The demolition of a public housing high-rise in Chicago

The videotaped fatal beating of 16-year-old Chicago Public School student Derrion Albert last month triggered a condemnation from Barack Obama and an emergency meeting at which Attorney General Eric Holder, Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley tried to figure out how the education and criminal justice system had failed Albert. But these high-profile figures largely omitted one other important issue – public housing.  Derrion Albert grew up in the Altgeld Gardens homes, a public housing project with the kinds of problems that Chicago public housing residents have endured for decades – problems that result in a violent and dangerous environment, where poor building maintenance and security, drug dealing, petty crime, and even serious violence are facts of daily life.

The Altgeld Gardens homes are the largest remaining housing project built and maintained by the Chicago Housing Authority (or CHA), which for decades has managed Chicago public housing with results that range from uneven to disastrous.  Chicago’s elected leaders have been at perpetual odds with the CHA – for years the mayor appointed its board of directors, but the mayor and city council distanced themselves from the housing authority’s decisions. That changed in February 2000 when Daley took over CHA and said all decisions would go through city hall. Further, Daley unveiled – in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development – a ten-year “Plan for Transformation” for Chicago public housing. The worst projects – cheaply built concrete high-rises – would face the wrecking ball; slightly less hopeless projects like Altgeld would be rehabilitated; and public housing tenants – usually poor and usually black – would   live side-by-side with Chicagoans of all races and incomes.

Nearly a decade later, that plan is far from completion. “The original timing goals of the plan were mandated by HUD and Congress,” says Robyn Snyderman, vice president of community development at Chicago’s Metropolitan Planning Council, a non-profit that has worked with the city on plan for transformation project. “And not all of them were terribly realistic.”  A recent audit of the CHA demonstrates how much is left to do – and how the real estate bust has added to the already precarious position of public housing residents.  However, the audit makes clear that the new vision for public housing can work – if Mayor Daley, the Chicago city council, and HUD care enough to make it work.

Here’s the Plan

A couple of weeks prior to Derrion Albert’s death, the Chicago-based Business and Professional People for the Public Interest issued the report The Third Side: A Mid-Course Report on the Transformation of Public Housing. BPI, its preferred acronym, might have the most generic, forgettable name in the history of non-profits. But behind the report and the group’s overall work on public housing stands housing attorney Alex Polikoff, who has spent more than forty years fighting for racial and economic integration in Chicago housing.  Polikoff is a critic of CHA, though he is not among those who believe that Daley is really running CHA to enrich his real estate developer pals and push public housing residents out of rapidly gentrifying areas. A Chicago Tribune investigation last year arguably offered evidence for this argument, arguing that the real beneficiaries of the Plan for Transformation are locally famous developers.

But Polikoff and the other housing experts at BPI believe in the plan — they see it as not some real estate or gentrification scheme, but as a means to make Chicago a more equitable city. The report makes a compelling case for “blending” public housing tenants with tenants who pay the market-rate rent as well as blending public housing residents with condo owners. BPI stresses that mixed-income public housing units can break apart the isolation and hopelessness that accompanies what sociologist William Julius Wilson termed, 25 years ago, the “concentration of poverty” in Chicago’s black ghettos. “It does not require a stretch of the imagination,” the report’s authors argue, “to understand that life chances may be significantly improved for children who instead spend their formative years in better neighborhoods. At bottom, the promise of mixed-income communities may be . . . the promise of breaking a grim cycle of intergenerational public housing poverty.”

This intergenerational, concentrated public housing poverty reached crisis level 20 years ago. “By the late 1980s, Chicago’s largest public housing projects were dysfunctional,” writes Roosevelt University sociologist D. Bradford Hunt in a just-released book, Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing. “Poor, African American, female-headed families were ‘stacked on top of one another’ . . .[and]  surrounded by appalling physical neglect, random violence, and social disorder.”  Nearly every tenant was economically disadvantaged. In 1995, HUD found that of the fifteen poorest communities in the nation, 11 were Chicago public housing projects. Even more astonishing was the violence tenants encountered. In 1994, at the Henry Homes project, 40 percent of residents said that a bullet had entered their apartment in the past year.

There was a silver lining to what Hunt and other scholars of CHA call a “humanitarian disaster.” Chicago’s dual problems of poverty and housing segregation entered the national consciousness for the first time in decades. The national bestseller There Are No Children Here, the documentary film Hoop Dreams, and even the horror movie Candyman showed the gap between the popular conception of America as a land of opportunity and the oppressed conditions of Chicago public housing. Public housing also re-emerged as an issue in Washington – the Clinton administration wanted to revamp the federal government’s role, while the New Gingrich-led, GOP-controlled Congress threatened to de-fund HUD entirely. HUD under Clinton took decisive action in 1995, putting the CHA into federal receivership. Washington had stepped in to try and fix Chicago’s crisis.

Andrew Cuomo

A surprisingly strong partnership developed. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley worked successfully with HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo to re-imagine CHA. Daley took over CHA in 1999 – he would now be in charge, and held politically accountable, for new construction, moving tenants, and coordinating CHA’s work with other city social services agencies. “The Mayor demonstrated a real commitment to end segregation in these communities with public housing,” says Snyderman of the Metropolitan Planning Council. Four years earlier, Daley had done something similar by taking over the Chicago Public Schools, which, like CHA, had for years been a notoriously ineffective city bureaucracy.

Daley and Cuomo agreed that the rows of high-rise buildings that were the face of  public housing in Chicago  would be demolished, since it was usually cheaper to move tenants into new housing than to rebuild than salvage the high rises. Also, HUD had issued a legal opinion that public housing apartments could be combined with private housing. The ruling had breakthrough potential:  legally legitimate mixed-income buildings where public housing units would inconspicuously blend in with the rest of a metropolis.  The mayor was enthusiastic about moving tenants displaced by teardowns  into  mixed-income locations. “Daley’s team,” Hunt writes, “wanted both to put a new face on public housing and to hide that face.”

Here’s Chicago Trying to Make the Plan Work

New townhouses in Chicago’s North Town Village

Today, the numbers don’t match the ideal that Daley has embraced.  Of the 7,500 mixed-income spots supposed to replace the demolished housing projects, only a third have been completed. And the 10,000 public housing units that were supposed to be rehabilitated, like Altgeld Gardens, are still poorly-maintained areas with concentrated poverty. Meanwhile, at a time when increasing numbers of people are being priced out of urban housing, the Plan for Transformation has actually decreased total CHA units by a few thousand, thanks to the teardowns. Community groups like the Committee to Protect Public Housing say that Daley is more concerned about beautifying Chicago than helping the city’s poorest residents.

BPI identifies a number of managerial and economic issues that have made the Plan for Transformation less than transformative. But the first place to begin is federal funding. To change the living conditions of thousands of Chicago’s most vulnerable citizens, HUD has allocated to CHA $1.6 billion, spread out over ten years. The idea was that CHA could “leverage” this cash to get additional funding from local government, private developers and banks.  The result?  CHA has to operate as lobbyist, fundraiser and real estate dealmaker. “The financing process,” the BPI authors write, “consumes time voraciously.”

But there were signs of life for the financing process – at least before the real estate bust.  The metabolic gentrification of Chicago neighborhoods in early part of this decade created a situation where some former public housing sites were located in suddenly desirable spots. This included Cabrini-Green project in the River North neighborhood, which in the 90’s transitioned from ghetto to bohemian enclave to yuppie shopping haven. Now sitting adjacent to the demolished Cabrini-Green projects is the mixed-income North Town Village. “If you walk around North Town Village,” says Snyderman.  “These are neighborhoods with different incomes and public housing living side-by-side.” Moreover, thanks to the rapidly changing neighborhood, North Town Village residents now have access to mass transit and commerce. At Cabrini-Green, BPI credits the city with “replacing one of the humanitarian disasters with a thriving, inclusive community.”

But the transformation at Cabrini has been slow to happen elsewhere – only a third of the planned mixed income developments have been built. BPI notes that the city has unevenly managed the 14,000 households that lost their homes in the high-rise teardowns. With their new, mixed-income communities still not built, tenants got vouchers to move into privately owned apartments. But few landlords wanted to take tenants from the projects, and the city did little to intervene. Thomas P. Sullivan, the CHA auditor in 2003 and 2004 and a private attorney, ruefully recalls early tenant re-location. “They were handing people vouchers and putting them back in high-poverty, high African American areas,” Sullivan says.  “They didn’t give a damn what kind of conditions they were move them into.”

CHA is now working harder to provide tenants with re-location counseling. However, thousands of tenants are in flux, moving from apartment to apartment with CHA vouchers in hand, waiting for Chicago mixed-income, real estate development to resume. And it is not just displaced tenants who are in limbo – the CHA has not taken action to improve the lives in the ten public housing buildings supposed to be refurbished. By far the largest remaining public housing project is Altgeld Gardens – of the 5,000 families still in projects inhabited exclusively by public housing tenants, 1,998 are at Altgeld.

The killing of Altgeld resident Derrion Albert brought media attention to an easily forgotten part of Chicago. Altgeld Gardens is on the city’s southern edge, thirty-five blocks south from the last stop on the Chicago Transit Authority train line. The project has always been a city within the city, requiring its own municipal services. When the local high school was turned into a military academy, students like Albert had to trek miles north to Fenger High School in the poor Roseland neighborhood.  Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell noted after the Albert killing that “historically, youngsters have impoverished neighborhoods have looked down upon youngsters from the projects.” Albert was killed because he was caught between a fight between students from Roseland and students from Altgeld.

The BPI report reveals that tensions at school are only part of the struggle of growing up in Altgeld. Just 40 percent of Altgeld units have been rehabbed. Still, the biggest problem is not the buildings, but what is around them. “CHA had no satisfactory plans beyond physical rehabilitation to begin to change existing conditions,” the BPI report comments. Mayor Daley has not flexed his political muscle to get the housing authority to coordinate with city services to bring better security against gang violence and open-air drug dealing. The city has also neither provided job opportunities for heads of households nor educational and extracurricular opportunities for children. After a dry, technocratic dissection of how the city has failed residents at Altgeld, BPI concludes thusly: “Driving through Altgeld Gardens is a depressing experience.”

Here the Plan’s Future

So Chicago Public Housing remains in choppy waters – but it’s not a hopeless situation. On the federal level, Barack Obama, a former community organizer in the Altgeld neighborhood, has appointed a White House urban czar, Adolfo Carrion. Perhaps more important, the administration has a HUD Secretary, Shaun Donovan, who is a veteran of the New York City housing authority – arguably the best-run city housing authority in the country.  Donovan’s formerplace of employment is known for integrating public housing with the rest of the New York.  So Obama, Donovan, Holder and Duncan each have backgrounds in urban policy and a stated interest in funding public housing programs like the Plan for Transformation.

However, the Obama administration is much more focused on the home ownership side of the real estate crisis.  Significant new funding for public housing is not expected.  So the bigger variable is the Chicago city government, particularly Richard Daley. The veteran mayor has been criticized for focusing on glitzy, legacy projects – like the recently failed bid to get the 2016 Summer Olympics bid – at the peril of Chicago’s most vulnerable residents. Both the Mayor and the City Council have not spent the time necessary to make CHA a fully functional city agency. But not enough progress should not be confused with no progress at all. “The public housing of today,” says Snyderman of Metropolitan Planning Council,  “is undoubtedly a whole different entity than the public housing before the plan.”

Even Polikoff, the long-time critic of CHA, offers qualified praise for the mayor. “The city is indeed playing a significant role.” he commented. “It has given millions of dollars for sidewalks and streets – it is unprecedented. The city council has also passed ordinances to support this funding. ” What Polikoff wants improved is better coordination between all the local bureaucracies – CTA to build train stations and bus stops by public housing, CPS to build schools nearby, the park service to build playgrounds nearby, and the police department to interdict gang and drug violence.  Daley has – publicly, at least — spoken with urgency about fixing the systemic problems that lead to youth violence in Chicago. Maybe with the Olympic bid dashed, the city has decided to more fully confront its glaringly evident inequalities, and this may extend to inequality in housing. “The Mayor wants this to succeed,” says Roosevelt University housing scholar Hunt. “Because he wants to wipe away the mistakes of the past.”

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