Published August 27, 2011

By Stephanie Lulay for the Beacon-News

AURORA — “That fat b----. I’ll punch her right in her stomach,” said 11-year-old D., his hand on his hip.

D. is sitting on the curb Tuesday night, watching a tenuous scene unfold. It all started with an 8-year-old flashing a body part to another child, but it swiftly became an all-out brawl between two families. Within minutes, 50 residents swarmed the courtyard.

Eight Aurora police officers arrive at the housing complex on Aurora’s West Side, and D.’s 15-year-old brother is carted off in an ambulance with his mother.

After the scene subsides, the residents go back into their apartments. D. sits on the sidewalk alone, playing shirtless with his toy motorcycle. It’s the coolest night yet in August, but tensions are running high at Jericho Circle.

After years of living in substandard conditions and following a process that has been riddled with problems and false starts, Jericho Circle residents finally all have a Section 8 relocation voucher — their ticket out of the complex.

And although all of the 84 families received housing vouchers by the start of June, more than half of the Jericho families were still living at the complex when West Aurora schools started class 12 days ago.

“Do you know how long we’ve been fighting for this? And we’re the last idiots out here,” said Sabrina Carvell, vice-president of the Jericho Circle tenant council.

Carvell and Arlisia Dockery, president of the tenant council, are two of the remaining 54 families still living at Jericho Circle. Early Aurora Housing Authority plans called for the housing complex to be torn down this fall.

Housing hard to find

On that first day of school, 13-year-old Arial Lusher and her little sister, 12-year-old Sabrina Lusher, are listening to their mom Melissa talk to neighbors about who’s left at the public housing complex.

They should be talking about what teachers and classes they have as they wait for the morning bus, said Dockery, the mother hen at Jericho Circle. Dockery doesn’t have little kids anymore, but she’s up to see the neighborhood children catch the 7:23 a.m. school bus.

After the kids leave, the women trade stories.

Lusher’s housing voucher pays $1,403 to a landlord if utilities are included in the rent, she said. If not, the voucher pays less, so she has money to pay utilities, too. She has five children.

Lusher said she found an apartment in her price range, but when she went to see it, the landlord changed his tune. “‘Well, I could actually get $1,700 for it,’” Lusher said of the conversation.

If Section 8 residents paid the rent difference under the table, they would risk losing their voucher altogether, AHA officials have said.

“I didn’t even want to look for no more damn houses. I was so low,” Lusher said.

Much like when she received her voucher, Dockery won’t say where she’s applied to rent. She’ll only say it’s a single-family, 3-bedroom home on Aurora’s West side.

The Jericho tenants are competing for a small number of landlords that may accept them, so they are a bit secretive about where they’ve found housing opportunities, she said.

“We don’t want everyone to know where we’ve found a house,” Dockery said. “If they knew, the (landlord) will pick and choose who they want to move in.”

‘Second-class citizens’

Dockery, who is a black, said she talked to a landlord on the phone who said he accepts Section 8 vouchers, but when she showed up to look at the apartment, that landlord also changed his story.

“I guess I sounded white on the phone,” Dockery said.

Carvell had a similar account, where another apartment had suddenly rented when she showed up to see it.

“At that moment, I felt like a little kid,” she said.

“‘They’ve got roaches. They are drug addicts’” Carvell said of the comments she has heard.

“See, we’re second-class citizens,” she said.

Ryan Dowd, executive director of Aurora’s Hesed House, said one of the biggest issues with finding housing for Jericho Circle residents is the landlords who accept Section 8 are being flooded with vouchers, when they typically trickle into the market.

“We’ve got ‘X’ number of landlords in Aurora that are used to accepting Section 8 vouchers. But when you flood 70 to 90 new vouchers into a market that’s finite — there’s just not enough housing to absorb the new vouchers,” he said.

There’s a three-month fatigue that’s set in, too. Carvell said her neighbors are nervous and depressed.

At times, Dockery said she’s ignored her Realtor’s calls for a few days.

“I’ve seen so many houses. I just got flustered,” she said. “I was tired of all the drama.”

Discrimination claims

Dowd said the stigma residents feel is associated with Jericho Circle is real.

Leshauna Hill has seven children, ages 6 to 17. Her housing voucher pays $1,325 if utilities are not included in the apartment’s price, and $1,600 if they are.

Finding a five-bedroom apartment or house in her price range has proved impossible, she said, especially because she wants her kids to stay in the West Aurora School District.

“They say it’s the fair market rent amount, but how can it be when you can’t find anything in the area?” she asked.

At a resident meeting, she asked if a basement can count as one of the five bedrooms she needs.

“They’ll ask me how many people are in my family and then never call me back,” Hill said.

That could be discrimination, said Kathryn McGowan Bettcher, an attorney with Prairie State Legal Services.

“So maybe that’s illegal. You can’t discriminate based on family size,” Bettcher said.

Resident Shirley Fraction came to Dockery’s apartment with a blank U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development fair housing complaint form in her hand. Fraction said she felt stereotyped because she was black and from Jericho Circle.

A 13-year resident, Fraction moved into the complex after it was rehabbed in 1997. She lives with her son, a 17-year-old West Aurora senior. After obtaining a $75 application fee from the Housing Authority to apply for an apartment, Fraction said she was shown a 2-bedroom apartment near Jericho Circle.

“I saw the apartment and I said ‘Wow. It’s nice,’” Fraction said.

Although the AHA conducts its own background check on residents, Jericho Circle residents said most landlords have required a second background check. In addition to fees, the AHA is paying for residents’ moving expenses within a 50-mile radius. Beyond 50 miles, residents get a fixed amount based upon their current bedroom size.

Fraction said the landlord she dealt with asked if her son had a criminal background and told her most Jericho residents would end up at the Hesed House homeless shelter. Although Fraction was offended, she said she was happy when she was told she was approved for the apartment.

A week passed, and that story changed, too, Fraction said.

“They were lying. I was really shocked,” she said.

According to city spokesman Kevin Stahr, no fair housing complaints have been filed to date with the city of Aurora or the Aurora Human Relations Commission.

‘Cart before
the horse’

The Section 8 housing vouchers for the Jericho Circle families were supposed to be released over four quarters in 2011. But after a letter to HUD officials from Mayor Tom Weisner and West Aurora School Board President Neal Ormond in late May, all 93 relocation vouchers were released to residents by June.

But the residents wouldn’t move out overnight, Aurora officials would soon find.

And while city officials and the Housing Authority board began to bicker about whether redevelopment of a mixed-finance housing property would be appropriate at the Jericho Circle site, the residents were still living at the property.

“I think we’re putting the cart before the horse,” said Theodia Gillespie, executive director of the Quad County Urban League, at an August community forum. “Residents need to have placement in a house tomorrow.”

Instead of worrying about redevelopment that might happen two years from now, “why can that not be a priority?” she asked.

West Aurora School Superintendent Jim Rydland agreed.

“I’m sorry. As superintendent, we should have done better. And we will,” he said to residents.

In the midst of the chaos, Mattie Coble, a six-year Jericho Circle resident, was named to the Aurora Housing Authority board last week. Coble is among those still living at Jericho Circle.

“We are human like everyone else,” Coble said at an August forum. “A lot of us are still stuck over there with no place to go.”

The plan now

Following an August forum, some community organizations formed a stakeholders’ group to tackle the task of moving residents out of Jericho Circle.

Dowd said the idea of the stakeholder meetings was to help the Housing Authority get Jericho Circle residents into housing in the community.

“Lots of other people have been involved in helping that process along,” Dowd said.

The group met twice last week.

But Hesed House and the Quad County Urban League will not be spearheading the effort as once imagined. Instead, a third-party provider that has not been named will lead the effort.

Joe Henning, president of the Aurora Area Chamber of Commerce, said that third-party provider is very qualified and experienced to deal with the housing issues.

The provider will next put together a proposal asking the AHA for any funding they may need. The Housing Authority has set aside $450,000 for relocation of residents, $61,000 of which has been spent to date.

“We’re waiting to see if (the provider has) the capacity to do it,” Henning said.

Henning said that the AHA only has two employees that are tasked with moving people out.

“I think there are a number of pieces that we’re now up against,” Henning said. “That’s where the rest of the community stakeholders will hopefully step up to identify those opportunities.”

Jean Federman, Housing Authority executive director, said individual assessments of the needs of remaining Jericho residents are also under way.

Dowd said part of the problem is that Aurora landlords are in need of more public education to understand how the voucher system works.

“The lack of awareness and understanding to how vouchers work is a real barrier,” Dowd said.

Dowd said that many landlords find that the Section 8 voucher program, a guaranteed rent payment, is actually a good deal for them.

Moved on

Carmen Castillo was one of the first residents to move out of Jericho Circle. And in the three months since she has been in her new house on the East Side, her life has changed.

Her boyfriend’s no longer in the picture, she said, so she’s relying more on her 16-year-old daughter to help with her two younger children, ages 3 and 4. Castillo suffers from lupus, a disease that affects her immune system.

Her daughter, who was attacked when she was 12 while living at Jericho Circle, now feels safe walking to nearby Phillips Park without an adult with her.

It’s a much quieter life at their new home, Castillo said.

“I met my neighbors and it went fine,” she said. “The kids play with the kids next door.”

But life in her own house has presented challenges, too, she said. She’s learning how to pay bills for the first time — lights, sewer, gas.

“I didn’t know water and sewer were two different bills,” she said. Her daughter, who works a part-time job, is helping her mom pick up the slack.

Castillo will take on her next big challenge soon as she’ll undergo a six-month trial of a new treatment for her disease.

“There is nothing at all that I miss about being there,” she said of Jericho Circle.

Dockery, who has led many children’s groups while at Jericho, is preparing for her next chapter in life, taking special education classes online.

She said that while the situation is tense now, “when we don’t have the neighbors, I’m really going to boo-hoo.”

Dockery looks down at her feet in front of her unit. It may be tough now, but she said she knows she will move out. And she said she cares about what will happen to her former home once she’s gone.

“This is not their land — it’s God’s land,” Dockery said. “And when it goes down, it better stay down.”