facility they’re eyeing in Joliet.

Parnell, whose 11th Level also received $1.25 million in two tranches from the state this year, said the sum was “not nearly enough” to get his group to the fundraising finish line. But it was a big leap forward for their business plan, and for the other nine growers who benefitted.

“Most craft growers, unless they were already independently wealthy or had a long history of operating businesses, are not going to be able to get business loans in the private sector,” Parnell said. “So even a low-interest loan [from the state] is a really big deal. But a forgivable loan is amazing.”

Where to Go From Here

The decision to switch to a forgivable loan model wasn’t popular with everyone.

Ballard, of Good Tree Capital, acknowledged that the switch was in the best interest of borrowers who are trying to stand up their businesses — in the short term, at least.

But he said making the loans forgivable cuts against the state’s long-term vision of building up a revolving loan fund that will be able to sustain minority-owned businesses in perpetuity.

“It’s kind of a sugar rush,” said Ballard, whose multistate firm helps disadvantaged operators break into the cannabis industry. “It feels good right now, but businesses are never going to stop needing capital. So a year from now, three years from now, five years from now — where are they going to go?”

Earlier this year, the Illinois legislature voted to infuse an additional $40 million into the Cannabis Business Development Fund by pulling from a separate pot designated for medicinal users. Legislators offered few guidelines on how the money should be spent. 

Bolton said officials are preparing a new wave of loans that will only be available to social equity dispensaries, which weren’t funded in the first round. 

Craft growers are not happy about being left out of the second round of forgivable loans. Of the nearly 90 craft grow licenses that were awarded, only 13 licensees applied through the first round, of which 10 were selected, according to data from the state. That leaves plenty more need, Redman said.

“As far as growers are concerned, we don’t see why [loans to growers and dispensaries] can’t be done in parallel,” Redman said. “There should be no reason why they can’t have X dollars for one and Y dollars for the other.”

Bolton declined to set a timeline for when borrowers will be invited to apply, but she confirmed the second round will consist of “direct forgivable loans fully-funded by the state,” and will not pass through third parties. However, the department is asking for proposals for “technical assistance.”

Ameya Pawar, who co-owns social equity licenses for three cannabis dispensaries, said he was encouraged by the state’s decision to step directly into the role of lender instead of turning to third parties. 

Pawar is a former Chicago alderman and an outspoken advocate of public banking. He said the state should take advantage of the fact that it can define creditworthiness much more broadly than private lenders do, which would open opportunities for more borrowers. 

“The return for a public lender isn’t just the repayment of the loan,” Pawar said. “The return is that you’re expanding the tax base. You’re creating jobs. You’re creating more income taxes and sales taxes.”

“It gives us the opportunity to look past that traditional pro-forma,” he added.

He said the fund’s likeliest path to success is to return to low-interest, nonforgivable loans, and for the state to remain the sole underwriter.

Mendez of the Woodstock Institute agreed, saying the state’s loan program is a good start until there’s a federally legal business model to fund the industry.

“The challenge is going to be, where does the state get the money to lend?” he said.

Jackson and Al-Sabah of Helios Labs aren’t waiting around to find out. Last month, they opened a downstate dispensary in Tilton, near the Indiana border, with plans to use sales revenue to seed their grow operation in Broadview.

But the plan already hit a hiccup.

“We had just closed on a capital raise that would have allowed us to start growing while we ramp up the dispensary business,” Jackson said. “However, that investor is in the process of potentially defaulting right now.

“So, we’re still trying to figure it out.”

Reporting on equity issues by the BGA is supported by Joel M. Friedman, president of the Alvin H. Baum Family Fund.