CHICAGO, 13 October 2003 — Hoping to rid itself of an urban-planning nightmare, Chicago is ripping down its notorious high-rise public housing projects and building utopian enclaves that house the wealthy alongside the poor.
A shrinking of public housing is occurring nationwide and advocates for the poor compare the trend — and the gradual demolition of grim housing projects — to the decimation of neighborhoods by 1960s-era urban renewal.
Some say it parallels the forced relocation of American Indians to distant, barren reservations a century ago.
The pervasive suspicion among those living in the infamous Cabrini-Green project, which came to symbolize the violence and despair of America’s public housing, is that Chicago Mayor Richard Daley is executing a subtle land grab aimed at the project’s 30 city blocks of prime property, located within sight of the luxurious lakefront area known as the Gold Coast.
In the former outlines of some of Chicago’s projects, once home to 100,000 of the city’s poor, modest townhouses and low-rise apartments have begun to spring up. But only a third of the new units are generally reserved for the poor.
Under a 10-year plan launched in 1999, the city’s 44,000 public housing units are projected to shrink by 40 percent though skeptics say the number housing the poor will be considerably smaller.
In Cabrini-Green, where buildings began coming down in the mid-1990s, residents believe they will not be allowed back.
“I had a lot of friends in those high-rises. Now we’re separated. The land grab’s been done,” said Margaret Smith, an unemployed, asthmatic grandmother of five outside her deteriorating row house. “Where are you going to put all these people?”
That is a question being posed about thousands of people displaced by the master plan to revamp the nation’s worst public housing. No one knows where some of them have gone.
The federal government estimates that 6,700 out of 48,000 displaced families nationwide have either disappeared into the private housing market or less welcome surroundings.
Some have squeezed in with friends or relatives, thousands more squat illegally in vacant apartments, and an untold number are homeless, according to academic surveys.
Most displaced tenants were either moved into remaining projects or have been granted vouchers with which to pay rent in the private market, said Michael Liu, undersecretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Voucher holders from the projects often end up in equally poor neighborhoods, academics say, as many are unaccustomed to finding an apartment and landlords in nicer areas often refuse to rent to them.
Displaced residents receive a pledge that they will one day secure new public housing — provided they meet strict conditions.
Out of 500 families from Cabrini-Green, representing a portion of those displaced, 400 recently failed the screening process for Northtown Village, a quaint, suburban-looking development of 260 apartments and townhouses adjacent to the looming high-rises, developer Peter Holsten said.
Those who were disqualified did not attend meetings to discuss job prospects or failed drug tests and refused counseling. Others did not have clean credit and criminal records.
Some residents do not plan on waiting. “I want to move up out of here, find my own place,” said Lisa Smith, 32, a mother of three.
“They’re using one strike to force people out,” said Carole Steele, a Cabrini-Green resident and activist, citing a rule that kicks out an adult tenant if his child commits a crime.
By skipping repairs on the remaining buildings — a charge the housing authority denies — fewer tenants will be left to be housed, Steele said. Boarded-up windows that pockmark the remaining high-rises lend credence to Steele’s charge.
The once-nightly gunfire has gone quiet at the city’s semi-demolished projects, but the violence has shifted to remaining projects where gang lines were redrawn by the tenant consolidation, police say.
The housing authority has temporarily stopped demolition at Cabrini-Green as it juggles its array of tasks and allows new construction to catch up.
“When the transformation plan was started there were four homeless shelters in Chicago, today there are 14. Homelessness is what’s going to happen and it’s too bad, because these families should be the beneficiaries,” tenants’ attorney William Wilen said.
Wilen suggesting replacing the projects’ “vertical ghettos” with low-rise housing exclusively for the displaced poor, coupled with counseling and job training.
He and others questioned whether residents of the mixed-income, mixed-race developments truly interact and branded as unrealistic the theory that the values of the working middle-class will rub off on the poor.
Experts are debating whether the communities designed to blend rich and poor will succeed. Developments in Atlanta and St. Louis have been helped by their desirable locations near city centers, but attracting buyers to downtrodden areas may prove more difficult.