Are 2,430 Illinois families going to be on the streets in October? That’s how an August 13 Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report (“House Funding Level Would Lead to More Than 60,000 Fewer Families Receiving Housing Voucher Assistance”) reads the HUD appropriations bill passed by the House of Representatives on July 25. “About 63,000 vouchers in use by families will lose funding,” say the CBPP analysts, whose views are backed up by a Congressional Budget Office estimate. If the cuts are shared evenly across the states, about 2,430 Illinois families who now depend on housing vouchers will not have them when the new federal fiscal year begins in October. That’s just over 3 percent of the 77,830 vouchers projected to be in use in the state at that time.
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What would a real governor do? Tribune reporter Cornelia Grumman, quoted in Mother Jones (July/August): “I think Illinois needs to set up an innocence commission, sort of like modeled after the National Transportation Safety Board. If a plane crashes and the NTSB comes in and they investigate what happened, what went wrong. Someone gets imprisoned wrongly for 20 years and it turns out they’re innocent and we do nothing. Nothing. No state does anything. I think we need to set up some kind of commission that goes in and finds out what went wrong. And who are those cops that are working on it and who are the prosecutors and who are the defense attorneys and what other cases have they dealt with?”
