by Ben Austen
He began to attend human rights conferences and events across the country, with organizations paying his way. Every couple of weeks, J. R. went before the judge overseeing his assault case and asked her for permission to leave Illinois—to attend conventions in Atlanta, Philadelphia, New York, Virginia, New Jersey, Maryland. In a letter Steele sent to the judge, she praised J. R.’s work, writing, “He encourages young men and women to participate in the processes that will determine the fate of their community as the Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan for Transformation changes the nature and makeup of the Cabrini-Green community.” The judge was both impressed and confused. She looked at J. R.’s past arrests, the crimes he’d committed, his lack of even a GED, and she tried to square that with the letters inviting him to speak at the United Nations World Urban Forum. She permitted all the trips, even one to Caracas, Venezuela, where J. R., sporting a Che Guevara bandana under a White Sox cap, met with Hugo Chavez’s government about supplying oil to poor Chicagoans. The judge also let J. R. go to Las Vegas, where he and Iesha got married, a last-ditch effort to save their relationship.
J. R. led a busload of Cabrini residents down to New Orleans as well to assist with relief after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. He returned repeatedly over the next three years, observing each time how the city was restored everywhere but in its poor, black neighborhoods. In New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward, the wrecked homes with spray-painted Xs sat unchanged; cars remained where they’d been washed under porches or flipped on their sides. “It was so obvious in New Orleans,” J. R. would say. “Once the water went down, you could see exactly where the rebuilding occurred and where it didn’t. The demographics of the whole city changed. That ‘tools of displacement’ shit is real.” Shortly after the flood, the New Orleans City Council voted to demolish much of the city’s remaining public housing. Six of its largest complexes were shuttered. The city lost more than three thousand previously occupied units of public housing. “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans,” a US congressman from Louisiana boasted. “We couldn’t do it, but God did.” For J. R., New Orleans clarified what was going on in Chicago. Chicago didn’t need a flood. He and his neighbors were being pushed out of the city center, out of Daley’s global city. He was going to push back.
Despite the objections of the dozens of police officers who attended the hearings, the judge in J. R.’s case ruled that he would be sentenced to no jail time. She gave him community service and two years’ probation, and ordered him to attend anger-management classes. “I’ve got anger issues with the system,” J. R. would tell the psychologist. He grew his hair out and twisted it into ringleted dreadlocks. It was around then that he legally changed his name from Willie McIntosh Jr. The new name was part of his new identity. “I’m Willie J. R. Fleming, human rights enforcer,” he’d say by way of introduction. “The ‘J’ is for Just, the ‘R’ is for Righteousness.” James Martin, the plainclothes cop at Cabrini-Green nicknamed Eddie Murphy, had known J. R. and his family for decades. Reflecting on J. R.’s personal transformation, he joked that his colleagues on the police force had messed up. They should have left the young man alone when he was just peddling DVDs and tube socks: “Now they went and woke him up.”
15
Old Town, New Town
KELVIN CANNON
WHEN HE WAS young, Kelvin Cannon believed the towers of Cabrini-Green were as immutable as mountains. They were as much a part of the natural landscape as the boundless plains of Lake Michigan. “But I got older,” he said, “and I got wiser.” He watched as the Ogden Avenue Bridge, his childhood playground, disappeared, the barricaded overpass eventually torn down. He learned for himself the history of Cabrini-Green—that the neighborhood had previously been Irish, Swedish, and Italian; that the Cabrini rowhouses and high-rises were built on top of an existing ghetto that had once seemed permanent until it wasn’t. Cannon came to subscribe to a pragmatism born of fatalism: change was something the powerful imposed on everyone else. In 2003, Mayor Daley had ended debate over the future of a downtown airport by sending in bulldozers late at night and tearing up the runways; he had Lake Shore Drive moved to create a downtown museum campus. Imagine what he’d do to public housing. “Cabrini was an eyesore for the Gold Coast,” Cannon said. “The plan to transform us was mandated in the early seventies. It was only a matter of time, inevitable.” The community might be able to save the rowhouses, he believed. The high-rises, no chance. “I was taught it’s best to sit at the table with people, so we can coexist,” he explained. “All we can do now is negotiate and try to get as much as we can coming back as public housing units.”
Cannon respected Carol Steele. He didn’t deny that the lawsuits and all the protests had served a purpose. But Cannon figured that Ms. Steele had lost her way. A decade had passed since the millions in federal HOPE VI dollars were first earmarked for the rebuilding of Cabrini, and in all that time little had been done. For the last three of those years, Steele was president of the Cabrini tenant council; she’d tangled with the city and with Peter Holsten, the developer who won the contract to rebuild parts of Cabrini-Green. “Three years wasted,” Cannon said. “In the process of tearing down, we were supposed to be rebuilding the mixed income. But Ms. Steele couldn’t come to an agreement with Holsten. Nothing was built. A lot of residents were being displaced, and a lot of those people were never found again.”
In 2004, Cannon decided he’d try to unseat Steele as tenant council president. He considered himself more than qualified. At forty-one, he’d lived at Cabrini-Green for all but the three and a half years that he’d been incarcerated, and it had been nearly a quarter century since his sole conviction for armed robbery and fifteen since he’d left the Gangster Disciples. He’d apprenticed under Cora Moore when she was tenant president. He’d worked alongside her and Dolores Wilson to self-manage their high-rise. He’d done maintenance and construction. Steele’s vice president reported Cannon to a gang crime commission, saying that a Gangster Disciple was trying to take over the multimillion-dollar rehab of Cabrini-Green. But Cannon let it be known that he’d turned himself over to God. Given a second chance, he’d dedicated himself to the community.
In some conservative circles, in fact, Cannon was hailed as an exemplar of the redemptive capabilities of self-reliance. He was invited to join members of the Empowerment Network, a profaith policy group that included Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum and other socially conservative members of Congress. As a former gang member, Cannon was presented as living proof that even the intractable problems of the inner city could be overcome through the “resilient power of freedom and free markets, and the reliance of its citizens on our deep wellspring of faith in God.” The Empowerment Network’s director, David Caprara, had specialized in resident-directed initiatives at HUD under Jack Kemp. “God bless your achievements, your family, and 1230 N. Burling,” he wrote to Cannon. “You are our hero!”
Cannon wasn’t about to run away from his gang past, either. He wagered that people at Cabrini-Green would recall that he’d commanded the Disciples without abusing his authority. Being a GD governor, he felt, proved that he was someone who stuck with whatever he started and rose to positions of leadership. He put on a shirt and tie and a V-necked sweater, donned his leather coat, and started to walk the land at Cabrini-Green, going door-to-door to every apartment, telling people why he should be president. He collected signatures and asked residents for their vote. Cannon liked to canvas alone. He felt people would recognize his fearlessness and determination. He made the rounds of the Whites, the Reds, and the rowhouses. When he completed the circuit, he started again. Half of the units were now vacant. But nobody really knew which ones were empty or occupied, who was on lease and could vote and who wasn’t. For three months he tried to reach everyone. Cannon spoke in intermittent bursts, his words suddenly rushing out in a torrent as he tried to explain that the election was a referendum on redevelopment. Under Carol Steele, they were missing their only chance to be a part o
f the evolving area. They had to embrace the change. They had to trust that too many lawyers were already involved in the Plan for Transformation for it to go wrong.
Carol Steele and her backers called Cannon a crony of the CHA and the developers. They pointed out that when Holsten opened North Town Village, a private mixed-income development across from 1230 N. Burling, he’d given Cannon a job there as a security guard. Steele said Cannon was at best naive. Hadn’t a decade of broken promises proven that the CHA couldn’t be trusted? How many times had residents been told they were part of the planning process only to be pushed aside when the city decided to go ahead with its own agenda? Steele wasn’t holding up the process, she said time and again; she was trying to make sure that what occurred was legal and in compliance with its stated aims: “We said, ‘Show us the land. Show us the money and show us the housing.’ But the CHA couldn’t produce. That’s why it’s been a long, drawn-out process.” She wanted proof that those with a “right of return” could truly return to Cabrini-Green, that they would actually be mixed into the new housing. Earlier in 2004, Cabrini residents filed another lawsuit against the CHA, after four hundred families were issued eviction notices that would have pushed them out long before the building of any replacement housing. Experience had taught her that the CHA fulfilled its promises to tenants only when a judge ordered it to do so.
On the day of the vote, Cannon passed out walkie-talkies to his friends and family to coordinate as they ushered residents to the polling places and watched for improprieties. Turnout, as at most public housing elections, was light. Also, many who did vote spoiled their ballots—they liked both candidates, so they picked each of them. In the final count, Cannon received a couple dozen more votes. Steele challenged the results, but the CHA approved the tally. She said she lost because the CHA and the city wanted her out; Cannon wasn’t so much elected as selected. Cannon credited his victory to a higher power than the Chicago Housing Authority and even Mayor Daley. He said he had God on his side.
ONE OF CANNON’S first acts as president was to move the tenant council offices north of Division, into 1230 N. Burling. He combined two units on the first floor of his high-rise to create a space big enough. Then, weeks later, he signed the agreement to finally start work on the new housing that would replace the Cabrini Extension towers. He put his faith in Peter Holsten, who’d been awarded the contract to develop the mixed-income complex. “We are blessed to have him as a partner,” Cannon said.
Holsten had grown up in the western suburbs, and after an MBA at the University of Chicago took him to the South Side, he stumbled into real estate and won business with the city. Public housing, he related, “came to encompass my life work.” He said he learned quickly that it wasn’t enough to hand public housing families the keys to an apartment and say, “Live happily ever after.” He believed in a model of in-your-face management, strict but respectful: “‘I’m sorry, Mrs. Jones, you’re being put out because your son set fire to the apartment. Maybe we can get your son in a program somewhere, and I can convince management to keep you here.’ That’s the yin and the yang,” Holsten would explain. “Obey the rules or else.” He hired case managers to help tenants search for jobs and stay current on their bills; he kept a social-service consultant on-site in each of his properties. “I want all the kids in my buildings to go to college, and I want the heads of household to be employed and for the cycle of poverty to be broken,” Holsten said. “I know that’s not going to happen. What do I settle for short of that? I try to give them the best house that I can. I try to get everyone to be neighborly.”
Over the previous decade, a dozen market-rate developments with public housing units mixed in had opened on the periphery of Cabrini-Green. Private developers competed for the building rights as well as the tax credits and favorable financing. For centrally located Cabrini-Green, it didn’t take much to lure investors. Residential property sales in the two-block radius around Cabrini-Green totaled less than $6 million in 1995, but five years later, at the start of the Plan for Transformation, annual sales had reached $120 million, and from 2000 to 2005, total sales neared $1 billion.
In 1999, when Holsten won the rights to develop North Town Village, he priced the for-sale units to sell, at a discount of 15 percent below the area’s going rate. Seventy-nine of the 261 condos and townhomes were reserved for public housing families, and he thought buyers might balk at the unique arrangement. Part of the pitch made to young professionals was that they would be “social pioneers,” embarking on a new form of urban living. People of different races and classes were going to live alongside one another, under the same roof. But being a pioneer also meant acting boldly and getting in ahead of others; it meant staking a claim before prices rose and the land was fully settled.
Months ahead of construction on North Town Village, when a sales trailer first opened at the site, the units went fast: forty-seven that day, eighty by the end of the week. Cabrini towers still defined the landscape. But buyers trusted that the high-rises would soon give way to even higher property values, and North Town Village was pronounced one of the city’s hottest real estate markets. “Just a stone’s throw from the Gold Coast, River North, Old Town, and Lincoln Park, Cabrini-Green is easily one of the most sought-after neighborhoods in all of Chicago,” gushed a write-up from a local real estate firm. North Town Village townhomes sold for as much as $475,000. A young couple who bought a condo described a buying frenzy, one woman yelling at her husband, “Just buy whatever’s left!”
The area that had been Cabrini-Green—and before that Little Sicily and Little Hell—some Realtors now tried to rebrand as “New Town,” dropping the Cabrini-Green moniker inimical to their interests. Peter Holsten named the mixed-income complex that replaced several red Cabrini high-rises along Division Street “Parkside of Old Town.” Among the dignitaries at the groundbreaking for the complex, Holsten was joined by the CHA’s Terry Peterson, Alderman Walter Burnett, and Kelvin Cannon, his shovel raised, wearing a do-rag beneath his hard hat and a white cashmere topcoat despite the mud. Daley announced that Cabrini-Green was now “part of the larger Old Town neighborhood.”
Latasha Ricks, one of Annie Ricks’s daughters, helped build Parkside’s combination of mid-rises and townhomes. “Even though I was president and a partner in the development,” Cannon said, “I helped build it, too. I was out there in the fields. I was there as a laborer.” During the construction, Holsten presold 70 percent of Parkside’s market-rate units, purchasers putting down 5 percent of the price. That was in 2006, two years before anyone could move in, and buyers paid half a million to nearly three-quarters of a million for the townhomes, with the condos starting at $300,000. Many people snapped up two units, figuring they’d flip one later as prices continued to climb. Holsten planned initially to complete one mid-rise before starting on the others. But with the money from presales and the increasing demand, he began construction on the entire 760-unit complex, all 228 townhomes and several mid-rises.
One of the new owners, in 2006, was Abu Ansari, whose partner, Mark, surprised him with the floor plans to their unbuilt Parkside condo. A stage actor from Texas, Ansari had moved to Chicago in the early nineties, and he’d followed news of the Plan for Transformation, wondering whether public housing residents would be forced to leave at the very moment that their neighborhoods started to flourish. His own mother had grown up in public housing in San Antonio. And as a black gay man in a relationship with an older white man, he was attuned to the stark divisions of race and class in his new city. How many times had he used the word “gentrifier” as a slur? And now he might be one of them, in of all places Cabrini-Green.
But two years is a long time to get over your misgivings. Prices around Cabrini rose higher still, and Abu and Mark talked about their prescience for getting in early. And when their Parkside mid-rise actually went up, the design exceeded their expectations. The building was the opposite of the towers it replaced. Squat and broad, it was a multisided prism,
reigning genially over the corner of Division Street and Seward Park, like a cross-legged Buddha. Its orange-bricked facade was adorned with splashes of purple ornamentation and decorative pillars. Every unit had a balcony. Abu and Mark started to embrace the idea of themselves as pioneers in an exciting social experiment.
When Abu and Mark finally moved in, it was bliss. Their ninth-floor apartment was roomy and modern, facing out over the new supermarket complex and Lincoln Park beyond. They hosted dinner parties, proud to show off their new home. At soirees set up by the building’s management, the owners met one another, the conversation turning invariably to their foresight and collective good fortune. The public housing units had yet to be filled, but the condos were nearly sold out. The owners could watch from their balconies as potential buyers for another mid-rise under construction next door lined up at a sales trailer.
This was in the early fall of 2008. A month after Abu and Mark moved into Parkside of Old Town, the global investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. For more than a decade, as home prices soared, people had embraced a faith preached by government and business alike—a global prosperity gospel—that the housing market could only go up. The Plan for Transformation was devised amid this real estate bubble, and it was premised on the sale of market-rate units at the new mixed-income complexes. Without these sales, the public-private developments couldn’t fund construction costs or guarantee loans for the large capital projects. Public housing was created in the 1930s because the for-profit real estate market, by its very nature, was unable to provide decent and affordable homes for Americans at the lower rungs of the economic ladder. And seventy years later, the speculative market had again made its limitations plain. People at Cabrini-Green weren’t thinking about the deregulation of the banking industry, or credit default swaps, or negative amortization loans, or collaterized debt obligations, but the building of replacement units came to a halt at every Chicago public housing development. Construction on the second phase of Parkside of Old Town ceased. With the trucks and the men in fluorescent yellow vests gone, the poured foundation sat exposed like a Roman ruin, harking back to an age that had yet to be.