The award

The Chicago Housing Authority accepted a $2.3 million Jobs Plus Initiative grant from HUD on September 15, funding a five-year employment program for working-age residents at Wentworth Gardens, according to a CHA press release. CHA is one of only 10 public housing agencies nationally to receive the grant in this round.

It is CHA's third Jobs Plus award, following programs at Altgeld Gardens from 2015 to 2019 and Dearborn Homes from 2021 to 2025. Partners for the Wentworth Gardens iteration include the Wentworth Gardens Local Advisory Council, the Chicago Cook Workforce Partnership, City Colleges of Chicago, the Chicago Park District and UI Health Mile Square.

The mechanism: three parts

HUD's Jobs Plus model, which CHA is implementing, rests on three components: employment-related services, a financial rent incentive, and community support. CHA's release said it will offer residents employment training, skill-building, financial literacy training and direct-hire job placements, with the goal of increasing the share of residents who find work, raising quarterly employment rates and boosting resident income beyond the five-year grant period.

The rent-incentive piece addresses a structural problem in public housing: because rent in most public housing is set as a percentage of income, a resident who earns more can see a large share of that increase absorbed by a higher rent bill, which blunts the financial reward for working more hours or taking a higher-paying job. Jobs Plus is designed to let participating residents keep more of their earnings without an immediate, proportional rent increase, aiming to remove that disincentive during the period residents are building new employment.

CHA highlighted the program's track record through the story of Ethiah Williams, who came to Jobs Plus as a participant and now works as a program manager. 'Jobs Plus saw potential in me before I fully saw it in myself,' Williams said in the CHA release. 'It gave me confidence, skills, leadership, and purpose.'

Scale and scope

HUD's Jobs Plus program is a place-based model — funding attaches to a specific public housing site and its residents, rather than to individuals wherever they live, which is why CHA needed a fresh grant at each new site rather than being able to extend the prior Altgeld Gardens or Dearborn Homes awards. The FY2026 Jobs Plus funding notice from HUD anticipated roughly five awards nationally worth between $1.6 million and $3.7 million each, drawn from about $10.2 million in total program funding, according to the federal opportunity listing on Grants.gov — figures that describe the funding round generally and are not specific to the Wentworth Gardens award amount, which CHA's own release states directly as $2.3 million.

CHA did not disclose in its release how many Wentworth Gardens residents are expected to participate or what specific income thresholds will trigger the rent incentive.

What the original Jobs Plus demonstration actually found

The Wentworth Gardens grant descends from a research demonstration MDRC ran for HUD and the Rockefeller Foundation in six public housing developments — in Baltimore, Chattanooga, Dayton, Los Angeles, St. Paul and Seattle — from 1998 to 2003. In three of those six sites, where all three Jobs Plus components were fully implemented and sustained, MDRC found the program produced a 16 percent increase in average annual earnings, or roughly $1,300 per year, for nondisabled working-age residents, according to a 2010 MDRC policy brief on seven-year findings. Crucially, that earnings gain persisted for at least three years after the program itself ended, evidence MDRC's researchers cited as showing the effects were not merely a temporary artifact of active case management.

A follow-up MDRC study published in 2021, sponsored by HUD's Office of Policy Development and Research, tracked the same demonstration's participants for 20 years and confirmed the earnings gains held up over the long run, one of the few place-based employment interventions with evidence that durable. HUD used that evidence base to begin scaling Jobs Plus nationally starting in 2015, funding annual competitive grants for public housing agencies to replicate the model; by 2023 MDRC had published participation and labor-market results for the first 24 of what HUD's own materials describe as an eventual roughly 60-site rollout of the program.

CHA's Wentworth Gardens award sits within that scale-up rather than the original six-city research demonstration, meaning its outcomes will be measured against the newer cohort of replication sites rather than directly against the original 16 percent figure, which applied only to the three original sites that achieved full, sustained implementation of all three program components.