Eleven years ago, when the Chicago Housing Authority rousted tenants from its Lakefront Properties development on the Near South Side, the CHA promised displaced residents that they would soon return to a smartly refurbished complex. Today, Lakefront Properties is on the verge of demolition, the project’s residents are scattered throughout the city and plans to return a small number of them to the neighborhood are opposed by local community groups.
There is every reason for the residents of Cabrini-Green–the CHA’s newest redevelopment target–to fear the same fate. The plan to redevelop Cabrini would raze 1,300 public housing apartments and replace them with only 650 units, half of which have income requirements that would disqualify current residents.
Advocates of the plan argue that conditions in the CHA have grown so grim that we must destroy public housing in order to save it. Tear down the high-rises, they say, and give the residents vouchers for private apartments or move them into new low-rise units. But this deceptively simple solution is based on two flawed assumptions.
First, that low-rise public housing units are superior to high-rises. Strong counter-evidence can be found by looking at the housing authorities in Los Angeles and New York, the two agencies that CHA Executive Director Joseph Shuldiner managed before coming to Chicago. Public housing in Los Angeles consists almost entirely of low-rise units. Yet the developments in L.A. have problems with crime and concentrated poverty that rival those in Chicago. By contrast, the New York Housing Authority operates hundreds of high-rise buildings–and boasts some of the best public housing in the country.
It is also a mistake to assume that passing out vouchers to displaced CHA residents will solve the city’s low-income housing problem. Chicago’s private housing market–especially for low-income working families–is tighter than it has been in years. Flooding that market with CHA evacuees will only exacerbate the crisis. In short, the call for the wholesale demolition of Chicago’s public housing high-rises comes at a terrible time.
Of course, critics of the CHA high-rises do have a point: The conditions at many developments really are terrible. And their myriad problems urgently need addressing. Unfortunately, Mayor Richard Daley’s Cabrini proposal doesn’t do this. With an estimated $1 billion price tag –and only $50 million of federal funding in hand–Mayor Daley’s Cabrini dream appears as likely to materialize as his illusory vision of a third airport at Lake Calumet.
Instead of expending its energies on massive–and possibly imaginary–redevelopment schemes, the CHA should focus its attention and resources on upgrading the many viable developments it already operates. Many of the CHA projects now roundly condemned by local pundits and planners worked well when they were competently managed.
Too few Chicagoans remember that the CHA was a model agency until the 1950s. Then, the CHA carefully screened incoming tenants and maintained a healthy mix of welfare recipients and working families. By the 1970s and ’80s, wrongheaded federal rules that forced working families out of public housing made it nearly impossible to maintain stable CHA communities.
Many of today’s CHA critics seem to forget this history. They argue that large public housing developments were doomed from the outset and have never worked well. That’s not to deny that the design and location of some developments have contributed to their decline. The buildings at the South Side’s Robert Taylor Homes–which jam hundreds of large, single-parent families into isolated high-rises–are clearly problematic. Don’t forget, however, that Robert Taylor was built by CHA managers beholden to the first Mayor Daley. Also remember that even large high-rises can work well as long as the number of single-parent families is strictly limited.
Blind to these historical lessons, today’s demolition experts believe that we must raze vast swaths of the CHA’s existing stock and replace it –if we can find the funds–with scattered-site apartments. Such arguments have been gaining force ever since the settlement of the Gautreaux case, the 1966 lawsuit against the CHA that led to the creation of complex legal remedies for Chicago’s public housing problems. The aim of Gautreaux attorneys–to desegregate CHA developments–was undeniably noble. Unfortunately, their legal remedies have always been more appealing to public interest lawyers than to public housing residents.
Since the CHA had concentrated most of its postwar developments in black areas, the federal judge in Gautreaux ordered the authority to build small developments–in effect, of no more than 12 units–on scattered sites in the city’s white neighborhoods. But the scattered-site units mandated by Gautreaux have proved far more expensive to build and manage than multi-unit dwellings. Three decades after the Gautreaux victory, just 2,000 scattered-site units have been built; ironically, the vast majority have been constructed in minority neighborhoods.
The Gautreaux litigation also led to the establishment of a voucher program in which select CHA families received subsidies to rent a private apartment–as long as they moved out of black areas and into white suburbs. But numerous studies indicate that low-income African-Americans do not want to move into neighborhoods where there are few blacks–exactly the areas where Gautreaux’s voucher program placed them.
As Gautreaux has proven, there is no magic bullet that can cure the CHA’s ills. Rather, the provision of quality public housing requires patient attention to often mundane details. We believe that Shuldiner and his federally appointed management team possess the skills necessary to get the authority back on track. But we fear their efforts will be in vain if the fate of Chicago’s public housing residents is hitched to the fantastical schemes of city planners and private developers.
