Lake Parc Place is not Cabrini-Green. But both developments are owned and operated by the Chicago Housing Authority.
Cabrini-Green, a complex of 23 high-rise and 55 low-rise buildings located amid the gentrifying Near North Side, has evolved into the most infamous of the CHA`s developments.
The deep poverty of its residents, the low educational achievement of its children and the shoddy construction of its buildings have been well-documented. And it was at Cabrini-Green last Tuesday that 7-year-old Dantrell Davis was fatally shot on his way to school, becoming the third child from Jenner Elementary School to be slain in the last eight months.
Cabrini-Green has come to represent all that has gone wrong with public housing in Chicago over the last half century.
Lake Parc, on the other hand, represents all that needs to be done right, according to CHA chairman Vincent Lane.
”You can change the character of a community,” Lane insisted as he stood Friday on the 10th floor of the Lake Parc building at 3983 S. Lake Park Ave. in a well-furnished model apartment that looks as if it belongs in a residential high-rise on the Gold Coast.
A model apartment? At CHA? Sure, said Lane. ”Why should Lake Parc be any different?” And he`s got a point.
Lake Parc, reopened in August 1991 after a five-year $16 million rehabilitation, looks a lot more like a Gold Coast residential tower than Cabrini-Green.
Just off of Lake Shore Drive on the South Side, Lake Parc is beautifully landscaped with young trees and plush grass, and has a splendid view of Lake Michigan and the Chicago skyline.
Each of its two 15-story buildings has a playground crowded with brightly colored equipment and a wading pool. There are well-maintained basketball courts and even a garden where residents can grow vegetables and flowers. And no graffiti.
”They have a lot to offer,” said 21-year-old Jathiya Wright, a McDonald`s restaurant manager who moved into in the development over the summer with her husband, Gerald, and their 3-month-old daughter, Sakina.
”There`s day care and a laundry,” Wright said. ”The rent`s pretty good, and there`s security.”
But Gerald, who`s also a McDonald`s manager, initially balked at the move because he`d lived in CHA before and didn`t want to repeat the experience.
So how did Jathiya convince him? ”He came to see the place, and he loved it,” she explained.
Gerald and Jathiya Wright are exactly the sort of working people that Lane had in mind when he envisioned Lake Parc as a new sort of public housing for Chicago-which is actually a return to the past.
And that was the point Lane made Monday at a news conference in Mayor Richard Daley`s City Hall office.
”A mixed-income complex, that`s my long-term view of public housing,”
Lane said. ”We`ve got to get working people in our developments.”
Lake Parc, he said, ”is the model we can use systemwide.”
Initially, public housing in the U.S. was viewed as a transitional home for young families or families in temporary economic difficulty until they had built up enough savings to move to a house or apartment in the private market. This meant that there was a relatively wide mix of incomes, from families with no income except public aid to families earning a lower middle-class wage.
But this approach was undercut by a well-intentioned move by the federal government to eliminate standard rents and require tenants to pay only 25 percent (and later 30 percent) of their income.
Though that benefited the poorest tenants, it penalized those with jobs and ended up driving them away from the developments.
And, because the remaining tenants were almost uniformly poor, government officials tended to build and maintain public housing as cheaply as possible. So what Lane has sought to do at Lake Parc, in an experiment he wants to duplicate at Cabrini-Green and throughout the rest of the housing authority, is to attract working-class families back to the development and reinstitute the same standards that one would expect in a Gold Coast high-rise.
”If we raise standards, people will improve their behavior,” he said,
”particularly if you give them something that`s worth hanging onto.”
The first job, then, was to make Lake Parc clean, decent and safe, but that`s exactly what its two buildings weren`t in 1986 when Lane, still a private citizen, first visited them.
”It was-Nobody should have to live that way,” Lane said. ”I had to feel my way up the stairs. There wasn`t a light bulb in the place. The stairway was cold. It was dark. It smelled like urine. (Gangs) controlled this property absolutely. It was more dangerous than Cabrini.”
A short time later, the CHA closed the two buildings and four others nearby so they could be renovated. By the time Lane became CHA chairman four years ago, that rehabilitation was under way, and Lane took advantage of it to make the buildings attractive and safe.
Many of the attractive features that Lane put in were items that most apartment-dwellers expect as a matter of course, such as showerheads, mini-blinds, ceiling fans, ceramic tile in the bathrooms and wood cabinets in the kitchens.
But Lane had a difficult time persuading federal housing officials to permit such extravagance.
”I refused to spend the (federal rehabilitation) money unless we did it right, and we fought and we got waivers,” Lane said.
Fixing up the buildings, however, was only part of the solution. The next step was to put a ceiling on rents so that it would make economic sense for working-class families to move in.
All that took was getting a new federal law passed specifically for Chicago.
”You have to go out and lobby the OMB (Office of Management and Budget), Congress and the senators,” Lane said, explaining how he got the bill through. ”You have to sell it. Maybe I`m a salesman more than anything, but that`s a part of it-marketing.”
With that law passed, Lane was ready to start offering 141 of the 282 apartments in the Lake Parc buildings to working-class families. Pessimists said he`d never find anyone, but he got 3,000 applications.
To be eligible for an apartment at Lake Parc, a working-class family has to have an annual income between 50 and 80 percent of the city`s median family income-or between $21,700 and $34,700 for a family of four. Rents at Lake Parc and other CHA developments now range from $260 a month for a studio apartment to $597 for a five-bedroom.
Today, a little more than a year after Lake Parc reopened, all but two of its apartments are rented.
But changing the economic mix of the two CHA high-rises is only part of Lane`s plan.
He hopes to break ground by the end of this year on the first of 564 new town homes to be developed in the neighborhood around Lake Parc by the long-moribund Chicago Dwellings Association and funded in large part by low-income housing tax credits.
Three-quarters of these town homes will be marketed to working-class and middle-class families at rents somewhat below the going rate in the area.
The other quarter will be reserved for families who are eligible for public housing. These families will pay just 30 percent of their income, and the CHA will pay the rest, using money it`s saving by renting half of the Lake Parc units to working-class families who pay the full rent there.
This approach-this effort to transform CHA buildings into ”normal neighborhoods”-can be done at other developments, Lane said.
”It`ll work at Cabrini,” he said. ”It`ll work at Henry Horner. It`ll work at Lathrop. It`ll work at ABLA. We did it here, and we`re going to do it there.”
And such changes have implications beyond the question of housing, Lane insists. For example, he said that educational performance of poor children will improve if they`re living with those from working-class families.
There`s another sort of change that can be seen already at Lake Parc.
Right now, young children at Cabrini-Green write about shootings, death and their fears. At Lake Parc, the writings of youngsters are different.
Taped on the wall in the after-school room off the lobby of Jathiya Wright`s building are poems written by Lake Parc children.
One, by John Kendrick Bangs, begins, ”I met a little elf man once/Down where the lillies grow. . . .”
Elves and lillies-such are the dreams that children can dream when violence is not an everyday fact of life.
