Prisons for the Poor

Book Review: 'High Rise Stories,' edited by Audrey Petty

Chicago's housing projects could seem like war zones, garbage dumps, brothels or drug dens. They were also people's homes.

By WALTER VATTER

When Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes opened in 1962, the complex was the largest public-housing project in the world: 28 high-rise buildings, each 16 stories high. At the groundbreaking ceremony, Mayor Richard J. Daley addressed the crowd under a banner that read: "GOOD HOMES BUILDING GOOD CITIZENS." "This project represents the future of a great city," he said. "It represents vision . . . a decent home for every family." The complex—housing 27,000 people at its peak, in 4,415 apartments—was situated in a dense, black neighborhood east of the Dan Ryan Expressway, in those days the line of racial demarcation on Chicago's segregated South Side.

This was quite different from the original vision of housing advocate and planner Elizabeth Wood, who in 1937 had become the first executive director of the newly founded Chicago Housing Authority, working to establish city management of three public-housing sites built by the federal Public Works Administration: the Jane Adams, Julia C. Lathrop and Trumbull Park Homes. Her vision was for low-rise structures scattered throughout the city, each with access to recreation space as well as community and cultural facilities. Only in the 1940s did public housing in Chicago take a different direction, with the construction of mid- and high-rise buildings at the Ida B. Wells Homes on the city's South Side. Between 1944 and 1946 there had been 46 racial incidents in Chicago, the majority connected to housing.

By 2000, Mayor Richard M. Daley looked at the sorry state of the city's public housing—neglected physical plants beyond repair, rampant drug dealing, gang wars—and concluded that his father's ballyhooed concept for providing affordable housing for the city's poor had failed. Under his leadership, with the Plan for Transformation, approved by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the city began the largest, most ambitious redevelopment effort of public housing in the country. Its goal was to rehabilitate or redevelop the gargantuan tract of public housing in Chicago.

"High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing," edited by Audrey Petty, presents 11 compelling narratives based on interviews with men and women who lived in the high-rise tenements, beginning in the 1950s. The stories relate how they came to public housing, what they saw and did during their years in the projects, and what became of them when the buildings were torn down and the residents displaced.

No single story about the public housing experience is typical. Dawn Knight moved in the 1980s to the Robert Taylor Homes in a "Gangster Disciples" (one of Chicago's prominent black gangs) building, just after her parents divorced when she was 13. She found sanctuary in a library in another building on the public-housing grounds that became her retreat (she was known as a "book head," which shielded her from gangs)—until the library closed. She then began mixing with kids in her building and getting high on weed. Her mother drank; many strange men visited the apartment. "Just go to school," her absentee father told her. "Go to school, stay away from people who don't want anything out of life." Ms. Knight became a teenage mother, began using heroin to ease the pain when her brother was shot and killed in a building elevator, eventually found crack-cocaine, and turned to prostitution to support her habit.

The high incidence of shootings and drug trafficking is frequently referred to in "High Rise Stories," as are broken elevators, garbage-laden hallways and the slow response of health and building-safety services. Eddie Leman, who spent his childhood at the Robert Taylor Homes, remembers: "Even when the elevators were working, the lights were out half the time. They used to call them death traps. People got their arms or their body caught up in there. The elevator closed tight, like a clamp."

The quixotic and mercurial nature of the police presence in Chicago's vast public-housing communities—ABLA Homes, Cabrini-Green, Robert Taylor Homes, among others—is also a theme. "It was crazy, but it's like the police were the government," says Ms. Knight. "So you were taught and you learned: this police is cool and this police will hurt you. If they said you did something, don't try nothing, don't disagree; if they try to take you, you just go down to the police station and sleep it off. If you challenged the abusive police, you'd be seriously hurt." She remembers that the police could also be fair and credits them for protecting her from her abusive ex.

Not all is nightmare. There are memories in the book of feelings of pride in moving to a brand-new apartment, of neighborliness, of community involvement, of personal achievement despite bleak odds, and of children at play. Dolores Wilson, who moved to Cabrini-Green in 1958, remembers the thrill of her new home at the time. "I loved the apartment," she recalls. "It had three bedrooms, and it was on the fourteenth floor. When I first stepped off the elevators and looked out over the railing I thought I was going to faint! I'd never been up that high." She left only when the buildings were torn down, in 2011.

As for Ms. Knight, she remembers one day when a group of white people from Minnesota staged a church-outreach production of Christ's Passion outside the Robert Taylor Homes, and she found watching the enactment a life-changing experience. Eventually she took her children and made her way to Minneapolis, where she lived in a shelter for battered women. After five years, she returned to Chicago, and now, 20 years later, she is an ordained minister and a college student. While Ms. Knight's life has successfully moved beyond the projects, she continues to live in one of Chicago's hotbed-for-crime neighborhoods, Englewood, on the South Side. As she looks to the future, she tells us: "Once I get my degree, I want to move the heck up out of Chicago. . . . I want my children to be able to go outside and for me not to worry, Will they get shot? I worry about that every day."

Mr. Vatter is a writer in Chicago.

The article appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

Poster's comment:

And we voters elected the people that did "that", to include spending our money from the public treasury.