When I first met Thomas Lee, an army veteran who’d been washed out of his New Orleans home by Katrina, he was standing outside a Cabrini-Green row house, listening to an official from the Chicago Housing Authority assure him that the city would find him housing and a job. At the time Lee, the focus of my September 16 column, was sharing the two-bedroom apartment of his uncle, a friend of mine, with his sister and her seven-year-old son, who’d also been made homeless by Katrina.
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Lee showed up at Cabrini-Green a week later because he’d been told the CHA was going to allow hurricane evacuees to move into one of several vacant row houses, but he’d unwittingly walked into a dispute between public-housing activists and CHA officials. After a standoff between the activists, CHA officials, and police, the activists told Lee to forget about moving into Cabrini. A CHA official suggested he go to Fosco Park, at 13th Street and Racine, where the city’s Department of Human Services had set up an office to help evacuees.
On September 15 Lee went to the office. “They asked me what I needed, and I told them housing and a job,” he says. “I filled out some forms. They said they would call around to landlords and get back to me. They asked for IDs. I showed them my honorable-discharge paper, but I told them I had lost my Social Security card. They said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll give you some replacement papers.’” He says they had him fill out a Mayor’s Office of Workforce Development–Hurricane Katrina Self Attestation Form and told him, “This is your identification card.”
On September 20 he was at the post office at 7 AM. “It was a different lady on duty,” he says. “I asked for the original lady, but she wasn’t in. This new lady told me I had to take a drug test before I could apply. I said OK. She said, ‘Can we see your Social Security card?’ I said, ‘I lost it in the flood.’ She said, ‘You can’t take the drug test without a Social Security card.’ I told her I had this paper the city gave me–the city told me it was as good as a Social Security card. She said she didn’t know about it. She said she had to make a call and get some information. She said, ‘Why don’t you wait?’”
So far Lee’s kept his sense of humor. “They told me they were going to get me all these things, but all I got is a parking ticket,” he says, chuckling. “My uncle tells me that’s how it goes in Chicago.”
