The CHA Transformation Plan The CHA Transformation Plan ensures every public housing family has a place to live after the agency demolishes its 52 high-rises and builds communities mixed-income in their place. But the plan makes no provision for those on the waiting list. From 1994 to 1999, 36,989 families applied for housing at CHA, according to agency records. In these six years, 3,754 people have left the list to move into CHA households. The agency is still accepting applications, which most prospective tenants fill out at the CHA Occupancy Department, 4700 S. State St. Applications are time-stamped, which determines their place on waitlists organized by number of bedrooms requested. When applicants reach the top of the lists, the first available apartment is matched. Families who decline housing offers are removed from the general waitlist, but can add their names to a secondary list for specific properties or dispersed housing, said Gregory Russ, chief of staff for CHA's operations department. The thousands of scattered units are intended to help satisfy a long-standing federal court order to desegregate public housing. Under federal law, the CHA was required to give preference to families on the list who lived in substandard housing, paid more than half their income toward rent, or were homeless. Congress made these requirements optional in 1998, and the agency chose to eliminate them, Russ said. Preferences are "difficult to verify" and make it "harder to explain" to other families why they were ignored, he said. Like the Smileys, Charlene Brown-Priest, 35, couldn't wait. Last December, after an operation left her temporarily unable to work, Brown-Priest ended up in a homeless shelter with her 17-year-old daughter, Kenya Brown. The family lived above a church near 61st Street and Vernon Avenue in Woodlawn. . Brown-Priest said he could barely cover rent at his $8.25-an-hour job as a full-time security guard. The $400-a-month apartment had "no running water, no working toilets and mice running everywhere," Brown-Priest said. . Living there was "six months of hell, but it was still a place to put your head." She said she added her name to the CHA waiting list in December, then settled into an apartment in Taylor with her daughter and her husband, Stanley Priest. “This is paradise,” said Kenya Brown, standing in the sparsely furnished but clean and freshly painted two-bedroom apartment. «It's hot here. It's so nice to have a flush toilet again,” she said.