High-Risers

by Ben Austen

  Vince Lane couldn’t know how vehemently Cabrini-Green residents would fight to save their tragic home over the next quarter century, or who among them would get to stay on the land in new mixed-income buildings, or what would happen to those who were dispersed. But he knew that the name Cabrini-Green was a catalyst for this change to come. He announced as he prepared the $50 million grant application for the first phase of the development’s overhaul, “Cabrini symbolizes all that is wrong with public housing.”

  The residents of 1230 N. Burling who listened to Lane were unmoved by his mixed-income vision for Cabrini-Green. Their building had the same high concentration of poor and black families as the other towers, and yet they were already partners in its restoration. HUD had awarded the 1230 North Burling Resident Management Corporation $6.8 million to oversee a full-scale renovation of the high-rise. They were getting a new roof, new pipes and trash chutes, a new heating system. They were replacing all the windows and rehabbing every apartment. And like anyone renovating a home, Dolores Wilson and the other managers obsessed over the details. They selected colors and styles, changing their minds ten times before settling on their picks. Blinds: white Levolor. Tile: mauve vinyl. Elevator entrance: terra-cotta. Exterior facade: eggshell. They interviewed engineers, contractors, and suppliers. They devised a five-phase renovation schedule, with families slated to move temporarily into rehabbed vacant apartments in the building while their own units were completed.

  Bertha Gilkey warned them that they needed to document how every cent was spent, since people were going to assume that they were incompetent or, worse, thieves. If the renovation was over budget or shoddily done, the residents were sure to be blamed. “I was scared,” Dolores would say. “I figured we were going to mess up on this or that.” So it was a milestone worthy of jubilation when their resident management corporation finalized its very first construction contract, in 1992, for the installation of the weather-sealing double-pane windows and the repair of the tower’s exterior concrete. Dolores wrote in the flyer announcing the celebration, “This ceremony would symbolize the success of the RMC’s hard work, cooperative spirit and participation in the comprehensive modernization program.” As further proof of how much they’d accomplished, she included in the invite the contract number for the work and its dollar amount, $1,274,000.

  The general contractor that Dolores helped pick came highly recommended. Shah Engineering had numerous jobs with the city and state. When the work progressed slower than scheduled, the firm’s owner, Manu Shah, assured her that there were always unforeseen delays. He said his crew had discovered lead-based paint in many of the apartments. The craftspeople he hired complained as well about cockroaches, saying they weren’t paid to be exterminators. When Shah bid on the project, he and his subcontractors had to detail how they would hire residents. People from the building wanted to work. Dolores and her team readied them, sending residents to training sessions, giving them tips on how to be interviewed, and submitting their names to the CHA and HUD. But the contractors and subcontractors came up with excuses for why they didn’t hire more people from the lists provided. One morning when the painters and drywallers showed up for work, a group of residents barred their entrance into the building. The tenants were shutting down the worksite until the contract was honored. Days passed, and then weeks. The CHA assigned an official to mediate the dispute. Shah agreed to another round of interviews. One subcontractor hired six additional tenants. The roofer took on two residents at $13.57 an hour. Work on the building resumed.

  A few years later, after a long federal investigation, Manu Shah pleaded guilty to bilking the city and state out of $10 million. His engineering firm had been awarded more than sixty government contracts with Chicago alone, and it was caught overcharging on the jobs. The residents of 1230 N. Burling could only shake their heads. “That’s Chicago,” they’d say. They’d seen it before.

  But as far as the renovation of their building went, Dolores and her neighbors were thrilled with the results. Amid the public outcry to tear down Cabrini-Green, their high-rise looked new. The outside walls were restored to the color of creamy vanilla. The mechanicals were updated. And Dolores loved her new kitchen and weather-sealing double-pane windows. “Everyone wanted to move into the Burling,” she’d say. The building didn’t just look good. For the residents, it was a monument to what could be accomplished when they were given the power to shape their own lives. “I wish Oprah had said ‘There are no children here,’” Dolores would pronounce. The Alex Kotlowitz bestseller about the Horner Homes had been made into a television movie starring Oprah Winfrey as the mother of Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers. “We would have been all over her,” Dolores went on. “Children still live here.”

  IN THE FIRST issue of Voices of Cabrini, in April 1993, the newspaper’s co-editor, Mark Pratt, welcomed readers by expounding on the publication’s name. “How often have you sat and either watched a report on television or read an article in a newspaper about Cabrini-Green and said to yourself, ‘I wish they had spoken to me,’ because you felt you had something to contribute or debate?” Six months had passed since Dantrell Davis’s murder, and Pratt was sick of the police sweeps and his neighborhood being called out as a paragon of inner-city horrors. He’d been a small child in 1972 when his family moved to the rowhouses, and he was ready to set the record straight on many things. He wrote of the homegrown gang truce, “It is a well acknowledged fact by some police officers within the Cabrini community that the peace treaty is really what has changed the safety of Cabrini and not the storm troopers, or Nazi-like tactics of the lockdown.” One contributor, addressing the imbalance in the media coverage of his home, wrote, “When something bad does happen in Cabrini-Green, and you do a story on it, please leave Dantrell Davis out of it. LET HIM REST IN PEACE.”

  Every three or four or five weeks, whenever an edition was completed, Voices of Cabrini would be filled with lists of graduates from the local public schools, tutoring programs, and GED classes, updates on the Little League season, and congratulations to tenants like Natalie Howard, of 911 N. Hudson, who took first place in a playground safety contest. It included poems, movie reviews, and remembrances of those who’d passed. The paper shared tips on how to identify child abuse and how to deal with an infant who wouldn’t sleep. Sidebars explained tenants’ rights and provided information on the area’s churches and legal-aid clinics. A lifetime Cabrini tenant, reflecting on his journey into and out of addiction, thanked local role models, notably Hubert Wilson, whose drum and bugle corps had inspired him to get clean and to teach drums at Sojourner Truth Elementary. “A family man,” he wrote in memory of Dolores’s husband, “who still took time to be an outside father to boys who didn’t have a father.”

  The newspaper grew out of an unexpected alliance between Cabrini-Green and the wealthy North Shore suburb of Winnetka. Peter Benkendorf, who operated a Chicago nonprofit focused on civic engagement, made the match. As he followed the news of Dantrell Davis, he recalled a shooting that had occurred in Winnetka four years earlier. A thirty-year-old woman named Laurie Dann, after trying to poison dozens with arsenic, walked into an elementary school with three guns, shooting six and killing one child before taking her own life. The events led to a book—Murder of Innocence—and a made-for-television movie starring Valerie Bertinelli as the unhinged killer. “School shooting” wasn’t yet a thing, but Benkendorf imagined that Cabrini-Green and Winnetka shared an unexplored bond. He connected with Henrietta Thompson, a Cabrini tenant who’d assisted the Candyman producers when they filmed on location at the development. They drove out to Winnetka and met with a group of women who’d started a community newspaper following the Laurie Dann incident as a form of therapy and a way to rebuild trust. At Cabrini, no one received grief counseling, not even Dantrell’s young classmates, and residents were being told there was little there worth saving. Thompson liked the idea of the newspaper.

  Thompson and Pratt shared the editing responsibilities
. Another ten Cabrini residents joined the staff, and during the first year of publication nearly a hundred people from Cabrini-Green contributed. They laid out the pages at a nearby ad agency where Benkendorf had worked, printing a thousand copies of each issue. Pratt borrowed a used car to deliver stacks of the papers to the high-rises and rowhouses, to local churches and community centers.

  Jimmy Williams, who as a teenager had been the drummer in the Electric Force Band, wrote a regular advice column, often of the tough-love variety: “Peer Pressure? What the hell is that? If you feel so low about yourself that you must follow the Joneses, lay down and die.” Godfrey Bey, who’d grown up in public housing on the West Side and owned a fast-food seafood restaurant, wrote a cooking column called “Come and Get It!” He presented recipes for such dishes as spaghetti conquistador and Cabrini mustard and turnip greens.

  The reviewer who covered the music scene at Cabrini-Green—“Chi-town’s capital hip-hop headquarters”—mailed in his pieces from rural Illinois, four hours southwest of Chicago. K-So, who’d written lyrics for the Slick Boys, was in a state prison serving five years on a drug conviction. He managed to keep up with the trends (he rated Naughty by Nature’s “Hip Hop Hooray” the “dopest single of 1993”), and what he couldn’t verify from the penitentiary he made up. Born Pete Keller in a section of the Near North Side neighboring Cabrini, he renamed himself “K-So” at twelve, for “Knowledge, Strength, Opportunity.” As a teenager, he decided to make Cabrini-Green his home, residing over the years in the rowhouses and twenty-one of the twenty-three high-rises. He loved the public housing project. He hated it, too, since many of the people he knew and cared about there ended up dead, in prison, or strung out, sometimes on the drugs he sold them. “Cabrini-Green has layers,” he’d say. “Cabrini has so many fucked-up multiple layers.”

  In 1995, when Keller was paroled from prison, he hopped a Greyhound back to Chicago and finished out his sentence under house arrest in a Cabrini-Green high-rise. Voices of Cabrini had stalled by then, and K-So restarted the paper with the zeal of someone who’d thought about little else for thirty months in an eight-by-ten-foot cell. In one of the many articles he wrote, he tried to make sense of a visit to Cabrini-Green by US congressman Christopher Shays, a Connecticut Republican who showed up at the housing complex unannounced over a Labor Day weekend.

  Ever since Jane Byrne’s three-week residency, numerous politicians had made a point of coming to Cabrini, usually to add grist to whatever housing or welfare reforms they were pushing. At 1230 N. Burling, Dolores Wilson regularly toured congressmen and senators. She met Jack Kemp so many times, she said, that she was willing to switch over to the Republicans if it meant sending him to the White House. “I don’t care what Jesse Jackson or anyone else says,” Dolores would say. “I’m voting for Kemp because I know what he’s for.”

  Keller was happy to play host to Shays. Fair skinned and straight haired, K-So was raised by adoptive parents who were white, and at various times he lived as a white person, a black person, and a Latino. For these reasons, he thought of himself as a bridge between cultures—and between Cabrini-Green and the outside world. He walked the congressman around the land at Cabrini, introducing him to residents. When Shays seemed eager to see more, K-So asked if he wanted to stay the night. Shays did. He slept on the couch in K-So’s living room. “‘Honey, it’s incredible. I’ll tell you about it when I get home’ whispered Christopher, as I overheard him calling home to his wife from an old pay phone at the bottom of my building,” Keller wrote. The two men spoke late into the night. Shays asked about living conditions and what sorts of jobs people had and what the worst thing was that Keller had seen. Shays was a Republican who denounced federal control of public housing, a New York University MBA, a Christian Scientist who was still married to his childhood sweetheart. The guy seemed as foreign and inscrutable to Keller as the people at Cabrini must have come across to him. “I wondered what he might have been thinking about us, his stay, future concerns or if he just wanted to say that he’d spent the night in Cabrini-Green,” Keller mused.

  The next morning Shays thanked K-So for the hospitality. The couch he found comfortable, but he did have to ask about the thick fug of heat in the apartment, the lack of any circulating air. It was unbearable. “How do you guys manage?” The question seemed like a bit of life imitating the art of Good Times. In an episode of the sitcom, a white official from the housing authority calls on the Evans family and is shocked to find the elevator out of order—he can’t catch his breath after hiking the seventeen flights of stairs. He learns, too, that the heat isn’t working, the refrigerator is broken, and no water is flowing from the taps. “I hate to bring you people down,” he says to the amused family, “but it’s awfully depressing to hear things like that.” Then word reaches the Evans apartment that two gangs are fighting outside the towers, forcing the official to stay for dinner. Outraged to discover that nice people are suffering in these disgraceful conditions, he announces that he is going to bring changes. He’s a top administrator at the district office, and he will make it happen. “You have my word, everything that’s wrong in this building is going to be fixed.” When the gang fight ends, he hurries out the door, promising over his shoulder that the Evans family should start to see repairs . . . in thirteen or fourteen months.

  Keller didn’t reply to Shays’s question, or at least he said he didn’t in the article, which he ends with an oddly revealing combination of conviction and doubt, a silencing of his Cabrini voice. He writes, “I wanted to comment, but I knew inside that he too knew the answer. Didn’t he?”

  VINCE LANE RETURNED to Cabrini-Green three weeks after speaking at Holy Family. On the campus of the nearby Moody Bible Institute, Cabrini residents joined him at an all-day “planning summit.” Asked to enumerate their concerns, tenants said they worried that they were being tricked off their land. They were allowed to live on the Near North Side so long as the area was full of crime and poverty. Now with investment and upkeep, with improved policing and new amenities, they didn’t believe that they would be allowed to stay to enjoy it. Lane led three more meetings at Cabrini the following month and a town hall for all residents.

  Did the tenants feel like they were heard? They did. They joined committees and neighborhood advisory councils. They met with an independent facilitator Lane hired to keep the dialogue going. They were convinced that they were included in what the CHA was now calling the “rebirth of Cabrini-Green through resident empowerment partnership.” This first phase of Cabrini-Green’s development would cover only nine of the seventy acres, just the northern end of the Cabrini Extension site along Division Street. For more than a year, the residents in the “empowerment partnership” dutifully completed the application for the $50 million HOPE VI grant. In the days before turning in the application, they traveled by bus to a suburban Hyatt hotel, thirty minutes outside Chicago. The weekend planning session began with a motivational screening of Fired Up!, a documentary that had been made about the 1230 N. Burling resident managers. Then in groups they hashed out the particulars of how security would operate in the redeveloped section of Cabrini, how the construction could be used to hire residents and support resident-owned businesses. They discussed the ideal blend of public housing and market-rate units in the mixed-income replacement buildings. Tenants wanted the rebuild to include the maximum number of public housing units, and the city argued that there was a threshold at which the neighborhood could lose the stability and diversity it had recently gained. The city hoped the mix in the new buildings would hew closer to a Realtor rule of thumb that white people wouldn’t move into any neighborhood that was more than 30 percent black. The residents wanted guarantees that they could stay in the area, even during construction; the city insisted that it had to support the private developers who would build the mixed-income housing and take on the risk of selling or renting out a majority of the units.

  In the end, everyone agreed to the demolition of three towers. In
the new buildings replacing them, 40 percent of the units would be reserved for public housing families. The proposal also earmarked funds for a battery of new and improved social services, for a resident-owned security company, and for job training and other resident businesses. Mayor Daley sent the group a letter in support of their application, and one of the Cabrini leaders called it “a marvelous plan. It will better the community and give us pride.”

  Vince Lane didn’t have the opportunity to see this marvelous plan come into being. In May 1995, HUD seized control of the CHA, forcing out Lane as part of a federal takeover of the agency. The CHA had long been a stalwart of dysfunction, remaining on HUD’s troubled housing authority list since the designation began in 1978. In its most recent evaluation, the CHA managed a score of just fifty out of a hundred. (New York City, with 180,000 units of public housing, scored in the nineties.) HUD saw that Lane had spent $74 million on sweeps and other security measures over the past year, and still CHA residents were twice as likely as other Chicagoans to be victims of a serious crime. Employees of the agency were caught in various schemes involving ghost workers, falsified overtime records, and overcharging for supplies.