CHA Passed Over Walter Burnett for Top Job, Leaders Say

Three neighborhood leaders are calling out the Chicago Housing Authority for passing over Walter Burnett Jr. as its next chief, saying the agency squandered a rare chance to install a leader who actually knows what affordable housing looks like from the inside.

Armando Chacon, Randall Blakey, and John Bosca signed a letter published by the Chicago Sun-Times this week arguing that the CHA and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development made a shortsighted call in not tapping the retired 27th Ward alderman for the top job.

“Chicago needs more leadership like his, not less,” the three said in the letter.

The signatories carry weight on this issue. Chacon serves as executive director of the West Central Association. Blakey leads the Near North Unity Program. Bosca is president emeritus of Neighbors of River West. All three organizations worked alongside Burnett during his years on the City Council, and their critique lands with the credibility of direct experience.

Their case for Burnett rests on his record in the 27th Ward, which stretches from the Near North Side through the West Loop and into River West. During his tenure on the Council, he helped push through projects and policies that created affordable and mixed-income housing across neighborhoods that saw some of the most intense development pressure in the city. The argument from his supporters isn’t abstract. They point to visible results: residents who stayed put as property values climbed, community organizations that kept a seat at the table when developers came calling.

What the letter emphasizes just as much as the policy outcomes is how Burnett operated. He didn’t dictate to neighborhoods. He didn’t run projects over the objections of the people who lived in them. He listened, he partnered with local groups, and he treated community input as something more than a public relations formality.

His biography adds a layer the letter’s authors consider essential. Burnett grew up in public housing. That’s not a talking point. It shaped how he understood what was at stake every time an affordable unit disappeared or a mixed-income development stalled in committee. The signatories argue the CHA, which manages more than 50,000 housing units across Chicago according to its own records, needs a leader who carries that kind of direct knowledge into the executive suite, not away from it.

The letter doesn’t specify who was chosen instead of Burnett, and it doesn’t detail the internal process at the CHA or at HUD. What it does make plain is that the community organizations that worked most closely with him in the 27th Ward view his absence from CHA leadership as a loss for the city’s most vulnerable renters.

The CHA has faced years of criticism over maintenance backlogs, mismanagement complaints, and the slow pace of mixed-income redevelopment at legacy public housing sites across the city. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has at times stepped in to press the agency on performance benchmarks. Against that backdrop, the argument from Burnett’s backers isn’t just that he would have been a good administrator. It’s that his specific background, his 27th Ward record, and his relationships with neighborhood groups represented a real answer to the agency’s documented problems.

Chacon, Blakey, and Bosca don’t call for a reversal of the CHA’s decision. Their letter reads more as a public statement of disappointment directed at the people who made the call, and as a record of what they believe was left on the table.

Burnett spent more than two decades on the City Council before stepping down. During that time, the 27th Ward became one of the more cited examples in Chicago planning circles of a ward where rapid private development and affordability commitments managed to coexist, at least to a degree. That outcome didn’t happen by accident, and the three signatories want it on the record that one person’s approach made it possible.

Whether the CHA moves forward with a different leadership direction, or whether HUD continues to shape the agency’s priorities from Washington, the next test will be the same one Burnett’s supporters say he was uniquely prepared to meet: keeping working-class and low-income Chicagoans housed in neighborhoods that are changing fast around them.