FAST FACTS• More than 2,500 households live in the Chattanooga Housing Authority’s 16 public housing sites.• Nearly 3,000 households get housing through private rentals paid in part by government vouchers.
Lisa Rooks, 44, talks about a crack in her paint on the ceiling of her living room in College Hill Courts. Rooks is not happy about plans by the Chattanooga Housing Authority to eliminate the housing project because it could leave her homeless.
CHA statistics on the cost of housing projects in Chattanooga.Here lies public housing.
All that’s left is to fill in the date of its passing.
Across the country and in Chattanooga, traditional large-scale public housing sites are being shuttered, the nation no longer able or willing to spend the billions of dollars a year it takes to maintain this crumbling part of the nation’s social safety net.
On top of that, for all the good such sites have done in providing numerous people with temporary shelter while they get back on their feet, large concentrations of public housing have become associated with generational poverty and crime.