For the past several years, three residents of St. Andrew’s Court, a halfway house on Chicago’s west side, have waited patiently for a spot in Chicago’s public housing system. Bobby Flowers, Jimmy Edwards*, and John Stamps are among the nearly 282,000 Chicagoans who registered for affordable housing assistance when the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) waitlist last opened in November 2014. In past waitlist cycles, these men would not have had a shot at CHA housing because all three are ex-offenders who moved into St. Andrew’s upon their release from prison.

Since HUD adopted the “One Strike and You’re Out” Rule in 1996, people with criminal records have been effectively—if not always explicitly—banned from public housing. Since that time, incarceration rates have risen steadily as a result of the War on Drugs, mandatory minimum sentencing, and other tough-on-crime policies. Upon release, inmates typically move back to the same urban neighborhoods they came from but are barred from most forms of public assistance as well as employment and educational opportunities because of their record.

[For more of this story, written by Madeleine Hamlin, go to https://www.citylab.com/equity...oner-reentry/535947/]