A middle-aged woman enters a glass booth, steps on a yellow pad and carefully places her feet, looking down and adjusting them as if she were a golfer about to putt.
She punches a number into a key pad and then places her hand inside a metal box with an open end, arranging her fingers around a group of poles. She waits for a second, then pushes a door opposite the one she came in through and enters her apartment complex.
Her name, apartment number, the time of her entrance, and whether she is going in or out has been stored on computer.
The woman is a resident of the Marshall Field Garden Apartments, a 628-unit subsidized housing complex on the Near North Side that has a high-tech, high-surveillance security system unlike any found in housing elsewhere in the country.
Some residents love it and some hate it, and it has sparked a complaint of racial bias to the city Commission on Human Relations. Residents and management alike agree on one thing: It has brought radical change.
The 6-acre, 10-building mid-rise complex bounded by Hudson and Evergreen Avenues and Blackhawk and Sedgwick Streets, was built in 1929 by Marshall Field III as a philanthropic endeavor to replace slum housing in the area.
But the complex itself became one of Chicago’s worst slums after it was foreclosed on in 1984 by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, whose failures at property management have been widely documented.
It was a half-empty haven for gangs, drug activity and prostitution, known to some neighbors as “Little Vietnam” for the gunfire echoing through it at night. An owner of subsidized housing nearby called it the single worst complex in the city outside of Cabrini-Green.
In 1992 HUD, guaranteeing annual rent subsidies of more than $6.4 million a year, sold it for $10.2 million to a group of investors headed by Sheldon Baskin and Daniel Epstein, who put in more than $20 million in renovations.
The new owners, who manage the building under the name Metroplex, Inc., quickly recognized they had a major security problem.
“There was a lot of violence,” said Baskin. “There were 80 felony arrests in the first 12-to-15 months and we had two drug dealers shooting at each other in a turf war. It was very, very rough.”
Baskin said there were 34 separate entrances to the complex and no locks. They put locks on all the gates and doors, and they lasted two days. Then they put in unbreakable locks, which lasted two weeks. An intercom-and-buzzer system was rendered inoperable because people put gum in the locks and smashed the phones.
That’s when they developed the system they have now, Baskin said.
Kenneth Barnes, an architect specializing in multi-family property rehab, and who is in charge of the renovation of the complex, investigated a range of security technologies to come up with the system.
Ultimately, he adapted a system being used at government installations, combining a hand geometry recognition system and portal access control. All the entrances were closed off but two, where the new system was put in use.
Hand geometry recognition is based on the fact that each person’s hand has unique characteristics that can confirm the person’s identity when read by a scanning unit. Unlike keys or cards, hands can’t be lost, stolen or duplicated.
The portals are aluminum-framed glass booths with two doors that can’t be unlocked at the same time except in emergencies. The door locks behind the user, who steps on a pad that ensures there’s only one person in booth. The user goes through the hand recognition process, and then the other door opens.
The portal system prevents “tailgating,” where a bunch of people can push through behind an authorized person entering the complex. The doors can’t be propped open, because when one is open, the other stays locked.
A computer system records the identity of the user and whether entrance or exit actually occurred. If the user is not enrolled in the system as a resident or guest and no pass-through occurs, that is recorded also.
The database includes all enrolled users’ hand geometry, and will automatically adjust if their hands are growing or otherwise changing as time goes by.
There is a bypass lane with a single door for use by smaller children, parents carrying kids or pushing strollers or people in wheelchairs. That lane, which also requires the hand-check, is controlled by guards and monitored by television cameras as well.
To the building management, the $150,000 system is well worth it.
“From a security standpoint, I would sincerely say the well-being of the tenants is much greater,” said Pat Howard, the assistant manager of the complex, who lived in the South Side’s Robert Taylor Homes public housing complex when she was a teenager.
“Whe you think of public housing or other 100 percent subsidized housing, this is utopia or paradise,” she said. “There is no comparison with security.”
And many residents applaud it as well.
“It’s much better,” said Joyce Colston, a resident for 10 years who lives with her two children. “Before I didn’t feel safe in my apartment. I was broken into two times. Now I don’t worry. And (criminals) can’t come in the building and hide now.”
Colston said her increased sense of safety outweighs any feeling the system might be too intrusive. “It’s only an irritation when I leave a little late and I’m running for the bus and I have to put my hand through,” she said. “It slows me down.”
Another resident, Arlean Woods, who has lived there for about 13 years, was more critical. “Sometimes it’s not working and there’s lines of people,” she said. “It’s supposed to keep out people that don’t live here, but it doesn’t. And it looks into a lot of people’s private business.”
But Woods also said that apartment break-ins had lessened.
Actively opposed to the system is Glennis Willis, a resident for about 25 years and former tenant association president who has filed a complaint with the Chicago Commission on Human Relations that Metroplex racially discriminates because it uses the system at the almost all-black complex but not in other Metroplex properties where white tenants live.
“I basically think it belongs in the Pentagon or something like that. I don’t believe it belongs in a housing complex,” said Willis. “I refuse to invite people to my house, having to go through that. It belongs in a prison.”
The complaint was filed last March with the help of the Leadership Council on Metropolitan Open Communities, one of the country’s most renowned fair housing groups. The commission is expected to decide soon whether to hold a hearing on the matter.
Baskin responded that the system isn’t being used anywhere else in the country for black or white residents, and was installed because other security methods didn’t work.
“I think the complaint is totally off the wall and I blame the Leadership Council for lending (the complaint) its prestige and efforts,” Baskin.
Metroplex doesn’t rely only on the system to manage security. It subjects applicants to rigorous screening. They are checked for criminal background, credit and current living conditions, including an inspection visit by off-duty police. Nine of ten applicants are rejected.
Some eight or nine residents are evicted annually, mostly for non-payment of rent, which averages about $22 a month after the subsidies. There were 73 arrests and 119 domestic disturbance calls from January through August in the complex, which houses more than 1,900 people–about 1,260 of them children.
Howard pointed out that there were only 82 work orders for tenant-caused damage in the same January-August period, which she said was very good for low-income housing.
Meanwhile, Barnes has formed Integrated Access Systems to market the security system to other owners of low-income property. He said he’s close to making some sales, but noted that owners of such property with lots of security problems tend not to have much spare change.
But he said the time may come when high-control access systems may be wanted at properties that aren’t mostly low-income.
