There's a long waiting list to get into public housing in Cleveland. At last count, the list ran to about .
That's about one out of 20 city residents, all waiting to get apartments at places like Woodhill Homes. And the number doesn't include the , formerly Section 8, where people get a subsidy to rent an apartment on the private market. Another 10,000 people wait on the list for that.
The average wait for a public housing apartment here is , which , nationally, of wait times. Some people at Woodhill have told me they waited four years or more.
With all that waiting, people probably stay a long time once they get in, right?
Well, not really. The . That鈥檚 longer than the stays in a private apartment, but hardly the decades that some may imagine.
At Woodhill Homes specifically, the average stay is actually shorter than the national average: five years, according to an analysis of Census data performed for ideastream by .
These statistics challenged some of my own preconceptions about public housing. I'd always assumed that it was easy to get into public housing and hard to get out, because the neighborhoods tend to be isolated from jobs and opportunity.
The reality, though, may be closer to the opposite: It's hard to get in, and not all that hard to get out 鈥� if you want.
In this episode of "Inside the Bricks," we hear stories of people moving into Woodhill Homes, and moving out.
Plus, we consider what it's like to live in a place where a lot of people 鈥� 鈥� believe you shouldn't want to stay.
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