Requiring
Chicago Housing Authority residents to be drug-tested and making it easier to evict tenants with family members accused of crime is unconstitutional and will backfire, residents said today at a downtown rally.
The CHA is proposing to change its lease policy to require all adults renting or living in CHA housing to be tested yearly for drug use, and to make drug testing mandatory for everyone applying to live in CHA buildings.
The revised policy would also make it easier for the CHA to evict tenants who live with someone who commits a crime.
The CHA says it’s responding to residents’ safety concerns and already has a similar drug policy in place in developments that have replaced older public housing across the city.
But residents who rallied outside CHA headquarters at 60 E. Van Buren St. this morning said the drug proposal would violate the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee against unreasonable searches, and would penalize families trying to steer relatives away from
drug abuse.
“To single us out for these two policies is unfair and unjust,” said Cheryl Johnson, who had to take her son off her lease in Altgeld Gardens on the Far South Side in 2006 after he was arrested with a small amount of marijuana.
When someone struggling with drug use is no longer under the same roof with family members, it’s harder to influence them to stay off drugs or enter treatment, Johnson said.
If the CHA board does approve the drug-testing policy, it should also require drug testing for everyone who works at or is a board member of the CHA, Johnson and others said.
Julia Mitchell, a resident of Lake Parc Place, said the drug testing would cause “humiliation.”
“This policy is just another way of stereotyping a group of people, based on economic status,” said Mitchell.
Although the policy gives tenants a chance to stay in CHA housing if they agree to drug treatment, residents said it would too easily lead to people being evicted.
Drug testing is already in place at 18 of the 45 mixed-income sites that have replaced the old-style public housing. Only one person has been evicted out of 51 cases in which people tested positive for drugs, according to CHA spokesman Matt Aguilar.
“We will not move forward on this unless we hear what everyone has to say,” Aguilar said.
Court decisions on drug-testing policies for people receiving government may end up blocking the proposed policy, even if it is approved.
Ed Yohnka, spokesman for the
American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, pointed to a 1999 decision in
Michigan that threw out a state policy requiring Public Aid recipients to be drug-tested. The
ACLU is opposed to the CHA proposal, even if some — or a large number — of CHA tenants are in favor of it, Yohnka said.
“As a general proposition, we oppose suspicionless searches,” Yohnka said. “We don’t think that it should be any different if somebody is renting an apartment on the North Side, in the Loop, or in the CHA.”
CHA officials are scheduled to take public comment about the proposal at the Charles A. Hayes Family Investment Center, 4859 S. Wabash Ave., at 6 p.m. Thursday. The CHA board could vote on the proposal in July
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