by Ben Austen
J. R. had a fairly extensive rap sheet, with eleven misdemeanors for criminal trespassing, theft, disorderly conduct, failure to disperse, and the one previous felony for the drug sale he did up on the far North Side when he was eighteen. But his lawyer argued self-defense, showing that the police had a track record of intimidating J. R. Brother Jim, writing the judge, attested to J. R.’s “complicated relationship with police officers. Some like him and even purchase merchandise from him. Others have arrested him for a number of minor offenses.” More than forty Cabrini residents admitted to seeing the incident, but only three of them who weren’t family to J. R. agreed to testify, the others fearing retaliation from the police. Officers gave conflicting testimony about who approved the use of excessive force, and a commander’s signature appeared on a permission form even though he wasn’t on the scene. J. R.’s lawyer requested a history of complaints and internal investigations into misconduct for each officer. The trial dragged on, with continuances and court dates stretching into months and then more than a year.
J. R. believed it would help his cause if he could demonstrate his dedication to his community. He needed to show the judge that he wasn’t some thug. The women running his old building allowed him to turn an empty apartment in 1017 N. Larrabee into a recording studio. He brought guys together from the different sections of Cabrini-Green, some of them in rival gangs, to cut a track for the Coalition to Protect Public Housing. “It’s such a shame, we living in vain / They took our neighborhood, they don’t want us to change / This where my mother grew up / This where my family grew up / Thank the Lord he sent us to save the Greens through us.” He took part in 100 Men Standing, a mentoring program for Cabrini-Green fathers. He started a chapter of the Hip Hop Congress, a social activism and arts nonprofit found mostly on college campuses; his was the only one in a public housing development, and he said it was a way to use music to reach the masses, to connect colleges with the community. One of his first events was a Hip-Hop Holidays for the Homeless. “Homelessness ends with hope,” he announced. With less time for peddling, he used his heat-press to design T-shirts for the “Save Cabrini” movement.
J. R. STARTED organizing as well for the Coalition to Protect Public Housing. He sat down in Carol Steele’s office, where posters displayed words of inspiration: POVERTY IS THE WORST FORM OF VIOLENCE—Gandhi; THE TEST OF OUR PROGRESS IS NOT WHETHER WE ADD MORE TO THE ABUNDANCE OF THOSE WHO HAVE MUCH; IT IS WHETHER WE PROVIDE ENOUGH FOR THOSE WHO HAVE TOO LITTLE—Franklin Delano Roosevelt; TRUST GOD. In a lilting voice that belied her toughness—a bullishness not unlike J. R.’s—Steele explained all that had been going on with the Plan for Transformation. Few city agencies could have handled a task of such immensity, of such political and human nuance. But the CHA had a long track record of being among the least efficient and worst managed of government departments. For patronage hires, it was a backwater, the better skilled of the well connected usually opting to earn a paycheck elsewhere. When the Plan for Transformation got under way, moreover, the CHA was just coming out of its federal takeover, its workforce being shrunk from 2,500 employees to a mere 500. Even for the remaining employees who were diligent, thoughtful, and caring, they were unprepared for the political pressures of the transformation process. The word from city hall was to empty the high-rises, and observers reported a wartime atmosphere at the CHA. “We just really give up on the ones who have a lot of problems,” said a contractor hired by the CHA to assist residents with their relocations. “By that time, we just can’t do nothing for them. I mean, we can’t even find them! So how can we serve them?”
The CHA was surprised to learn how many people in its buildings had mental or physical disabilities, suffered from trauma, or abused alcohol or drugs. These families needed the help of a social worker, not a relocation counselor. “Once we started digging, we had no idea how bad it was from the perspective of people needing services,” said Lewis Jordan, one of several heads of the CHA who would be in charge of the transformation. Of the tens of thousands still living in public housing, many had spent decades there, and without the proper guidance, a great number of them didn’t see announcements, missed meetings downtown, and, on hearing about the multiple steps involved in their moves, gave up. Those who did follow each task met with relocation managers and attended workshops on good neighboring and money management. They filled out the numerous forms stating whether they preferred a permanent or temporary move, whether they were willing to rent in the private market with a voucher or wished to stay in a rehabbed public housing development. If they were behind on rent or had unpaid utility bills, or if they had a relative on their lease with a criminal record or didn’t meet new employment requirements, they raced to become “lease compliant.” Then they joined trips to scout homes in other neighborhoods. But the relocation counselors each handled more than a hundred cases at a time. They were supposed to show every family five possible residences. But that didn’t happen. The counselors were paid per case closed and in many instances had established relationships with specific landlords.
Overseeing a vast network of thousands of Section 8 landlords presented its own challenges. Many landlords in the private market offered homes far superior to public housing. But there were also many who were inexperienced as far as tying their low-income renters to social services. Some illegally turned families away or refused to repair leaks or faulty furnaces. Apartments weren’t up to code. Negligent landlords were rarely punished. And when they were, tenants suffered, since they were forced to relocate again, uprooting their families, starting the search process all over and dealing once more with utilities, the phone company, and a rental deposit.
By the end of 2002, the city had demolished 6,900 units of public housing. But it had yet to rehab any public housing units that weren’t reserved for seniors, and it had built only 130 units of public housing in mixed-income buildings since 2000. Many residents, failing to find apartments before their move-out dates, doubled up with family members elsewhere or left their condemned public housing and moved into other public housing in the city not yet scheduled for demolition. Residents too often left one unsafe or unsanitary apartment for another and then another. Not infrequently families were sent across gang boundaries. “The Plan for Transformation was probably the most disgusting thing I ever saw as an organizer. How little care was taken for the people who were being displaced,” said Jim Field, who worked first with the Community Renewal Society and then the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. “The general public actually cares about homeless people. That is not the case with how they feel about public housing residents. The stories coming out of public housing of shootings and killings, most mainline people say, ‘Well, we’re paying for that.’ But they can frequently identify with homelessness.”
Facing criticism, the CHA agreed to let an independent monitor assess its progress. Thomas Sullivan, a former US attorney, confirmed that the buildings were closed in an unnecessary rush, that tenants lacked proper counseling and were thrown into a state of mass confusion. Nearly every relocated family, he found, ended up in neighborhoods that were primarily African American, and three-quarters in areas that were overwhelmingly poor. These were not the soul-rebuilding opportunities that the transformation promised, and now families were in strange territory and without their former support networks. “The result has been that the vertical ghettoes from which the families are being moved are being replaced with horizontal ghettoes, located in well defined, highly segregated neighborhoods on the west and south sides of Chicago,” Sullivan wrote. The Plan for Transformation didn’t so much break up concentrations of poverty as move them elsewhere, making them less visible to the rest of the city. A class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of the relocated residents, asserting that the city had been resegregated.
The CHA followed many of Sullivan’s fifty-four recommendations. It hired a new social service provider, vastly improving how the agency relocated families. But problems with relocations also persist
ed. Tenants had signed a “right to return” agreement stipulating that anyone with a lease at the start of October 1999 had a shot at coming back to whatever replaced the old high-rise housing projects. Now nine in ten families said they wanted to return to their longtime neighborhoods, twice as many as the CHA had predicted. At Cabrini-Green, the CHA signed a right-of-return contract with 1,770 families. Those who wanted to come back had to take temporary vouchers and move elsewhere. Some didn’t meet the new rules for returnees regarding work requirements. Others were evicted with “one strike” drug laws or for other reasons. As more time went by, some died, others were simply lost. The process was much worse at other large developments that were torn down hastily. A few years into the transformation effort, the CHA placed ads in local newspapers, stating that it actually couldn’t account for some of the 16,800 families it had ostensibly been tracking, and would anyone from the following list of 3,200 families please contact them in the next ninety days or risk losing the right to return to public housing.
“It was perfect timing,” J. R. would say. He was fighting his own legal case as the Plan for Transformation was rolling out. Getting involved was an easy choice. “I decided I wanted to play a role. I saw the suffering wouldn’t stop.”
AT THE SAME time that the city was carrying out its Plan for Transformation, the housing authority considered selling 1230 N. Burling to its tenants. The building had long been celebrated as the exception to everything believed to be wrong with Cabrini-Green. During the federal takeover of the CHA, HUD determined that the tenant managers of 1230 N. Burling had “improved living conditions” and reduced “neglect and abuse,” allowing for “resident empowerment and economic uplift.” Now the residents proposed buying their home. Their offer was far below the market value of the property, and they asked also that the federal government continue to subsidize maintenance costs at the high-rise for a decade after the sale. Residents pointed out that developers were being given sweeter incentives to build around Cabrini-Green and that the government paid Section 8 landlords to house low-income renters. By operating 1230 N. Burling as a non-profit co-op, they would be able to provide homes to 134 public housing families. They’d earn “sweat equity” in the property as well, their work compensating for what they couldn’t afford in a down payment. The sale was endorsed by local politicians and civic leaders and approved, albeit unenthusiastically, by the CHA. Many deemed the proposal a poor use of public resources with a high likelihood of failure. The Illinois Housing Development Authority and Chicago’s Department of Housing and Economic Development ultimately killed the deal.
Still, the CHA continued to see the Burling building as an ally in its plans for Cabrini-Green. In 2002, Carol Steele ran to unseat Cora Moore as the head of the tenant council for all of Cabrini. When the polls closed, Moore led 260 to 66. But four hours later, an additional 222 ballots from the rowhouses were discovered—and then subsequently lost—with Steele winning 201 of them. After other ballots were disqualified, Steele was declared the winner, with an overall edge of 261 to 214. The CHA didn’t want to concede the election to Steele. In addition to the questionable ballots, Steele had been involved in the lawsuit that halted work on the Cabrini Extension high-rises and was a leader in the Coalition to Protect Public Housing. The agency called for a new round of voting. There’d been other irregularities as well: poll watchers were unable to enter buildings where votes were cast; electioneering occurred at polling sites; in one high-rise, voters each received two ballots; and in 1230 N. Burling, Moore’s stronghold, the ballots weren’t properly initialed. The election ended up in court, with the CHA providing Moore an attorney. In their arguments, the lawyers cited both Shakespeare and the recent precedent of Bush v. Gore, which differentiated between the counting of spoiled and missing ballots. The CHA lawyers attacked Steele’s character, saying she hired her boyfriend to manage the rowhouses. The back-and-forth lasted eight months, until a judge decided that the transgression of the missing ballots was less egregious than the failure of initialing them, at least as far as Illinois election law went. Steele was declared the winner.
Other buildings at Cabrini-Green also formed their own self-management corporations. The CHA accused the resident management group that Steele led in the rowhouses of permitting squatters to stay in empty units and of spending some $300,000 on salaries and fees, in excess of what federal law allowed. Then in 2003, at 6:00 a.m., the CHA raided 1230 N. Burling. Before padlocking the door of the resident management office, CHA officials emptied everything out, tossing computers and files into Dumpsters. Dolores Wilson’s daughter Cheryl found hundreds of dollars’ worth of tenants’ uncashed rent checks scattered by the wind. In a press conference, the new head of the CHA, Terry Peterson, said he was firing the resident managers. He displayed photographs that had been taken during an earlier inspection of the building. They showed garbage in piles and a shopping cart lying on its side in a hallway. “Our residents deserve to live in safe, clean, and well-managed buildings,” Peterson said. “Those are the kinds of conditions that are unacceptable and that we’re going to hold our property managers responsible for cleaning up.”
The tenants of 1230 N. Burling, assured for years of a special status, struggled with their comedown. “They didn’t give us a reason, they didn’t tell us who they were,” Cannon said. “They just said, ‘Your services are no longer needed.’” He’d been in charge of maintenance of the building for more than a decade. Like the other resident managers, he lost his job. The building wasn’t perfect—nearly a decade after its renovation, the front doors were dented and the Plexiglas in the entranceway fogged. On the landings and ramps, years of winter ice and salt had stripped the concrete floors, and the brick walls in the hallways, painted a stygian red, were scribbled with graffiti. But it wasn’t what the CHA was claiming. The conditions before the residents took over were truly unacceptable. “Our suspicion is obviously that they want to take over the building, deplete the number of people in it, and then say it’s uninhabitable and then move people out so they can demolish it,” the head of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, Ed Shurna, said.
“I felt it was the end,” Dolores Wilson said. “If they could just come in and close down a corporation, they could do anything.” She expected to hear from the politicians and officials who had worked with her and her neighbors over the years, who had trained them and funded their efforts. “I was thinking Bertha Gilkey would have come to cheer us up or tell us how to follow through. I thought she would have at least called,” Dolores said. “She knew we were doing a good job. No one ever gave an explanation. You would think they would tell us why they did that to us.”
J. R. FLEMING
J. R. DISCOVERED that activism was a lot like peddling. He made the same rotations on the land at Cabrini-Green, visiting all the remaining high-rises and rowhouses. His customers still listened to his playful patter when he was selling tales of injustice and broken promises. He told residents that the city’s “Plan for Devastation” could be deemed a success only if the metric were getting poor people off prime real estate and moving them to areas where there were even fewer jobs and transportation options, where crime, gangs, and schools were all worse. He liked the sport in being a gadfly, a pest to those in power. With the other members of the Coalition to Protect Public Housing, he’d go to CHA board meetings, using the public comment portion to call out officials as “chump change opportunists” and “sell-out Daley lackeys.” His voice booming, he repeated how Cabrini residents had been displaced, how their rights of return were being hindered, how resident-owned businesses didn’t receive contracts and tenants weren’t hired for construction jobs.
The CHA launched a new brand reinvention, executed for free by the Chicago ad agency Leo Burnett, turning the letters of the housing authority into the word CHAnge. The image “This Is CHAnge” appeared all over the city alongside pictures of residents and their testimonials of better lives. In 2005, artist-activists covered up the ads on bu
s stops with similar looking displays that reworked the agency’s logo to “This Is CHAos.” The alternative campaign featured large photos of either Mayor Daley, Terry Peterson, or other housing officials alongside accusatory questions: “Are tourists more important than the poor?” “Do money and politics mix?” The one featuring the prominent Chicago real estate developer Dan McLean read, “When the Mayor’s Plan for Transformation called for the demolition of Cabrini-Green, McLean got the scoop early and began buying up adjacent properties. . . . McLean cashes in on our tax dollars with no risk.” J. R. defined the CHA’s new slogan as “Chicago Helps All Negroes Go Elsewhere.” He advised tenants who were facing removal or bouncing around among Section 8 rentals. It was exciting to lead a hundred residents in chants as they marched downtown. “Aren’t y’all tired of running?” he demanded of his neighbors. “We’re from the Greens. We can’t let them take our history.”
Back in 1998, for the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Carol Steele and other CHA residents had traveled to New York to give testimony about their fight back home. Cabrini-Green was so vilified, so closely associated with crime and drugs, that it was hard for residents to find allies in their hometown. But in New York, activists from around the world made it clear that they considered the battle on the Near North Side to be part of their larger global struggle. For J. R., the formulation of housing as a human right provided him a game plan that he could run with. He started carrying a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in his back pocket, whipping it out and brandishing it like a weapon. In the same way he used to spout copyright laws when hawking bootleg gear, he now recited the UN document, article twenty-five dash one: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing, and medical care and necessary social services.”