Poultry Farms in Apartment 13D Show Scale of Pandemic-Aid Fraud
Newly released SBA data reveal thousands of $10,000 grants went to people who falsely claimed to have businesses they didn’t have.
South Ashland Avenue, a commercial strip in the Auburn-Gresham neighborhood of Chicago.
Photographer: David Goldman/AP Photos
On a block of South Hermitage Avenue on Chicago’s South Side, rows of crenelated brick apartment buildings stand behind low iron fences and tidy lawns. It’s a residential street like thousands of others across the country, home to nurses, computer techs, hairdressers and retirees.
But if records from the Small Business Administration are to be believed, this block is also a bustling commercial hub. One man claims to employ at least 10 people in his apartment on one floor of a two-flat. Next door, an occupant of a handsome three-story with limestone quoins does the same. Ditto for a couple of her neighbors across the street. In all, the block, lacking so much as a single storefront or neon sign, contains 18 businesses employing at least 10 people each, according to the SBA. In June and July, all 18 were approved for $10,000 pandemic-relief grants. Some didn’t respond to messages seeking comment, and the rest couldn’t be reached.
The payouts on South Hermitage reveal the pervasiveness of fraud in the $214 billion Economic Injury Disaster Loan program, meant to help businesses hurt by Covid-19. In hundreds of neighborhoods in Chicago and across the country, the records show government aid flowing to statistically impossible numbers of small businesses, many of which appear on closer inspection to be fictional.