by Ben Austen
Annie Ricks knew about the meetings and marches. She heard her neighbors talk about the city’s schemes to shut down Cabrini-Green. She didn’t really believe it, though. She pointed to 1230 N. Burling, the high-rise across the field from her. The building had new doors and security cameras and two elevators that worked. After school most days, Annie brought her students over to play at the building’s brand-new playground. “Why would you tear down a building when you just put money into it?” she said. After the Girl X incident, Ricks saw that there were more news crews and police officers in the area. But that also felt to her like more of the same. On her way across the parking lot to Schiller school, she was stopped by a cop. He demanded to know where she was going. “Work,” she said. “Where are you going?”
One day she told Ernest Bryant that she was ready to get married. Although he had never been on her lease, they had thirteen children and had been together for a quarter century. “Either you marry me, or get out,” she said in her half-joking way.
“All right, Jeffrey,” he agreed. “I’m going to marry you.” He called his mother, who said Annie was already her daughter-in-law. They had a big wedding at a banquet hall on the South Side, holding the service and reception at the same place so people would have less trouble getting there. Annie’s aunt officiated, and her children got drunk. “We had a good time,” Ricks said.
14
Transformations
IN THE SUMMER of 1998, officials from HUD called Mayor Daley’s office. The federal government had controlled the Chicago Housing Authority since taking it over in 1995, and in those three years, by several measures, the agency had improved. Joseph Shuldiner, the HUD executive charged with cleaning up the CHA, had previously led the authorities in New York City and Los Angeles. He arrived in Chicago to find Section 8 files packed away neither in chronological nor alphabetical order; no new vouchers were being issued despite 48,000 families languishing on the waiting list, some for more than twenty years. Most of the employees he inherited seemed to be associated in some way with different aldermen or state representatives, and the companies with CHA contracts were almost all politically connected. “Everything was political blood sport in Chicago,” Shuldiner said of his introduction to the city. He hired a private management company to oversee the voucher program, and he whittled down the CHA staff, eliminating hundreds of jobs. Rather than the housing authority attempting to manage its own properties, or turning to residents to do it themselves, Shuldiner outsourced these duties to private firms at nearly every development. A new system was implemented to track work orders and service requests. For the first time in a decade, an audit showed that the agency’s financial records were complete and presented fairly. With these changes in place, the federal government was ready to give the CHA back to the city. The thing was, Daley wasn’t sure he wanted it.
The mayor was keenly aware that his family name—unfairly and not—was tied to the legacy of public housing in Chicago. (Upon sitting down with Shuldiner, Daley read him the minutes from the 1959 US Senate hearing in which the first Mayor Daley said he didn’t want “high-risers” for his city.) Daley wasn’t interested in incremental upgrades at the CHA. He didn’t believe public housing developments could ever be assets to the neighborhoods around them, and he didn’t want to go to Washington with his hands out every year begging for another allowance of HOPE VI funding to make improvements around the edges. If the lawsuits at Henry Horner and Cabrini-Green had taught him anything, it was to avoid some piecemeal change, hung up by litigation at every development and then shackled by each ensuing consent decree. The city’s public housing projects were monuments to failure in so many different forms—civic and individual, political and historical, physical and economic. Like their place in the city’s psyche, their solution needed to be monumental. “Make no little plans,” Daniel Burnham had declared about his design for Chicago at the dawn of the twentieth century. Daley said he would take back the CHA only if he could tear down all of its high-rises. “‘This is the end of your political career. You do this, this is impossible,’” Daley said he was warned. “‘It’s all African American. You’re not going to solve this. Don’t do it.’ Sure, everybody believed that. Leave it as is. But you wouldn’t have a city of the future, you’d a city of the past.”
In September 1999, Daley presented what would be his most sweeping urban renewal program. Under the Plan for Transformation, as the endeavor became known, the city would demolish every remaining public housing family high-rise, knocking down some 18,000 units. Over ten years, and at an estimated cost of $1.6 billion, Chicago would build public-private mixed-income developments on the cleared land and rehab existing low-rise public housing. The total would add up to 15,000 new or renovated family units, plus an additional 10,000 for senior citizens, reducing the current stock of 38,000 down to 25,000.
Daley cast the undertaking as an even more radical transformation of Chicago and its denizens, saying that neighborhoods too long under the pall of towering public housing would finally be imbued with vitality and reconnected to the rest of the city. The very landscape would be remade, the skyline altered, the street grid restored. The replacement housing would be built on a “human” scale, with only a third of the apartments going to CHA residents, thus breaking up the old concentrations of poverty and triggering further commercial and residential investment. And the mostly black residents who had lived in these neighborhoods in social and economic isolation would now reap the rewards of the prospering city. “I want to rebuild their souls,” Daley declared.
Julia Stasch helped pull together the mayor’s public housing transformation strategy, first as Daley’s commissioner of housing and then his chief of staff. Discerning and conscientious, she recognized that there was little research into whether families of different economic classes would live amicably side by side in the replacement buildings, or how to manage properties with both private condo owners and public housing renters, or how exactly the poor would benefit from their close proximity to the gainfully employed, or even what the right mix in these buildings should be, or, more significantly, what would happen to the vast majority of public housing tenants who didn’t get into the more sparsely populated, deconcentrated buildings. “Mixed-income buildings are not the answer to low-income housing,” Stasch would say rightly. But she thought it anachronistic to look to government-run public housing to make up the brunt of a city’s overall portfolio of affordable options. “The cavalry was not coming,” she would explain. “The only way to get public benefits funded today is by harnessing the market motives of private entities.” This meant that in addition to mixed-income buildings, vouchers would serve an ever-increasing number of families, and former high-rise residents would have to be relocated to rehabbed public housing complexes that were less monolithic in their original designs. There were also single-room occupancy hotels—one would be built next to the new shopping center on Division and Clybourn. And under Clinton, the federal government was producing hundreds of thousands of affordable units through low-income housing tax credits, which offered incentives to private developers to reserve a small percentage of apartments in their buildings for people with modest incomes above the public housing threshold.
Stasch had served as a deputy in the Clinton administration’s General Services Administration before coming to city hall. (Asked on her federal employment form if there was anything in her past that could be an embarrassment to the president or the country, she wrote that she’d lived a counterculture life in San Francisco in the 1960s; she wasn’t asked to elaborate.) In thinking about the Plan for Transformation, she wrestled with the same concerns that went into the reform of the welfare system and that had always bedeviled public housing. Should the entitlement go only to the neediest, lowest-income families? For how long? And how to refresh it for other needy families, discouraging recipients from staying in the system for generations? She wasn’t sure of the answers. What she felt unequivocal about, though, was the har
m caused by concentrated poverty. “What’s the antidote to that?” she said. “It’s mixing people from different economic backgrounds.” A pragmatist who believed that the perfect is the enemy of the good, she refused to let public housing families remain in the dangerous status quo of high-rises. “The bad situation in public housing required that we end it.”
The financing of the public-private real estate deals under the Plan for Transformation involved a Rubik’s cube of moving parts—tax credits, soft loans, city and state funds, developer fees, HOPE VI grants. Various public and private entities had to be satisfied and countless rules abided or officially rewritten. A large chunk of the funding for the Cabrini-Green redevelopment was expected to come from the sale of market-rate apartments. But the project also benefited from $280 million in tax-increment financing—a tricky bit of temporal juggling in which city money is made available for improvements in the present based on the presumption of the future gains in real estate taxes. To pull off the colossal endeavor, Daley, Stasch, and the rest of his team said they needed to be free of numerous federal strictures, and they asked for special dispensations on allowable construction costs, contracting guidelines, rent limits, admission requirements, and many other rules. HUD had a designation called Moving to Work for its highest-performing agencies that allowed for greater flexibility. Chicago was still anything but high performing, yet that was the classification the city now sought. Andrew Cuomo, the future New York governor, was then Clinton’s secretary of housing, and thought submitting to Chicago’s demands would set a terrible precedent. If he made these exceptions for Daley, then the mayors of Indianapolis or Cincinnati would be in the next month asking for similar deals. But Daley went over Cuomo’s head to President Clinton. The CHA was named a Moving to Work agency, granting it dozens of waivers of federal provisions.
“We are going to be fighting this tooth and nail,” Carol Steele announced. The Coalition to Protect Public Housing called for a moratorium on any demolition until the city could demonstrate that the Plan for Transformation wasn’t just scattering families into the unknown. Steele had taken part in the years of negotiations that had finally settled the lawsuit Cabrini-Green residents filed against the CHA back in 1996. Under a consent decree, signed in 2000, six of the red high-rises would be demolished, not eight, and the replacement housing would include three times as many public housing units as Daley’s proposal had allotted. Tenants would also be able to form a nonprofit subsidiary and take 50 percent ownership of a partnership with the developer of the site; they would share in fees and profits, the money going to aid both displaced and remaining Cabrini residents.
Steele now pointed out what she saw as basic arithmetic errors in the Plan for Transformation. The city was guaranteeing families with a valid lease as of October 1, 1999, the right to return to rehabbed public housing, or a new mixed-income development. But Daley’s plan would reduce the city’s stock by a third. In recent years, the city had eliminated thousands of public housing units, and many more sat vacant. Yet there were 56,000 families on the CHA waiting list, 24,000 waiting for a housing choice voucher, and 80,000 people who were homeless. And many more low-income renters in the city struggled to find affordable housing options. Where would these tens of thousands of families go? “The mayor says that no one is going to be displaced,” a protestor at a rally outside city hall said. “We say the mayor is a liar.”
In a way, the CHA was hoping to replicate the success of a scatter-site housing initiative started as part of the Gautreaux case, the class-action housing desegregation lawsuit against the agency that was first filed in 1966. Rather than waiting on the CHA to build housing in racially diverse or “revitalizing” areas, a judge finally ruled on the case, in 1976: families from Chicago public housing would enter a lottery, and the winners would be moved with vouchers into private rentals in better-off neighborhoods. By the late nineties, 7,100 families had taken part in the program and been relocated to areas with less crime, improved schools, and better job prospects. Only a few hundred were moved a year, so receiving neighborhoods—often white and suburban—didn’t feel inundated and the relocated families could receive counseling and assistance with mobility, and be checked on and studied over time.
But now the city was hoping to find permanent and temporary homes in the private market for more than twenty thousand additional low-income families. A study of the Chicago rental market that was demanded by the Coalition to Protect Public Housing showed that the city wasn’t even close to being able to handle this flood in demand. Chicago had an overall residential vacancy rate of just 4.5 percent, among the tightest in the nation, with the availability largely concentrated in the poorer sections of the city. More than 40,000 families were already renting with Section 8 vouchers, but another half million renters in Chicago qualified for the subsidy, and the city had an affordable housing deficit of 140,000 units. The numbers gave the federal officials funding the project pause. “HUD cannot approve a plan in which the CHA will displace more families than the housing market can accommodate,” the department wrote in a letter to the CHA.
In January 2000, Daley went ahead with the big public rollout. He’d convinced the Central Advisory Council, the tenant leadership body representing all the city’s public housing developments, to endorse the proposal, breaking with the tenants who were trying to stop it. “With or without us, they were going to submit it anyway,” Francine Washington, the president of the group, said. “At least this way, we are able to include our comments.” With the tenant group backing the plan, HUD signed off on it as well. Then the city’s largest foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, threw its institutional support behind the mayor’s redevelopment effort, funding dozens of grants and funneling some $65 million into the efforts.
Stasch had been hired by MacArthur to lead this charge. She set about recruiting the many partners across the city needed to pull off the endeavor. She funded the researchers to study its efficacy, and she enlisted businesses to employ CHA residents who would now need to meet more stringent work requirements. “We were able to have an impact on a huge swath of the city that had been negatively impacted, and on the lives of thousands of people,” Stasch said. “It was a once-in-a-generation opportunity.”
J. R. FLEMING
ONE NIGHT IN May, three years into the Plan for Transformation, J. R. Fleming was leaving the Cabrini rowhouses where he’d just sold an electric scooter when he saw the flashing blue lights of a police car behind him. He was in the passenger seat, with Iesha driving one of the Vanduras and the children strapped into the back. J. R. didn’t have the van registered or insured, but that didn’t stop him from jumping out and yelling, “What’d I do?” He wasn’t surprised to be pulled over. A couple of months earlier, police officers had raided his sister’s apartment in 1017 N. Larrabee, where J. R. stashed his bootlegging equipment and his merchandise. Acting on a tip, officers found several computers, seven VCRs, televisions, speakers, and video cameras—equipment, they claimed, that was being used to duplicate the stacks of unlicensed music, movies, and video games that they also confiscated from the apartment. J. R.’s lawyer argued that he was a legitimate music and video producer, and there was no proof he intended to sell any of the merchandise. When prosecutors asked for a warrant to search the hard drives of J. R.’s computers, they were denied. The charges were dropped, though J. R. never saw any of his confiscated equipment again. A week later, he found dents kicked into the doors of one of his vans and the side-view mirrors bent back. He was told the cops did it.
What surprised J. R. about being pulled over that night was how the officer responded. He was a white cop, a mountain, six feet four, 240 pounds. Without a word, the officer reached back and smashed a fist the size of a tree burl into J. R.’s face. Then he hit J. R. a second and a third time, knocking him to the ground. Iesha charged out of the van, yelling that the cop should just arrest J. R., he wasn’t resisting. Knowing he was going to be locked up, J. R. trie
d to hand the cash he had in his pocket to Iesha. That’s when the cop crossed the line. He stiff-armed Iesha in the chest, pushing her away.
This was Cabrini-Green on a warm spring night. A hundred people were hanging out in front of the buildings. They saw the cop shove Iesha, and at once there arose a collective “Oooh!” Was that a punch? Did he touch her titties? J. R.’s own thoughts cleared. He took a steadying breath. He knew so much in these situations depended on not panicking. Turning to face the officer’s partner, who’d followed him out of the squad car, J. R. raised his hands. “He didn’t even have to do her like this,” he said. Positioning himself with his back to the big cop, he drew a bead on the man’s chin. “This could have been avoided.” On the last word, he slammed back his right elbow, connecting with the officer’s jaw. A tooth arced through the air and landed silently on the ground. The cop followed, dropping like a felled oak. And with that, J. R. knelt down and crossed his hands above his head, trying to give the second officer no more excuse than he already had to shoot him dead. “That was murder she wrote,” J. R. said. “That changed the rest of my life.”
The arrest didn’t come easily. Responding officers arrived, running toward J. R. armed with nightsticks. What was he to do? He defended himself. In the scuffle, he was hit with a steel flashlight. Officers blasted pepper spray into his face. He was wrestled into the back of a squad car and charged with two counts of aggravated battery of a police officer, one count of resisting arrest, and a single count of criminal damage to a government vehicle. As the arrest report stated, “Offender using his feet kicked out passenger side rear window.” J. R. said he needed to break the cruiser’s window—he couldn’t breathe after all the pepper spraying. If found guilty of all four counts, J. R. could spend the next sixteen years in prison. He’d be forty-six when he got out, his children grown.