A Chicago Fire Football Club and Chicago Housing Authority news conference once guaranteed a Mary Baggett appearance.
Baggett has served as the CHA resident cheerleader for the two organizations as the housing authority entered into a controversial agreement with the Chicago Fire to lease 23 acres of the agency’s land for the soccer team’s new training facility on the Near West Side.
In news conferences full of lofty speeches from the various stakeholders, Baggett was always there to offer her gratitude to the soccer team and the housing authority. She showered them with praise and shared her hopes for the future of the community with this investment. She also got combative with residents who were not fans of the development deal and pushed back against the naysayers who said no housing would come of the project.
Now, Baggett has changed her tune.
“CHA is trying not to keep their end of the bargain,” said Baggett, the president of the ABLA Homes Local Advisory Council, CHA’s resident board for the Near West Side community. “We are living in a deplorable state over here.”
Baggett and CHA are pointing fingers at one another. Baggett says the housing authority is not keeping its contractual obligation to rehab Brooks Homes, the 330-unit building where she and other CHA residents live adjacent to the new soccer facility. The Chicago Fire, CHA and its residents signed a legal agreement as a part of the land lease deal on the terms of the Brooks Homes redevelopment. CHA says resident leaders are becoming a liability to construction projects following a CHA Office of the Inspector General report.
The new conflict between CHA and Baggett underscores long-festering tensions between community advocates and residents who have criticized the housing authority for leasing public land to a private soccer team and is a setback for the agency as it’s sought to build public support.
This scuffle is going on while the agency has been bleeding staff in recent months. Eight high-ranking officials have left the housing authority since August, including one who was fired. As it reckons with the departures of these senior leaders and searches for a new CEO, the agency has launched a series of initiatives for 2025, including moves meant to increase housing and safety for residents.
Baggett told the Tribune that CHA is conducting a partial rehab of Brooks Homes instead of the full rehab outlined in the contract. Contractors are closing up walls, she said, with feces and garbage behind them. She also said there was a recent gas leak at the property and conditions are making residents sick. The Fire is, however, holding up its end of the deal with residents, Baggett said, including by hosting a job fair in the community on Monday.
Leonard Langston Jr., CHA’s interim chief property officer, told the Tribune that CHA is conducting a full rehab of Brooks Homes and the scope of the work was shared with Baggett and others via email last month. He confirmed there was a gas leak in a crawl space at the property that has since been addressed; the crawl spaces at Brooks Homes, Langston said, will also be completely renovated as a part of the redevelopment.
“We are committed to preserving and modernizing our public housing sites so we can continue to provide that secure and stable housing for our families,” Langston said. “Resident safety is our highest priority.”
Meanwhile, according to a copy of the document obtained by the Tribune, CHA’s OIG sent housing authority executive leadership a notice on March 7, detailing that it had identified a “significant risk” to the agency because CHA staff and contractors are “allowing public housing resident leaders and/or non-employees to become inappropriately involved in CHA construction projects.”
While noting the importance of resident leadership in advocating for CHA residents, the OIG notice states that CHA employees who “delegate their decision-making authority to non-employees expose the agency to significant legal liability and jeopardize the safety and welfare of CHA tenants.”
The OIG then recommended that CHA management immediately communicate with the agency’s property and asset management division employees, contractors and the Central Advisory Council (the top resident board) that all resident leader feedback on development work should be directed to the relevant CHA senior managers, not the agency’s contractors. Langston then sent a note to the Central Advisory Council and the local advisory councils’ leadership a week later to communicate this message.
“We really appreciate the valuable role that our elected resident leaders play in the partnership that we have with them because, ultimately, we are committed to the same: ensuring that we have good housing for our residents,” Langston told the Tribune. “We do agree with the OIG’s recommendations, in that while we value that partnership, there also is a line that we just have to ensure is not crossed.”
Langston confirmed that resident leaders for Brooks Homes, currently CHA’s largest renovation project, and its contractors were spoken with as a result of the OIG report.
Following the OIG notice, Baggett and a couple of other Brooks Homes residents shared their displeasure with the public housing authority at its March 24 board meeting.
CHA keeps “sabotaging this project, stopping this project … when this project should be moving according to the signed agreement,” Baggett said.
“It seems to me that CHA’s team wants to do what they want to do and not do what’s right by the community,” Baggett said. “The community is suffering under the hands of your team.” She said the residents will have to take this issue to court if CHA does not follow through on its end of the deal.
Robert Merritt, a Brooks Homes resident who spoke at the board meeting, said some of the rehab work that has been done is not being executed properly, allowing mice and rats to come into residents’ units.
He also said crime is “extremely low” in the neighborhood right now thanks to job opportunities for residents on the project.
“It gives them something to do, so we want to keep that momentum up with them working,” Merritt said, “as well as get everything else done in the area.”
