At Chicago Housing Project, Both Fear and Renewal

By SUSAN SAULNY - New York Times - March 18, 2007

CHICAGO — On a night of freezing temperatures, a bare-chested baby crawled alone along an open ninth-floor gallery at the Cabrini Green housing project, its wails piercing through a nearby apartment’s living room walls.

“Whose child is this?” Mattie Gibson shouted, darting from the apartment and peering into vacant units. “Hello? There’s a baby here!”

From a corner apartment, two little boys from a family of squatters emerged to take the child from Ms. Gibson’s arms.

“This is the kind of chaos all around here,” said Ms. Gibson, a payroll clerk who has lived here for 15 years. “No one seems to be listening. It’s like they all moved on.”

For the most part, they have.

More than a decade ago, when the Chicago Housing Authority began dismantling much of its notoriously dysfunctional stock, the worst of Cabrini Green was the first to meet the wrecking ball because it was considered to be among the most frightful addresses in the country.
For some families, it still is. Under the supervision of a federal judge, the demolitions have slowed while the residents of several deteriorating buildings and the Housing Authority negotiate redevelopment plans and where the displaced population will go.

In one 19-acre part of the project officially known as the William Green Homes, there were once more than 1,000 apartments in eight 15-story towers. Today, 176 families and an unknown number of squatters live there in three remaining buildings. At its peak, the entire Cabrini project was home to about 15,000 people in hundreds of row houses and towers. Many of those structures are long gone, or are awaiting rehabilitation or demolition.

The project was popularized by the 1970s sitcom “Good Times” as a neighborhood of strivers and funnymen, but reality was more cruel: Cabrini Green was the kind of place where a young boy could be killed by sniper fire while holding his mother’s hand on the way to school, as happened in the fall of 1992.

Now the neighborhood, near the intersection of Halsted and Division Streets on the North Side near downtown, is rapidly gentrifying with new condominiums and shopping strips, amenities that were unthinkable just a decade ago.

Though life in the project remains hellish — a woman recently fatally overdosed in the stairwell near Ms. Gibson’s door, and drug dealers sometimes take control of the building entrances — there is a feeling that the worst of the bad old days are over for the neighborhood at large. From the gallery outside her apartment, Ms. Gibson can see the gleaming lights of two new Starbucks, a Blockbuster and the shopping carts from a stylish grocery store.

Because of the changes, many public housing residents have refused to leave the area, where roots run generations deep. In 2004, the Local Advisory Council, which represents hundreds of residents, sued the Housing Authority over relocation plans from the city’s Plan for Transformation, a $1.4 billion blueprint for public housing renewal adopted in 2000.

Richard Wheelock, a lawyer for the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago, which represents the tenants, said the Housing Authority’s demolition program had far outpaced its construction, leaving families with few options beyond “equally dangerous and segregated communities” on the city’s West and South Sides. “The only leverage the residents have is to say we’re going to stay here until you build the stuff,” he said.

Mr. Wheelock also said that tens of thousands of displaced residents who meet certain standards have received federal housing vouchers, which allow them to move wherever they find a willing landlord.

About two-thirds of the displaced families with vouchers have indicated that they would prefer to return to traditional public housing, officials said. But the Plan for Transformation, a national model in its scope and original ambition, is off schedule and in need of more money. The goals were to demolish obsolete buildings and to break up pockets of poverty by incorporating public housing into mixed-income communities.

Seven years into it, slightly less than 30 percent of the new housing for those residents in mixed-income developments has been built or rehabilitated, according to the authority’s 2007 annual plan. That represents about 2,270 new dwellings for people with permanent relocation rights on a waiting list of 15,000 families. (And beyond those who were displaced by the demolitions, there are more than 90,000 people from the general public on another waiting list for public housing.)

Under the transformation plan, the Housing Authority also set out to rehabilitate 5,000 units of public housing for families by 2010. So far, 1,733 units have been delivered, the annual plan said. The time frame for everything has been extended to 2015.

The authority has produced housing much more quickly for its older citizens, rehabilitating almost all of the 9,438 units it promised. It has also rehabilitated more than 2,500 units for families in so-called scattered sites around the city.
“What drives us is money,” said Sharon Gist Gilliam, the chief executive of the Housing Authority. “If I could get my hands on a quick $2 billion we could get this done in three or four years.”

There are signs of hope: Just across from what remains of Cabrini Green are new mixed-income communities that are thriving as models for the future. Many more are on the way but housing officials point to rising construction costs as their main obstacle to a faster delivery.

With so much of the project gone now, residents said the problems have not disappeared so much as been concentrated. Housing officials insist that the buildings are well maintained and that there is a constant police presence.

The place tells its own story.

Drug dealers form thickets in the lobbies so deep that it resembles a crowded market. The elevators are often out of service, forcing residents into stairwells that addicts have claimed for their own purposes.

And then there are the squatters.

“I want to be out of here so bad,” said Sierra Milton, who lives on the 14th floor of one of the last towers. “There are people hiding everywhere, in the hallways, around the corners. I want to go because I’m scared. I’ve been living here since 1998 and this is the worst I ever felt.”

Nikia Evans was born on the fifth floor of the Green Homes because an ambulance did not make it to her mother in time. She is still there, along with her aunt and grandmother, waiting for a time and place to move. The uncertainty is unsettling.

“I heard that we were getting vouchers,” said Ms. Evans, who works at a catalog call center and qualifies for a voucher. “But I’ve heard so many stories I don’t know what to believe.”

Two doors down, Ms. Evans’s aunt, Thelma Hicks, 67, sought to reassure the family.

“If I had a choice, I’d stay here because this is my roots,” she said. “But we know things change. And we always have to be open to new things. It’s hard to deal with this but they say things will change for the best. We’ll see.”