by Ben Austen
While the people in the parking lot below waited for the start of Project Cabrini Green, the marching band from the Marion Nzinga Stamps Youth Center arrived. The flag-waving majorettes stepped crisply heel to toe, the tack-tack-clap of the drums and cymbals ringing the air. The dancers spun as a boy on drums shouted a command. Everyone in the brigade dropped low, their bent legs swaying like butterfly wings. Then the LEDs started dancing from the cavities of the high-rise. It was like stealing a peek inside 134 still-occupied homes, nighthawks in each planted in front of a television, the flickering sets washing the darkened rooms in their glow.
ANNIE RICKS
FOR A COUPLE of weeks, the media followed Annie Ricks and her family to Wentworth Gardens, eager to tell the next chapter in the life of the last Cabrini-Green high-rise tenant. Annie’s new apartment was on the second floor of a three-story walk-up, part of attached buildings that formed a horseshoe around a shared courtyard. During the news interviews, the boys who hung outside tried to angle their way into the camera shots as Rose Ricks shooed them away. “My family from Cabrini-Green made history,” Annie would proclaim. “We made nationwide history.” But the attention waned, and the reporters stopped calling. Annie’s twenty-year-old son, Reggie, liked to tease her, knotting his elastic face as he addressed his mother by her middle name: “You used to be popular, Jeffrey.”
“I am popular, Reggie Lee Ricks,” she chided playfully. “God loves me.”
Like many of the people who relocated elsewhere, Ricks regularly traveled back to Cabrini-Green. She was one of those gathered outside 1230 N. Burling on the eve of its demolition. Her daughter Latasha drove her, and her son Kenton snapped photos as Ricks watched roosting geese and a rabbit scurry over the cleared fields. On other days, she spent time with family members in the remaining rowhouses. She’d drop into Carol Steele’s office or track down Joe Peery in his Parkside of Old Town building. At the end of the school day, her son Raqkown usually took the bus not to Wentworth but to Cabrini-Green, playing basketball at Seward Park. Some relocated parents enrolled their children in Jenner or Manierre, another local elementary, having them ride a bus and train rather than put them in schools in their new neighborhoods. Others met up with friends at the rowhouses, hanging on Cambridge. Better there than an unfamiliar strip of Austin, Englewood, or South Shore. At a town hall meeting for those displaced by the Plan for Transformation, former Cabrini residents talked about the dangers in their unfamiliar neighborhoods. “My grandchildren can’t even go outside and play in their so-called new community since they received their Section 8 apartment,” a woman told the crowd at Saint Joseph’s. “They are having gang wars all around this city when a new face comes on the block, so that is why my grandchildren come back to Cabrini to play with the people they know and the people who know them.”
Former residents also got together for “Old School” picnics and reunions. Several Cabrini-Green Facebook pages formed, people reporting job opportunities and business ventures, sharing words of inspiration and announcements of deaths in the Cabrini family. Oftentimes a post showed a photo of one of the high-rises—“Who can say what building this is?”—leading to lists of competing memories. There was nostalgia, but more than that as well. No one forgot that they’d seen a dead body or that the elevator was too often out of order. But they remembered the good, too, more powerfully now that they felt adrift elsewhere.
The Ricks family’s first days at Wentworth Gardens were promising enough. With all the coverage about the end of Cabrini-Green and its last tenant, many people recognized them from the news. An older woman, upon meeting Annie, said, “Hey, you’re the lady on Channel 7 with that one tooth.” “Yes, I am,” Ricks responded proudly, and they became friends. Ten other Cabrini families had relocated there as well, including Donna, the mother of J. R. Fleming’s first four children. They all welcomed the Rickses. When winter ebbed, Annie barbecued out in the courtyard, a communal feast. At nights during the summer when the White Sox hit home runs, she sat in the window with her grandchildren and pointed to the fireworks from the exploding scoreboard that lit up the sky.
Wentworth Gardens was built in the 1940s on four square blocks next to the White Sox stadium, and like other public housing developments with “garden” in their names, it offered a promise of a verdant planned community, with parks and lawns replacing the alleys and littered streets of the slums. But it, too, deteriorated as maintenance lagged. Apartments flooded, sewage backed up, and heating systems failed. When the Plan for Transformation got under way, Wentworth was given an extensive rehab. The units were modernized with new kitchens and bathrooms, the grounds were again landscaped, the parking lots expanded. Wrought iron fencing now ringed the perimeter.
All of that was good to Annie. But she also pointed out that the downstairs door to her building was broken. Even though it was locked, people just yanked it open. The buzzer in the apartment didn’t work, either. She was assured that these problems would be fixed. She wanted to remain upbeat, even though with no laundry hookup she now had to drag a cart to a separate laundry building. And despite the demands she made while holding out in 1230 N. Burling, Ricks was relocated to an apartment with only three bedrooms. She slept in one of the rooms, Rose and her baby in another, and Reggie and his son stayed in the third. Raqkown, the youngest, was like Michael Evans from Good Times—the little fellow who slept on the couch. “Okay,” she said. “We’ll make this work.”
She quickly learned that Wentworth was plopped down in the middle of a food desert. When a new White Sox stadium was built next to the old one, in 1991, it replaced much of the surrounding neighborhood, clearing homes as well as local businesses and the jobs they provided. The closest supermarket when she moved there was nearly two miles away. Most residents did their shopping at a gas station and liquor store on the south end of the development. One of Ricks’s daughters sometimes drove her to a grocery store, but Annie liked to walk, so she also headed out on her own. She journeyed south a couple of miles to shop at Jewel or Walgreen’s. She’d trek another half mile beyond that to visit an aunt in a senior center, and sometimes she went by foot to Oakwood Shores, a rehabbed public housing complex near the lakefront where some of her cousins lived. Ricks now cursed herself for not deciding where she wanted to go rather than letting the CHA pick. “We ended up there because my dumb butt didn’t make them put in writing about a four-bedroom,” she would say. “That was my mistake.”
Annie didn’t unpack entirely, as if she couldn’t accept that Wentworth was her home. In the living room she hung a photo from her wedding day. There were photos, too, of her deceased mother, who’d lived to ninety-four, and of Annie’s children at their graduations and three pictures of President Obama. A couple of prayers and rules were taped to the wall—“Men don’t wear hats in the house.” But boxes were stacked unopened. Most of the trophies were never put on display. A bassinet was stuffed with clothes, and a grandfather clock remained taped shut from the day the Big “O” Movers carried it inside. One day Reggie took stock of their new apartment. “Tell you the truth, we downsized,” he told his mother.
Annie Ricks couldn’t deny it.
DOLORES WILSON
DOLORES WILSON DIDN’T return to 1230 N. Burling for the vigil. She was in her eighties then and couldn’t stand out in the cold for hours looking at a lifeless wreck. She had dizzy spells, trips to the doctor, tests. “The longer you live, the house is going to tear down,” she’d say. Plus, she was still familiarizing herself with the bus routes and the streets around Dearborn Homes. Most Sundays she did go back to Cabrini. Holy Family Church had a van that picked up its members who’d been scattered around the city, and for a small fee Dolores also took the Pace bus. She tried to make the 10:00 a.m. services and also the Bible classes that followed.
Her new neighbors liked to tell Dolores how bad the Dearborn Homes used to be. “They said the building I’m in was the worst,” Dolores explained. “It was where the drugs were sold. The police wouldn’t
come in there, no security.” When it opened, in 1950, Dearborn was the first public housing complex in Chicago with elevators—sixteen X-shaped buildings of no more than nine stories with a “towers in the park” design. In the 1940s and ’50s, the CHA designated many of its new developments as “relocation projects,” housing for the tens of thousands of families displaced by highway construction, slum clearance, and other large urban renewal efforts. Under the Plan for Transformation, Dearborn Homes became a new relocation project, undergoing a multimillion-dollar renovation. Thousands of families left public housing high-rises for a different rehabbed public housing site. “If I’m at Cabrini, and I choose Dearborn Homes, the public housing I’m moving into is nowhere near the public housing I’m moving out of,” Lewis Jordan, the head of the CHA from 2007 to 2011, said. “People are exercising a choice: they know in the relocation process that they’re going to 100 percent public housing that’s 100 percent better.”
“Some choice,” Dolores would crack. When she moved into Dearborn, though, the floors were waxed and the elevators and walls clean. Trees and green grass surrounded the mid-rises. A security guard checked IDs in the lobby. A bus ran along State, trains were nearby, and the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology sat just to the south. She did complain about the absence of any stores—the closest grocery then was fifteen blocks away—and about the size of her “teeny-weeny” apartment. Dolores would say of her place that she didn’t have room to move around. “The elevator is in my bedroom, almost. I can sit in my living room and cook in the kitchen.”
She liked that her daughter Cheryl lived next to her, on the very same floor, and Che Che visited often, and she sometimes looked after her great-grandson, who went to a school next door that she could see from her window. “All he had to do was take the elevator down and cross the street, and it’s not even a traffic street,” Dolores would say cheerfully. But the underenrolled school was one of the fifty shuttered by the city in 2013. From 2000 to 2010, Chicago’s African American population fell by 181,000, a 17 percent drop, families deciding to quit the troubled city for the southern suburbs or the South. And eventually Cheryl had enough of Chicago and joined the exodus, moving to Atlanta to be closer to her own daughters. For all those reasons, Dolores couldn’t muster the interest to do the little interior decorating that she’d always loved. She couldn’t make her “way small” apartment feel like home. “I’m there,” she’d say. “I’m surrounded by walls. But I’m just walking through.”
Dolores said she no longer wanted to get involved in politics and activism, but she’d been saying that her entire adult life. She continued to obsess about prison reform and police abuse, about the number of unsolved murders in the city’s black neighborhoods and all the money spent on building up the areas near downtown. She called her friends and wrote letters to local papers. She didn’t attend the tenant council meetings at Dearborn—it was too far a walk across the development. But when her great-grandson’s school was being closed, she went to protests to try to keep it open. “I could not imagine that they would just relocate children for the benefit of those with money or with political power behind them,” Dolores said. And then she learned that the CHA hadn’t fixed up or rented out almost 3,500 of its units, despite the fact that the federal government was still paying the agency whether the units were occupied or not. The CHA had also issued 13,500 fewer vouchers than HUD had funded. With tens of thousands of families on the waiting list for a subsidized rental, and hundreds of thousands more above the public housing threshold but struggling to pay rent on the open market, the CHA built up a reserve of $430 million, claiming it as some sort of rainy-day fund—while just about every other city and state agency looked to be in penury.
Dolores almost cried she was so mad. What about the rain that families in need of housing were feeling right now? She came to feel about a new mayor, Rahm Emanuel, the same way she did about the second Mayor Daley—“I hate their natural guts,” she said. She joined a local group whose mission was to engage the Bronzeville neighborhood—her new neighborhood—in “civic capacity.” “It sounds really elaborate, but it ain’t,” Dolores joked. When the group went to Springfield to protest even deeper cuts to social service programs, Dolores rode the bus downstate with her fellow demonstrators. As people marched around the state capitol, they shouted, “What do we want!” “When do we want it!” Dolores waved her fist and yelled the words, thinking at the same time that what she wanted was to sit down and to do it right now.
“Maybe after a while the protesting will pay off,” she said with a sigh. “Maybe if we keep going, there will be some change.”
DOLORES HAD IT better than many others who moved away from Cabrini-Green. They dealt with sketchy landlords, out-of-control utility bills, and an unfamiliarity with their surroundings that often put them in the way of danger. The gang structure in Chicago had fragmented into some 850 cliques, small groups of guys who grew up together, their collective identity organized around a corner or a park, the local school or the slaying of a friend. Their clashes with one another were mostly petty, personal, stirred up on social media, the kinds of conflicts that occur when every few blocks a different crew holds sway. Yet with more guns on the streets of Chicago than in New York City and Los Angeles combined, the arguments too often proved deadly. In 2012, Chicago saw 504 homicides, more than in any other city in the country and the most there since the early nineties.
Relocated public housing families were often blamed for the soaring rates of crime. There was an assumption, repeated by community leaders, the police, and homeowners, that the newcomers brought with them their “project behavior,” a lack of socialization, as if they had re-created Cabrini-Greens wherever they settled. In South Shore, which took on more Section 8 renters than any other Chicago neighborhood, a resident described the arrival of high-rise families like a biblical plague: “It is as if the gates of Hell . . . opened and these people were let out. . . . I had to ask again, where did these people come from? And, lo, I was told they came from the projects, the CHA.” It turned out the problem families he was describing were not from public housing, but no matter. Sometimes the behavior deemed “ghetto” wasn’t the fault of the voucher holders but of their landlords. Families had to yell out their apartment windows to check on the door when buzzers and intercoms were broken and the requests to fix them went unheeded. A police commander who’d patrolled public housing high-rises before they were torn down said, “Ninety percent of the people in there were great people.” It was about perception. “That stigma of the CHA,” he added, “breeds the fear.” Experts talked of a tipping point at which “crime would explode” as more public housing families were relocated to an area. A criminologist from the University of Illinois at Chicago speculated that the dispersal of CHA families had already led to a sharp jump in crime in the city’s southern and western suburbs. And people in middle- and working-class Chatham, on Chicago’s South Side, blamed the Plan for Transformation for their neighborhood’s decline.
The communities with large numbers of Section 8 landlords, however, were already suffering in postindustrial Chicago. The Loop and the areas around it added 48,000 residents from 2000 to 2010, more than in any other city center in the country. Many black communities, on the other hand, continued to be drained of population, and they became even poorer and more perilous. Then the foreclosure crisis hit. By 2013, Chicago had 62,000 vacant properties, with another 80,000 foreclosures working their way through courts countywide. Two-thirds of the vacant homes were clustered as if to form a sinkhole in just a few black and Latino neighborhoods. One of every five apartments in South Shore was caught up in a foreclosure, along with thousands of single-family homes. Vacant houses were more likely to be used by bored kids, gangbangers, and drug users. Maps of the city’s homicides, foreclosures, and public housing relocations looked almost like perfect overlays of one another. Families from Cabrini-Green and other high-rise developments didn’t spread crime like an infectious d
isease; they were moved into tense areas far from the city center where the poor were already competing over shrinking resources.
That also meant relocated families were bound to exacerbate the problems. It would have taken uncommon coordination for the CHA, the police, and the schools to work in tandem on the relocations to avert conflicts. But that’s exactly what was required. “It’s like they took all the gangs and mixed them up,” said the uncle of a sixteen-year-old who was shot to death in Englewood after he was moved from Robert Taylor. “Every project they shut down, they don’t check where they put you. They just put you.”
Eric Davis, the Cabrini-Green police officer who was part of the Slick Boys, lived in South Shore, and he now saw people all the time in his neighborhood who’d moved from public housing. They’d greet him as 21, and they’d laugh about something in the past that probably wasn’t funny when it happened. Davis had retired from the force in 2007, after twenty years on the job, and he refused to set foot ever again on the land at Cabrini-Green. He’d show up to meet someone and linger just beyond the periphery of Seward Park, as if repelled by an invisible electric fence. He figured that he and every other police officer, resident, and activist who spent time at Cabrini suffered in some way from post-traumatic stress. His wife would catch him staring into space. “You in Cabrini, baby?” she’d ask, touching his arm. He had another reason never to go back—he wanted to preserve the purity of his final day on the job.