High-Risers

by Ben Austen

  For the people at the South Side YMCA, the movie explained that their fates had been determined by the actions of Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers, by the deregulation of banks in Iceland, by collaterized debt obligations and credit default swaps. Realtors, lenders, and rating agencies were all in cahoots. The whole vast system was stacked against them. US banks were two and a half times more likely to steer African Americans toward risky subprime mortgages than they were whites, even when black borrowers qualified for traditional, more secure loans. Nationally, black and Latino borrowers lost their homes to foreclosure at twice the rate of whites. And those around the room hadn’t only lost their homes. Their neighborhoods were in ruins. After rushing to force out families in foreclosure, banks had failed to properly market, maintain, and secure the vacant homes, as the law required them to do. The homes turned into hulls, further depressing the value of occupied buildings around them. By 2012, 40 percent of the people who owned houses in Chicago’s black communities owed more on their mortgages than their homes were worth.

  When Inside Job ended and the credits rolled, J. R. stood in front of the group, bouncing on his toes, as if he’d just watched Rocky. He didn’t find the movie depressing, he said. It inspired him. He’d seen it nineteen times and hoped to see it 150 more. It was true that Obama and his people couldn’t be trusted. The president’s men believed in housing not as a human necessity but as an engine of economic growth. “Yeah, we got change. Chump change. Hope don’t give you housing,” J. R. said, mocking the president’s famous campaign slogans. “The market failed us. Harvard, Yale, and the University of Chicago failed us. Our government—the government—doesn’t belong to us. Forget them, they forgot us.” That’s why they were now doing themselves what Franklin Roosevelt had done for the country in the 1930s. “If the government won’t provide public housing for the people, the people must provide it for themselves,” he announced. The takeovers of abandoned properties were infinitesimal compared with the demand, but it was a start. “What we need is the people’s public housing authority.”

  UNTIL HE WAS eight, Rahm Emanuel lived in Uptown, the North Side Chicago neighborhood where his father settled not long after emigrating from Israel. But Emanuel’s formative years were spent outside the city, in the wealthy North Shore suburb of Wilmette. Much has been made of the way Emanuel’s parents trained him and his two brothers to spar verbally and come at life aggressively. His father, a pediatrician and former member of an Israeli paramilitary group, tested his sons’ aptitude at the dinner table. Their mother worked on them culturally. Rahm and his brothers were sent to summer camp in Israel, and he served as a civilian volunteer in the Israel Defense Forces. The oldest brother, Ezekiel, went on to become a renowned oncologist and bioethicist; Ari, the youngest, with an infamous temper, rose through the ranks of Hollywood agents, taking over at the powerful William Morris Endeavor agency. Rahm, the middle child, excelled at ballet, earning a scholarship to study at Chicago’s premier company, but he turned eventually to politics. He raised money—lots of it—for campaigns. Argumentative and profane, he relished the combat in every ask, demanding tens of thousands of dollars from donors who had the gall to suggest a pledge of only a few thousand. He worked as the chief fund-raiser for Richard M. Daley’s first successful mayoral run, in 1989, and at thirty-two served as the national finance director for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, before assuming a role as one of the president’s chief advisers. When Emanuel returned to Chicago in 1999, it was for a job at the local office of a major investment-banking firm. In little more than two years with the company, with his long list of contacts in the Daley and Clinton administrations, he managed to earn $18 million. He spent $450,000 of it as he won a seat for himself in Congress in 2002. After Barack Obama tapped Emanuel to serve as his first chief of staff, critics characterized their shared Chicago roots as everything from provincial ineptitude to machine cronyism. When the administration pushed through its signature reform of the health care system, in March 2010, Rahm’s backroom arm-twisting was hailed as a triumph of the “Chicago way.”

  Daley had been mayor of Chicago all that time, through most of the first Bush presidency, both of Bill Clinton’s terms, the entirety of the George W. Bush White House, and into the Obama years. In 2011, having already surpassed the more than twenty-one years his father had held the office, Daley decided not to seek a record seventh term. Although he had won his last election, in 2007, with three-quarters of the vote, Daley had since seen his approval ratings fall to an all-time low. There was the city’s failed bid to land the 2016 Olympic games as well as a fiasco involving the privatization of the city’s parking meters. And maybe, too, he’d just had enough. The city’s finances were in far worse shape than the mayor let on, and his wife of thirty-nine years, Maggie, was dying of breast cancer. With Daley’s blessing, Emanuel came back to the city to run for mayor. After a Daley in charge for forty-three of the previous fifty-five years, Emanuel represented both a break from and a continuation of the past; he was something new, yet also a political and business insider, the type of pugnacious leader Chicagoans were conditioned to expect.

  At Cabrini-Green, in her rowhouse offices, Carol Steele talked about her high hopes for Mayor Emanuel. Every politician and public official she’d known had looked on as public housing communities were wiped out, as poor people and their problems were forced out of sight. But with Emanuel she was willing to suspend disbelief. She had faith in Rahm not because of his ties to Obama. “Don’t get me started on that one,” she said. Emanuel made her think of the biblical story of Saul undergoing a conversion, transforming from a persecutor of Christians and into Paul, one of Jesus’ apostles. “I think Rahm might be Saul going to Paul,” she said. “I hope Rahm is Paul.”

  As mayor, Emanuel did throw himself into the idea of Chicago. “Chicago is the great American city, the most American of the American cities,” he said. “New York City looks out onto the world. LA looks in a mirror. Chicago—it’s where people from around the world and the country come to make a home.” Emanuel had served on the board of the CHA when the Plan for Transformation was developed more than a decade earlier. During his bid for mayor, he’d said little about the unfulfilled plan or about public or affordable housing. Then in 2012, with Emanuel announcing that Chicago faced a budget deficit of $636 million and with the foreclosure crisis showing no signs of abating, his administration announced the creation of a Plan for Transformation 2.0, a “recalibration” of the original goals.

  The new plan was much like the old plan. The CHA remained thousands short of reaching its promised goal of 15,000 new or renovated family units of public housing. With no sale of market-rate apartments to fund the building of low-income rentals, the city continued to add at most a couple hundred new public housing units each year. As part of the recalibration, the city did clarify that it wouldn’t restore either the Cabrini rowhouses or the Lathrop Homes—both amid gentrifying neighborhoods on the North Side. And yet the demand for low-income housing in Chicago was as great as it had been in eighty years. When the CHA opened up a lottery in 2014, allowing people merely to sign up for an opportunity to get onto a public housing and Section 8 waiting list, 280,000 people applied, a fifth of all the renters in Chicago. These, too, were people who’d come to Chicago to make a home.

  J. R. FLEMING

  THE VERY FIRST abandoned property the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign took over, in the summer of 2011, was on the 6700 block of South Prairie Avenue, in a section of the South Side known as Park Manor. The name of the century-old community had come to seem almost ironic, like a runty dog that people called Killer. There was one small park and no manors, just aging three-flats and single-family homes wedged into a crease formed by the crisscrossing of rail lines and expressways. Blocks were gap-toothed by the blight of empty lots and boarded-up homes, many of them marked with red “X” signs, alerting firefighters that the precarious structures should be left to burn. Dolores Wilson had lived on Prai
rie Avenue before coming to Cabrini-Green in her twenties, and around the time J. R. was eyeing vacant properties there, a driver took her past her old home. As Dolores rode by the building, she kept silent, ashamed to claim it as her own. The front door was open, the windows smashed, their tattered curtains rippling in the wind. Most of the surrounding buildings and stores that she remembered were gone, replaced by tracts of weeds and tall grass, befitting an actual prairie.

  A friend told J. R. about the redbrick Victorian in Park Manor. Deutsche Bank had foreclosed on it two years earlier, and the house’s owner, for all her efforts, couldn’t convince the bank to consider a mutually beneficial modification of her loan. She finally walked away from it, moving to Philadelphia. But her foreclosure ended up among two thousand temporarily halted when lawyers working for the bank admitted to illegally altering documents. With the foreclosure in legal limbo, J. R. saw an opportunity. “When the ownership is complicated,” he announced with a playful grin, “then it’s community property.”

  What the Anti-Eviction Campaign wanted to do was technically illegal. But J. R. liked to boast that he didn’t concern himself with the law. The takeovers “weren’t legally right, but morally right,” he’d proclaim. He’d offer up the example of the Underground Railroad, an audacious act of theft. He reminded people that until 1967 it was illegal in many US states for black and white people to marry. “We’re challenging amoral laws by breaking them.”

  One of the Anti-Eviction Campaign’s board members was a thirty-four-year-old former Cabrini resident named Martha Biggs. She persuaded J. R. to move on the Prairie Avenue house. “This is it,” she told him. “This is where we can make our statement about the human right to housing.” Her interest in the home was also personal, since she hoped to live in it with her four children. Martha grew up in one of the white high-rises at Cabrini, one of eleven children. When she was eighteen, her mother died; at twenty, and with her own apartment in the rowhouses, she was evicted for drug possession. Like many residents kicked out of Chicago’s public housing at the time, she moved herself into one of the thousands of units the CHA had failed to refill once they became vacant. When she was put out of that Cabrini unit, she squatted in another one. The utilities were still in the name of the previous tenant, and after Martha landed a job at a hot dog factory, she got a tax return of $4,000 and offered to pay the entire bill due, a total of $2,000. But the CHA wouldn’t take her money. The agency didn’t put Martha out, but neither could she officially reside there. When her building was finally shuttered, she moved with her children to an apartment on the West Side. Then one day a sheriff showed up to kick them out—the building had gone into foreclosure. Her four children were between the ages of one and twelve. They slept on the couches or living room floors of family members. They stayed in homeless shelters, but at the shelters there were bugs and thefts and a feeling that people had quit trying. More often they huddled for the night in a parked minivan, Martha finding a way to keep her children neat and ready for school.

  Tall and powerfully built, with ropy biceps, Martha was more than ready to work on the vacant house on Prairie. Scavengers had broken in and ripped out the pipes, toilets, radiators, ceiling fans, and cabinetry. And it wasn’t like they did it carefully. There were holes in the walls and ceilings. Martha and other volunteers got to work drywalling and tiling and replacing what was taken. They stripped old paint and laid down fresh coats. They repaired windows and walls.

  Six weeks after the start of renovations, the Anti-Eviction Campaign held a news conference on the front lawn to announce the home takeover. Martha stood beside J. R. and three of her children. Occupy Wall Street was then taking place downtown, and J. R. had befriended some of the activists, most of them young and white and looking for ways to shift from symbolic displays of outrage in the city center to something tangible in the areas hit hardest by the excesses of the 1 percent. A group of them had come out to the press conference, and they stood on the front porch, chanting, “Fight, fight, fight! ’Cause housing is a human right!” J. R. spoke first into the microphones set up by local news affiliates, settling into a preacher’s rhythm. “Because of the government’s inability to provide an answer to the homeless crisis that is plaguing our country, because of the banks’ unwillingness to help homeowners, we have taken it upon ourselves, as men, women of our communities, to take back control of our communities.” Then Martha, less prone to public declarations, began.

  “Hello, my name is Martha Biggs, and I’m from Cabrini-Green.”

  On his national television show, Tavis Smiley covered Martha as part of his “Poverty Tour.” The New York Times ran an article about the Prairie Avenue Victorian titled “Foreclosed Home Is a Risky Move for Homeless Family.” But Martha didn’t think the move too much of a risk. She lived on the first floor with her children, whom she enrolled in neighborhood schools. Other members of the Anti-Eviction Campaign, including J. R., sometimes crashed on the second floor. J. R. and Martha had also canvassed the block ahead of time, asking neighbors how they felt about a family moving into one of the several empty homes on their street. The idea appealed to them. They lent Martha rakes and gave her chairs and a china cabinet. She, in turn, used her fix it skills to do minor repair jobs for them. The possibility always loomed that a sheriff or a representative of the bank would show up to evict her. Believing she would be compensated for the improvements she’d done to the house, Martha kept receipts, and after a year she estimated $9,000 in parts and labor. And as at Cabrini-Green, there were dozens of other empty properties in the surrounding blocks where she could move next.

  “I’ve been through so much, really, I feel like I can live anywhere,” Martha said. “As for property, I came from nothing, I can leave with nothing. They say, ‘Who are you?’ I say, ‘Martha Biggs.’ They say, ‘What’s your address?’ I say, ‘Earth.’”

  J. R. happened to be sitting on Martha’s stoop in the fall of 2012 when a man from the city’s Department of Buildings rolled up to mark an empty house across the street for demolition. J. R. had been eyeing the property, researching its tax history and record of ownership, thinking the Anti-Eviction Campaign could do something with that orange-bricked two-flat. He jogged over to the city worker, shouting, “Uh-uh, that’s not going to happen.” J. R. told the man it was crazy that taxpayers were cleaning up the mess of corporate giants who’d gone unpunished for their misdeeds. The city had spent $14 million in 2012 tearing down 736 vacant buildings, including 270 abandoned homes that the police identified as shelters for gangs and other criminal activity, and Emanuel’s administration had 1,400 more on its demolition list. J. R. talked about the violence in the city and the black flight that was emptying out neighborhoods like Park Manor. The South Side population plunged by another fifty thousand people over a five-year stretch. He said the city shouldn’t demolish something that could be turned into an asset, a home. The city worker didn’t disagree. With a long list of properties to visit that day, he decided to move on to the next one.

  J. R. broke into the house not long after that. On a weekday morning, he slid open a window off the front porch, then, unable to unstick the front door, kicked it open from the inside. Other members of the Anti-Eviction Campaign were waiting for him outside, smoking cigarettes. Thomas Turner wore a bike helmet because at six feet four he regularly smacked into low-hanging pipes or ceilings during these maneuvers. Thomas pulled a drill from a black duffel bag and began replacing the lock on the front door. Martha got started securing the rest of the house, screwing shut the heavy wood windows on the first floor. J. R. flipped light switches, trying to find out whether the electricity worked. When a ceiling fan began to twirl, he sang out, “We’ve got power!”

  By then J. R. had entered hundreds of abandoned homes, each one a variation on the same theme of despair. He’d stumbled upon drugs and whatever paraphernalia people needed to use or make them. He saw the gathered sheets and worn-down mattresses of trick houses, the carcasses of dogs and cats and r
ats and possums and raccoons. Walking around the hundred-year-old house on Prairie now, he documented the state in which they’d found it, unconsciously filling every silence, belting out an off-key “If I Had a Hammer.” He snapped “before” photos of a gaping hole in the ceiling, the kitchen stripped bare of its appliances and cabinetry, a bathroom scavenged of everything but a seatless toilet, the plaster and studs blasted to pieces. “This is not even about selling stuff,” J. R. brayed. “It’s ‘I’m going to break up a bunch of shit cause I’m mad and I got to go.’” Windows were shattered or missing altogether. The flotsam and jetsam from capsized lives blanketed the floors—old winter coats and pants, soiled grocery store bags, a crusted gallon jug of Open Pit barbecue sauce. Lying in the corner of the dining room was a water-stained “My First Birthday” photograph of a boy in a grown-up’s Chicago Bears jersey and wool cap. On a low table in the living room rested a solitary Bible. “There’s always a Bible,” J. R. noted.

  Neighbors dropped by during the day. None of them could recall the house’s last legitimate tenants. Martha had run off what she called “crackheads” who had pulled up in a U-Haul to strip the place, though she figured they later parked around back where she couldn’t see them. The scavengers had pulled the tiles off the walls in the kitchen and bathrooms. A widower in his sixties who lived alone in a nearby apartment mentioned a shooting that had happened on the corner over the weekend. “I got it on video,” J. R. said of the immediate aftermath. “Eight shots to the back!” He announced that he was leading an antiviolence rally later that week, and almost as soon as he said it he leaped up from the porch and chased down two lanky teens passing by to invite them. The guys nodded with confusion as J. R. talked excitably about how together they would reclaim the block.