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Chicago’s Public Housing Authority has an unusually high vacancy rate. Until they were evicted, it also had a group of unhoused people occupying one of those vacant buildings to bring attention to the ongoing vacancy problem – and to stay warm.
The agency is investigating after a management company forced activists who’d been at the house since January to leave the property. The firm’s president, having viewed video of the incident said it “does not condone this type of behavior under any circumstances.”
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KD Williams, 39, and Wilson Mather-Glass, 25, are two of the occupants of a house in Humboldt Park. They said they moved in Jan. 1 after seeing a new homeless encampment pop up in the neighborhood and a large number of vacant houses at the same time, all allegedly owned by the Chicago Housing Authority.
The housing authority said it maintains more than 16,000 units of public housing and a portion of the units are vacant for a number of reasons at any given time.