High-Risers

by Ben Austen

  The Parkside buyers who hadn’t finalized their purchases simply walked away, giving up their 5 percent deposits. Peter Holsten lost half of his presales. His market-rate partner on the project, a national developer with properties across the western states, filed for bankruptcy. Holsten listed Parkside apartments at half their peak price, with only a 3 percent down payment required. With the help of the MacArthur Foundation, the city created an incentive program called “Find Your Place in Chicago,” paying $10,000—and for a limited time only, $15,000—to anyone who purchased a unit in a mixed-income development. It offered grants to buyers to cover closing costs. When Holsten couldn’t pay back a $32 million Parkside construction loan to JPMorgan Chase, he and the bank discussed taking the unsold units to auction, allowing Chase to write off the remainder of the loan as a loss.

  For the Plan for Transformation and Mayor Daley, that was unacceptable. Cabrini-Green was too notorious to fail. The city bailed Holsten out. He was due to receive a public subsidy of several million dollars only after a certain number of Parkside units were sold. Although the collapse of the housing market left him nowhere near that threshold, the city gave him the money, allowing Chase to renegotiate his loan. A couple of months later, the city financed about half of the $42 million cost to build another eight-story Parkside building on the corner of Oak and Larrabee that would include thirty-nine units of public housing.

  Most of the owners in Abu and Mark’s building were underwater, owing more on their condos than they were worth. Those who bought multiple units, hoping to flip them, were stuck with two apartments they couldn’t sell. Neighbors lost their homes to foreclosure. Parkside buyers had been celebrated as urban pioneers and risk takers. Now they felt like suckers. Owning was supposed to mean you had the right to exercise choices. Buy, sell, move, take out a home equity loan. You wanted to make money, to see a return on your investment. That’s what they imagined as the American way. Never mind that the federal government devoted three times as much each year to mortgage interest deductions and other homeowner subsidies—essentially public housing for homeowners—than to the entire annual budget of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. But now the housing market had failed them as well. The remaining Cabrini-Green high-rises across the street no longer were so easy to ignore; they loomed ominously, like giant tombstones.

  That was when the public housing families began to move in. Housing officials had talked passionately about the prospect of “productive neighboring” in the mixed-income developments, the families in public housing networking with and learning from their middle- and upper-class neighbors, working adults modeling a professional lifestyle for lower-income youth. Even in the best of times, it seemed starry-eyed to imagine that interactions would happen in these buildings across race and class and age that rarely occurred elsewhere in the city. But amid the worst financial crisis in eighty years, the divisions became starker. Parkside included on the same floors not only people of different races and classes but also the conflicting American ideologies of self-sufficiency and social obligation, of home ownership and public assistance. Stuck with their bum mortgages, though, the owners came to resent the people who were “living for free” beside them in nearly identical apartments. Obsessing over the number of units that sold and at what reduced price, they complained that public housing families were “taking over.”

  At their meetings, the condo owners talked endlessly about “situations” in the building that were depressing their property values. They’d seen renters come downstairs to get mail in their pajamas. That wouldn’t look attractive to a potential buyer. They proposed a rule prohibiting pajamas in public spaces. They fretted over the congregating of public housing families in the lobbies. They had to be frank: a large gathering of young black people in the entranceway looked more like the old Cabrini-Green than a new one. Someone suggested removing furniture from the lobbies. Someone else seconded a rule restricting the size of gatherings inside apartments, to keep noise levels down. They complained about public housing residents who left the gates to their townhomes open—it was ugly and a hazard for anyone walking a dog. One woman suggested a ban on garden gnomes. She was afraid no one would buy a place after seeing a gnome.

  Ansari was especially sensitive to the rising tensions. There were other black condo owners, but the fault lines formed mostly around race. He tried to befriend the older woman who lived next door to them. A former Cabrini-Green resident, Ms. Smith told him how much she loved her Parkside apartment, and spoke proudly of her son who was attending college. She also played her television at an unbearably high volume, and music with a heavy bass thudded while Abu and Mark tried to sleep. When one of them knocked to mention the noise, Ms. Smith apologized and promised to keep it down. But in no time the music again thumped and the television again blared, and the requests and the promises were repeated, with increasingly less politeness on both sides. To make matters worse, both Abu and Mark were laid off in the downturn. Ansari was able to find part-time work. But Mark remained at home. Every day, at the same hours, he soon discovered, Ms. Smith’s adult children visited, often with their own children in tow, and within minutes the family members were screaming at each another. Mark could set his clock by it. He’d try to ignore the yelling, the music, the TV, but he couldn’t even think. When he went over to complain, Ms. Smith sometimes bemoaned the sorry state of her life, telling Mark that she had nothing and he had everything. Mark couldn’t believe it. He was fifty and out of work, with a new mortgage to pay. By then, he’d been unemployed for more than a year, and he worried if he’d ever be hired again.

  On a night when Mark phoned several times to complain about the racket, one of Ms. Smith’s sons threatened him, calling him a “faggot.” Mark had the son banned from the building. The son who’d been away at college returned. “Please, please,” he begged of Ansari. “I’m trying to keep the family together.” Eventually, though, the manager of the building stepped in, moving Ms. Smith to a different Holsten development. Mark was overjoyed to see them gone. Ansari’s feelings were more mixed. “I felt relief but also a deep sadness,” he’d say. “My biggest nightmare came true.” As a black homeowner, he’d forced out a returning Cabrini-Green resident. The Smiths certainly weren’t uplifted by their brief time in Parkside of Old Town.

  The economy began gradually to improve. Mark found a full-time job. Slowly, the empty Parkside condos sold. You couldn’t beat the location, at the crossroads of major boulevards and bus and train routes, right by the Loop and the burgeoning tech sector forming nearby in River North. The hulking Montgomery Ward warehouse hugging the river just a couple of blocks away had been remade with the use of city subsidies and now included high-end condos, corporate headquarters, restaurants, a spa, and a yacht club with boat slips onto the water. Ground was broken on another Parskide of Old Town mid-rise, as well as on several other private residential buildings in the immediate vicinity. Demolition of the remaining Cabrini-Green high-rises proceeded. The CHA renter who moved into Ms. Smith’s apartment was a widowed grandfather who kept to himself. Every once in a while, Abu and Mark could hear as if at a distance the tinkling of contemporary jazz. They worried mostly that they were too loud for him.

  DOLORES WILSON

  MOST OF THE high-rises at the city’s other large public housing developments were already leveled or in the process of being cleared. It seemed to defy reason that the most infamous of Chicago’s gallery-style public housing complexes, the one on the primest real estate, would outlast them all. But the lawsuits at Cabrini-Green had stalled demolition. Now it raced to catch up. Five white high-rises were razed over thirteen months starting in December 2005: 1340 N. Larrabee, 630 W. Evergreen, 714 W. Division, 534 W. Division, and 624 W. Division. Kelvin Cannon had lived in two of the buildings as a child. Then came 1121 N. Larrabee and 1159–1161 N. Larrabee, two of the Reds, and in a flurry, in 2008, five more of the red high-rises, a total of 538 apartments. Dolores Wilson watched as one by one the wh
ite high-rises around her were crowned with the rooftop billboard that heralded their demise—HENEGHAN WRECKING WE MAKE SPACE. And then she couldn’t look away as the space was made. The red-cabbed cranes came in, a wrecking ball the size of an ocean liner’s anchor swinging into the top floors, the prefabricated facade crumbling like old chalk. Another crane with steel teeth spat water as it tore into a wall, exposing someone’s room behind it. Bit by bit the buildings disappeared, one apartment, a bank of them, several floors. The sheared towers revealed dozens of brightly painted rooms, like a box of pastels.

  When the letter arrived saying 1230 N. Burling would be next, the high-rise facing it was in the process of being reduced to a couple of twenty-five-foot mounds of rubble. A group of residents in Dolores’s building met in the first-floor rec room to decide what to do. One of the elected tenant reps warned everyone about the CHA’s scare tactics. Kenneth Hammond, a forty-one-year-old lifelong Cabrini resident, had been living in an adjacent high-rise, and when it was torn down he’d leaped as if from a sinking ship to the Burling building. Hammond had watched as his former neighbors took whatever far-flung addresses the housing agency assigned them. They were made to believe they didn’t have a choice, and most of them ended up in neighborhoods that seemed at least as poor and segregated and violent as the homes they’d left. “Don’t think it’s near safe out there as it is in your own community,” Hammond cautioned. Cabrini-Green had its problems, of course, but it was better to face those problems in your own home than on someone else’s turf. Living at Cabrini, most people had figured out which stores offered credit, what church, social service agencies, community leaders, and neighbors could be counted on in a bind. If someone had trouble with rent, a towed car, or a family member who’d been arrested, she at least knew where to find help. In the private market, you were on your own. “Who can you go to?” Hammond said. “Once you in these new communities, they going to shut you out. Only thing they going to tell you, ‘Man, Shorty, go back to where you used to stay.’ The CHA trying to set us up to fail.”

  The last thing Dolores wanted to do was move. At eighty-one, after a half century at Cabrini-Green, she had her church, her friends, her family, all on the Near North Side. Her youngest son, Kenny, had passed away a couple of years earlier, of pneumonia. But both of her daughters lived in 1230 N. Burling as well, Debbie on the same floor and Cheryl two floors up, on the eighth. Dolores appreciated that people wanted to fight to stay. “Carol Steele works her butt off,” she said. “Praise the Lord for her. I’m glad she doesn’t give up.” But in her conscientious way, Dolores attended the relocation meetings; she filled out the surveys and paperwork and followed up with a case manager.

  She had zero interest in testing the private market after all her years in public housing. She’d heard about families renting with vouchers who’d been forced to relocate two and three times. She didn’t think she could handle one move, let alone more. She walked across Division Street to Parkside of Old Town and submitted an application for a unit. When she visited one of the apartments there and stepped out onto the balcony, she lurched back. The fence between her and a six-flight fall was no more than waist high. “I got conditioned where I can walk up to a fence and lean against it, even if it looks like a prison,” she explained of the ramps in the high-rises. But she knew Peter Holsten and respected the way he ran a building. A woman at the Parkside office told Dolores, “We’ll let you know.” But no one ever did. She turned in an application at the Cabrini rowhouses as well. At least she could have a front and back door, a little yard. But the manager there blew her off, telling her to come back Friday and then didn’t show himself. Eventually, a representative from the CHA told her to choose somewhere else. She joined a scheduled tour of the rehabbed public housing across the city, a carload of residents leaving from in front of her building.

  Dolores liked what she saw at Lawndale Gardens, a rowhome development on the West Side, in the Little Village neighborhood. But then she found out it was a block away from the Cook County Jail, with its ten thousand inmates. “I can’t be close to a jail,” she shouted. It would have been like someone who believed in ghosts living alongside a cemetery: she’d have heard the suffering of the inmates at all times. They drove her next to the Dearborn Homes, on the South Side, once a part of the four-mile corridor of public housing that stretched south from the Loop along State Street. Dolores was tired of running around, so she took it. Her unit there would be a tiny one-bedroom, on the fifth floor of a nine-story building. The CHA set it up so Cheryl could relocate to an apartment on the same floor.

  Even for someone as meticulous as Dolores Wilson, the actual move was confusing. She had so much in her four-bedroom apartment to pack, and so little space in her new place to put it. She was told she would be given boxes for all her belongings. Then on the day of the move, the men from Big “O” Movers said there weren’t any more boxes and they had to move her right away. Dolores cried as a lifetime of mementos went into the trash. She lost every letter she ever received. She lost her wedding photos and pictures from her trips to Jamaica with Hubert and documents from her time as head of the resident management group. Hubert had received more than twenty certificates and awards, for coaching sports teams and running his drum and bugle corps. The Corsairs had won twenty-six trophies. Dolores had honors from HUD, the Chicago police, the water department. All of that history was gone, every plaque, tossed in a city dump somewhere. “I hate Daley Jr. with a passion,” Dolores would say. She blamed him for doing nothing when he was Cook County state’s attorney and the news broke about Jon Burge, the Chicago police commander who supervised the torture of more than a hundred black men. She blamed Daley for caring more about the land at Cabrini-Green than the people who lived there. And she blamed him now for the loss of her belongings.

  KELVIN CANNON

  WHEN KELVIN CANNON’S first three-year term as tenant council president ended, the CHA extended it to five years without holding an election. With the foreclosure crisis and the Plan for Transformation stalled, the agency must have felt justified in ignoring this isolated little fief in the democratic process. Cannon didn’t question why two years were added to his term. He just went ahead and did his job the best that he could. He met with developers to go over the constantly reduced scope of their plans. Hundreds of landlords in the city renting to Section 8 families were also losing their buildings to foreclosure, sending their tenants back into the private housing market at a perilous time. Many of these Cabrini families were now calling their old home, asking Cannon for assistance. J. R. Fleming, in his role with the Coalition to Protect Public Housing, sometimes harangued Cannon, accusing him of cozying up to the developers. But all in all, Cannon believed he’d been among the fairest, most loyal tenant council presidents ever at Cabrini-Green. He was proud of the work he’d done. Yet in 2010, when Carol Steele pressed for an election, he decided not to run. With the construction of the first phase of Parkside completed and the rest slowly beginning to resume, Cannon felt it was time to move on.

  He’d lived in 1230 N. Burling since 1983, when he was paroled there. In 2010, the tenants were told the building would be torn down, and Cannon moved into an apartment in Parkside of Old Town. It was a two-bedroom, with two bathrooms and a balcony that looked onto his emptying Burling high-rise. The apartment had a sunny open design, hardwood floors covering the connected kitchen and living room, and carpeting in the bedrooms. There were stainless steel appliances and a granite countertop, and it was roomy enough for Cannon to put a weight bench alongside his couch. He hung his panther paintings. His photograph collection covered the walls, the tabletops, and an upright glass display case, the pictures telling his life story—Cannon in a group shot with his children, or alongside his father during a prison visit, or dressed to the nines at the Players Ball, or standing beside Mayor Daley, or with Reginald and William Blackmon when they were teenagers. Cannon’s oldest brother stayed in the second bedroom. Cannon’s mother and another brother also m
oved into a Parkside unit. People griped that Cannon had gotten the apartments as payback for his support of the developers and the city. But he dismissed that talk as plain jealousy. He applied for an apartment and qualified just like anyone else. “I can’t help that we passed drug tests and background checks, and others didn’t,” Cannon said. And of course he looked out for his mother. She was eighty. “If I don’t help my mother, who will?”

  For Cannon, living in Parkside was a blessing. “You’re supposed to pass that blessing on to the next person,” he said. So he understood why others complained about it. By year ten of the Plan for Transformation and with almost every high-rise gone, only 372 Cabrini-Green families had moved into a mixed-income development. Those applying were excluded from one of the limited spots if they or a family member couldn’t pass a criminal background check, if they had unpaid rent or utility bills, if they or any other adult on the lease failed a drug test, or if they weren’t working thirty hours a week or their children weren’t enrolled in school. Holsten estimated that he accepted one of every five public housing applicants. But it turned out that a small number actually applied. They assumed mixed income wasn’t for them. Of the sixty Cabrini families Holsten had asked to compete for twelve units at North Town Village, only two saw the process through. He began working with church leaders and local officials to bring out more potential tenants. He hired William Gates, the former prep school basketball star featured in the documentary Hoop Dreams and a longtime rowhouse resident. An ordained minister, Gates conducted outreach for Holsten in the Cabrini community.