Total CHAos:

Guerilla Marketing in Public Housing

Jamie Murnane, New City Chicago

"Are tourists more important than the poor?" Mayor
Daley asks a few pedestrians waiting for the CTA. Dan
McLean, president of MCL, asks "Do developers deserve
a tax break more than you?"

Of course, Daley and McLean didn't literally ask these
preposterous head-scratchers, but CHAos, a new
marketing campaign on the offensive that launched last
week and has its sights set on the Chicago Housing
Authority, has splattered pictures of the public
figures on billboards, newspapers and public transit

spouting such offensive blurbs.

CHAos mimics the Chicago Housing Authority's Leo
Burnett-created marketing campaign that began last
year, which proclaimed the new face of "CHAnge" with a
"Plan for Transformation" that would reshape Chicago's
public housing. And by reshape, they meant tear down
all of the CHA's high-rise public housing
units--14,000 buildings in all--which the CHAos
campaign says would ultimately displace more than
20,000 residents.

The CHAos website, www.chicagohousingauthority.net
(cleverly titled, as the real Chicago Housing
Authority finds its home at www.thecha.org), poses the
question: "How many units of Lincoln Park housing

would be demolished if the plan for transformation
took place there?" The CHAos campaign claims that the
CHA has done very little in the way of change--and
that public housing residents remain at the bottom of
city officials' lists.

"Do money and politics mix?" asks CHA CEO Terry
Peterson. No response, as of press time, from the
Chicago Housing Authority.