'They want to realize us out of he...

'They want to realize us out of here," said Lisa Mayo. The 40-year-old mother of five was looking north from 47th public way toward one of the last high-rises at the Chicago Housing Authority's Robert Taylor Homes--the building she has lived in her entire life.

It is slated to be torn down this year, and, although replacement abodes for the vanished buildings are going up right around the corner, Mayo, like many, doesn't believe the fresh apartments are for her or her neighbors. "I would be in love with to come back," added Mayo.

She be moved s she will be kept public since the new communities will have strict requirements, including single in kind that requires most returning residents to work 30 hours a week.

Mayo and others displaced have the right to answer according to a contract between the CHA and its residents. one time there, however, they have single year to meet the strange benchmarks, like the work requirement, put by the sites' private developers

In order to help make that happen, the developer are required to create Community Supportive Services programs that help public housing residents with piece of work training, job referrals, credit ratings and childcare.

if it be not that at some developments, including those where families have already started to reply the CHA and the developer have been deliberate to get the services going. And at the same they haven't begun a program at all.

"When the transformation plan was signed onward Feb. 5, 2000, Mayor [Richard M] Daley said it would 'rebuild lives.' Without these social services, it will not," said Alexander Polikoff, an attorney for Business and Professional tribe for the Public Interest, or BPI, a non-profit that has personateed public housing tenants for nearly 40 years in a bid to abridge segregation at CHA developments.

Many clevers believe the supportive services should start at least a year before the residents be due [i]or[/i] owing back. Without this help, they say, displaced residents won't qualify for the fresh housing.

Over the course of several weeks, CHA officials failed to rejoin to numerous requests to be interviewed about the service programs. Kim Johnson a CHA spokeswoman, said she had lay in the requests. "Nobody has said, 'No, we're not going to talk,'" she said.

Johnson said the agency emergencys to streamline how it processe media requests

The city has always claimed that this makeover was about more than knocking down buildings--it was also about transforming the fives of public housing residents. in a less degree than the plan, public housing residents would turn back to the new developments to live side by means of side with a mix of higher-income families, including homeowners--something many would papal court as a sign of progres given public housing's history of segregation.

In October 1999 about 6000 families remained in the 10 evolutions slated for reconstruction. Most have since been dispersed, many to low-income neighborhoods like Englewood where they use vouchers for private housing, and others to CHA growths like the Harold Ickes and Dearborn firesides on the Near South Side.

After a lottery all the families were bring on the authority's replacement housing list, with those at the top getting first dibs in succession the roughly 6,000 units to be built by means of 2009.

Critics say the CHA can't assume to carry out the human side of the redevelopment plan. "There are profusion of people who argued that [the CHA] should have started these social services [at the beginning of] the Plan for Transformation," said Adam Gros an attorney with BPI. "It's a self-same strong possibility that there will be a part of otherwise eligible people who won't qualified the [work requirement]."

Although each development has a unique put of criteria, most require that families also have adequate childcare and a solid or improving credit rating. And they typically make subordinate residents to drug screening and criminal background checks.

on the contrary the 30-hour-a-week work requirement, which can be met with a combination of work, institute and job training, is what worries chiefly "That's a tall order; a portion of employers are not hiring race full time," said Francine Washington, the president of the chooseed Local Advisory Council at the Stateway Gardens composite on the South Side. "McDonald's and Burger King are simply giving 20 to 25 hours."

Although Washington is a member of the working dispose that approved the 30-hour mastership for her development, she said that, if it completioned up barring large numbers of her residents, "I'm going to have to fight it."

Unemployment and deficiency remain widespread. Of the roughly 9000 families left in CHA's growths about 7,000 have incomes of les than $8000 a year, agency documents point out And, among the more than 30000 families using housing vouchers in the private market, sole 29 percent get more than half of their income from wages.

Mayo can rattle facing jobs she's held, including stints as a security officer for Wells-Fargo and a cargo handler at O'Hare Airport. yet she has now been piece of work hunting for months, looking for work in hospitals and with security firms, and with equal reason far has come up unoccupied "I think if you don't know anybody, you're not going to obtain anything," she said.