by Ben Austen
During the last two hours of his very last shift, Davis was called to 1017 N. Larrabee, J. R.’s old high-rise. A twenty-five-year-old woman was going into labor. The paramedics told her it was false labor and she had nothing to worry about. Davis had known the woman since she was a child, and she demanded to speak to him and only to him. It was her third baby, she said. By now she understood when a baby was coming, and it was coming. Davis agreed to take her to the hospital. The elevator was broken, and he held her arm as they walked slowly down each flight of stairs. They made it as far as the lobby.
“Twenty-One, I’m having my baby,” she said. He got it, he told her, that’s why he was taking her to the hospital. “No,” she repeated. “Right now.” She lay on her back on the floor, slid off her stretchy maternity pants, and told Davis to look. Bracing himself, he kneeled between her legs and saw the melon of the baby’s head pushing its way out. Other residents gathered around. By the time Davis got the courage to reach for the emerging form, a hundred spectators had filled the lobby.
“Damn, I didn’t know you guys delivered babies,” an onlooker said. The woman spread her legs wider, and the rest of the baby started to appear—a face, shoulders, wriggling arms. Davis’s hands were down there, wet to the elbows. Then, suddenly, miraculously, he was holding a tiny boy. He placed the baby in the mother’s arms. Davis had arrested the child’s father before, catching him in possession of an unlicensed gun and sending him to the penitentiary. But when the father showed up that night he embraced Davis like a brother. The mother said she wanted to name the baby Eric, after Davis. It was their first boy, though, and they gave him his father’s name. But everyone called the child 21.
ANNIE RICKS
ANNIE RICKS BOASTED that she could adjust to anything. She’d seen it all. But when violence broke out at Wentworth Gardens, the longtime residents blamed the newcomers, the outsiders from Cabrini-Green. The Ricks children walked the grounds, and older tenants sucked their teeth, saying they didn’t have problems before they showed up. An elderly woman announced for Rose Ricks to hear that she didn’t like the Cabrini people and wanted them gone. A middle-aged man told Reggie, “I’m going to make you move.” Annie’s children were basketball players, and when Reggie and Raqkown tried to play on the courts beside their apartment, the guys there threw elbows and fists, trying to turn the game into a brawl. A group of boys jumped Reggie in the courtyard. The entire area seemed to stick together, so the odds looked always to be about fifty to one. Reggie had a gun held to his face, and his girlfriend who was six months pregnant was knocked to the ground and had to go to the hospital. J. R. Fleming’s daughter with Donna had a pistol pulled on her as well. “There have been beatings. Children have had their wrists broken, jaw broken,” J. R. told the New York Times about the Cabrini families who moved to Wentworth. “It’s a powder keg.”
The Ricks children came to appreciate all the more their mother’s stubborn refusal to leave Cabrini-Green. Even amid the violence of their old home, they knew they could rely on allies there earned over a lifetime. It wasn’t like that at Wentworth Gardens. “My sons didn’t come from Cabrini-Green; they came from their mother’s womb,” Annie would say. “My sons don’t sell drugs. They don’t keep guns in the house. They’re not in any gang. So you can’t judge them. You know how people say you come from a different development. It’s like a gang thing. People at Wentworth think you’re stepping on their turf. This is not your turf. This is CHA’s turf. You can’t run me from my home. Because I do pay rent.”
On an airless Saturday in the summer of 2012, Ricks went outside around midnight. She’d been indoors with her grandchildren for hours, upset with Rose for leaving the babies with her all day. She set up a small table, placing atop it a transistor radio and a can of bug spray. She popped open a bottle of iced tea she’d bought at the nearby gas station and tuned the radio to a gospel station. She had about ten minutes of relaxation before she heard screaming and cursing in the distance. She recognized the voice before she saw him—it was Reggie. He came sprinting toward her out of the darkness with Raqkown beside him and a mob of twenty men at their heels. Her sons had been at the apartment of a friend, another former 1230 N. Burling resident who’d moved to Wentworth. A group of guys had forced their way into the unit. Reggie and Raqkown managed to punch and push their way out before taking off across the interconnected courtyards. While Reggie was running and fighting, an elderly woman came outside to smack him with a broom; a man hit him over the head with the lid of a Weber grill.
Reggie and Raqkown dashed past their mother and up the stairs to their apartment, their pursuers rushing past her as well. Rose, who was inside, opened the door for her brothers, and the Wentworth guys charged in behind them, colliding into her. Annie Ricks ran up the stairs after them. “Home invasion!” she cried. In the cramped apartment, one of the invaders knocked a television off the wall and stomped his foot through it. They pushed over a chest of drawers and threw chairs. Reggie picked up a cooking pot off the stove and swung it. Rose armed herself with a mop. Their mother always carried a fist of keys with her, and she now punched with it. She had the aerosol can of bug repellant as well, and she sprayed it into any face close by.
“I’m just going to say it like this,” Ricks said later that night, “we did whatever we had to do to get their asses out of our house. God told me to get the bug spray. I had to protect my sons. But I’m not mad. If I get mad, it wouldn’t be me.”
When the police arrived, they were what Ricks described as “Bridgeport police,” white cops, seemingly from the traditionally Irish neighborhood just to the west. The officers laughed at Reggie, who was bleeding from his head. Ricks later asked for a police report, but the cops said only Reggie could request one. By that time, he was on his way to the hospital.
For two weeks after that night, Ricks stayed with a relative in the Cabrini rowhouses. Her daughter Earnestine put up Reggie and Raqkown. Rose moved temporarily to a place in the western suburbs. “It isn’t safe for them at Wentworth,” Ricks said. She complained about Wentworth Gardens to anyone who would listen, talking to Carol Steele and calling on the many reporters who’d interviewed her when she’d moved in the first place. “It’s been hell,” she insisted. “I’m going to say it just like this. They damn near killed Reggie. Ever since December 9, 2010, I can’t get a good night’s sleep.” That was the day she left Cabrini-Green.
A social service provider asked Ricks if she wanted to go to a shelter. She didn’t. A shelter wasn’t any place to live. “That’s like giving up,” Ricks said. The CHA said she could move to the Cabrini rowhouses as part of the agency’s victim assistance program. But she didn’t want the rowhouses, either. “Why should I go from harm to harm, from hell’s danger back to hell’s danger?” Plus, the rowhouses weren’t sized right for her family. With the home invasion, her old stubbornness returned. No way was she going to be cheated out of a four-bedroom again. Not this time.
17
The People’s Public Housing Authority
J. R. FLEMING
IN THE MIDDLE of a 100 degree Wednesday, the same summer week in 2012 as Annie Ricks’s home invasion, J. R. Fleming strode up to a brick bungalow on a South Side street lined with them. A man in an electric wheelchair whirred along the opposite sidewalk. A shirtless boy lay splayed like a cat across the hood of a shaded car. The neighborhood was known as Princeton Park, for the nearby planned community where Harvard and Princeton Avenues formed a loop around an eighty-acre greenway. The townhome subdivision had been built in the 1940s specifically for working-class African Americans. Black families soon bought up the bungalows on the surrounding streets, as blockbusting Realtors convinced white homeowners to sell low and flee to the suburbs. In the fifties, with the area’s racial reconstitution nearly complete, Chicago aldermen agreed to build new public housing there—the Frank O. Lowden Homes, named for the Illinois governor who sent the state militia into the city during the 1919 race riot. The yellow-bricked house that J.
R. now entered had been vacant for almost two years. The Anti-Eviction Campaign, the group he cofounded, had already broken in and taken over the property. Campaign members were in the living room stuffing the belongings of the last tenants into trash bags. “In an eviction,” J. R. noted, “you took what you could, not what you should.”
When J. R. emerged from the bungalow, a passerby demanded to know what they were doing on his block. A man in his fifties, he was a security guard at a lakefront condo tower several miles away. He said that the streets around him were pockmarked with abandoned houses, and he and the other homeowners who’d stuck it out had been calling the police to get trespassers out of the empty properties. J. R. greeted the news with a broad smile, as if he’d heard that they were cousins. He told the security guard that the people of Princeton Park weren’t alone in their predicament. He said the foreclosure crisis had left Chicago gutted with abandoned properties—tens of thousands of them citywide. At the same time, the city had a shortage of 120,000 units of affordable housing and another 100,000 people sleeping in shelters or on streets or without a permanent place to stay. “Do the math,” he demanded. “This country doesn’t have a housing crisis. It has a moral and political crisis. Can you feel me?” J. R. denounced a housing industry whose greed brought low not only black neighborhoods but also the entire national economy. “The banksters are gangsters!” he yelled.
J. R. was enjoying his indignation. He lived for these public proclamations. Thirty-nine and still broad across the shoulders and chest, he had softened around the middle, and a skunk-like streak of gray ran up the center of his dreadlocks. He wore a medallion in the shape of the African continent over a loose-fitting Anti-Eviction Campaign T-shirt, which advertised that his organization had chapters not only in Chicago but also in Cape Town, South Africa. In salesman mode, J. R. explained to the man that his group had freed up a dozen abandoned homes in Chicago over the past year. Without seeking permission from any bank or the city, they’d pulled the boards off the doors and windows, made the properties livable, and moved in families in need of housing. “What we’re doing is playing matchmaker,” he said, laughing. “We’re connecting home-less people with people-less homes.” It was simple, logical, right? He said that the families they resettled into these properties wouldn’t pay rent or a mortgage; many of them were former public housing residents and couldn’t afford to. He chuckled deeply, asking the security guard if that wasn’t preferable to a vacant home further deteriorating, turning into a haven for gangbangers or drug users.
The older man had been nodding in agreement, unable to interject. Finally, he said, “I’m glad to see you guys doing something positive.” It did make sense to him. He was like a lot of people in neighborhoods such as this one: after living through decades of decline followed by the foreclosure crisis, they’d revised their economic understanding of real estate. Of course, they had considered their homes to be commercial assets, rock-solid investments that would steadily increase in value. But that was before their neighbors left and before the bubble popped. Black wealth in the country, already a fraction of that of whites’, had been cut in half in the previous few years. Suddenly, a productive squatter next door seemed less like a criminal or a freeloader than a possible boon to a struggling community. The man did have one question, though. “How might I volunteer on that?”
The Anti-Eviction Campaign hosted its weekly Thursday night meetings at its headquarters, a corner lounge on the South Side that itself had been in foreclosure for a few years. The group’s secretary was a woman named Shirley Henderson who had worked in the mortgage business herself. The financial crisis led to her losing first her job and then her home, from which she’d been illegally evicted, officers barging in without a warrant, guns drawn on her and her grandchildren. A year into her battle with a bank, she was at the courthouse when an officer told her about a boisterous young man from Cabrini-Green who’d been accompanying people to court. “When you’re in foreclosure,” Henderson said, “you look for help anywhere you can get it.”
She now tried to sort J. R.’s roving weeks into some semblance of a schedule. There were days he led protests outside the downtown offices of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Other times he enlisted campaign members to inundate banks with emails and phone calls demanding that a customer’s delinquent mortgage be reworked. He led blockades outside homes to thwart banks from carrying out evictions. He’d marched into a cramped Harris Bank with a team of protestors and a nonagenarian named Emma Harris who’d been set up by the lender with a subprime refinance with rates that eventually ballooned. After she went into foreclosure, the bank, rather than giving her a chance to rework her mortgage, “quit claimed” the property, forfeiting its ownership and handing the buildings over for free not to her but to a third-party developer. At the branch, J. R. thundered into a bullhorn, “This is a Harris versus Harris showdown!”
Back in 2003, J. R.’s awakening to public housing activism was sudden, the result of a police officer’s fist to his face. How he came to guerrilla-style housing activism was more gradual. In 2009, J. R. was organizing against Chicago’s bid to host the 2016 summer Olympics. No longer hog butcher or toolmaker, Chicago had by then come out of its postindustrial decline as a New Economy tourist destination for the world, a player with derivatives and trade shows, a city of big transportation hubs. While these industries breathed life into the city’s central area, they couldn’t support the sprawling Chicago that was. Chicago felt increasingly like a ring city, like London, Hong Kong, or Paris, with the moneyed elite residing in a prosperous core and poor people and minorities relegated to the resource-starved peripheries, the banlieues. And now Chicago was vying to build an aquatic center and a velodrome? It wasn’t even housing its citizens or funding its schools. When Rio, not Chicago, was awarded the 2016 games, Republicans in DC spun it as a rejection of their caricature of President Obama’s mobbed-up hometown ties and of his entire big-government liberal agenda. Locally, though, J. R. felt he’d helped avert a gross injustice. It was proof to him in the power of protest.
Later that year, J. R. learned that the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing was carrying out an investigation across America. When she came to Chicago, J. R. was the one to show her around Cabrini-Green. The United Nations concluded that affordable housing conditions in the United States matched those in the third world. J. R. read the report and felt like he did in high school after his football team ran all over a rival. “I’m thinking, touchdown!” he said.
He believed that the international censure would shame Mayor Daley into preserving more of the city’s public housing. He expected that the black president from Chicago would feel the scorn of the world and create an effective affordable housing policy for the nation. He thought that organizers in Chicago had finally saved Cabrini-Green. Of course, none of that happened. Despite the admonishment of the United Nations and J. R.’s own cries of wrongdoing, all the towers that remained at Cabrini-Green were torn down.
Even the remaining sliver of the Cabrini rowhouses, the last remnant of the old development, now looked to be doomed. The nearly 600 rowhouses were slated to be restored under the Plan for Transformation, counted among the 25,000 public housing units that the city promised to build or rehab. More than a decade into the plan, however, the city had created only 17,000 usable replacement units, and the number of public housing units at Cabrini-Green had been reduced from 3,600 to fewer than 500. Nevertheless, the agency now decided that even a single strip of rowhomes would be bad for both the neighborhood and anyone who had to live there in concentrated poverty. It didn’t matter that the residents were surrounded by affluence or that the CHA was fine with relocating families to Wentworth Gardens, Dearborn Homes, Altgeld Gardens, or other public housing developments of concentrated poverty in less desirable real estate markets.
J. R. had to admit he’d been beaten and that the game wasn’t even close. “I was piss fucking mad. I was bubbling,” he would sa
y. “Arguing with elected officials and the CHA doesn’t matter. None of that shit matters. Because at the end of the day, they’re going to do what they’re going to do and we can’t stop them from tearing down public housing.” It was around then that a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Chicago named Toussaint Losier introduced J. R. to a South African housing activist. Losier had studied the direct-action tactics of the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, and he was showing the group’s chairperson, Ashraf Cassiem, around Cabrini-Green. Cassiem listened to J. R. rant about the humanitarian crisis created by America’s for-profit housing system. The South African laughed at J. R. for all his bluster: “The question is what are you willing to do when the government won’t provide the necessary housing?” J. R. and Toussaint decided together to start a Chicago chapter of the Anti-Eviction Campaign. And unlike in South Africa, they wouldn’t have to build lean-tos and shanties on government land; in the black neighborhoods of Chicago, they had all the empty homes they required.
One evening in the fall of 2012, J. R. helped lead a fund-raiser at a Bronzeville YMCA. For a modest donation, thirty people crowded into the basement to watch the film Inside Job, the 2010 documentary that explained the arcane origins of the housing crisis. Because many of them had been subject to subprime mortgages and foreclosure, the audience groaned and hissed as Matt Damon, the movie’s narrator, described the proliferation of loans that by design were likely to lead to default. “That’s their attitude to us,” a man in the audience yelled. When Larry Summers, who had been one of President Obama’s chief economic advisers, was shown as complicit in the undercutting of the country’s financial oversight, the systems that might have reigned in the private sector’s financial trickery, an elderly woman who was taking shaky notes on a palm-size pad let out a gasp. “Didn’t Obama take him?”