On a hot afternoon in the middle of June 1992, four people met in the Robert Taylor Homes public housing development to address the recent escalation in gang-related violence. On one side of a large metal table sat Will Jackson, the director of the Grace Center, where the meeting was being held, and Edith Huddle, an officer of the Local Advisory Council (LAC), the elected tenant-management association representing the interests of Robert Taylor’s 20,000 residents. They sat across from Prince Williams, a leader of the local Black Kings street gang, which was involved in recent shootings that had occurred at the Robert Taylor Homes, and Jeremy Coals, the founder and president of No More Wars, an agency specializing in dispute resolution between gangs in the city of Chicago. In the back of the room, several people, including myself, listened intently. The meeting at the Grace Center was arranged by Will Jackson and Jeremy Coals. Will had been working to establish lines of communication between street-gang leaders and tenant leaders; he brought Jeremy Coals to the meeting after learning of the influence that No More Wars had with the city’s street gangs, among which the Sharks and Black Kings were two of the largest.
Several days before the meeting, the first gang war of the year had commenced in the Robert Taylor Homes. The Sharks had conducted drive-by shootings and injured two members of the enemy Black Kings gang. To retaliate, Prince declared “war” against the Sharks, and for the next 36 hours, there was an intermittent exchange of gunfire between the two gang families. After the injury of the two Black Kings members, a 12-year-old girl was fatally shot, and her friend critically injured, while playing in an open concrete expanse that surrounded the housing development’s high-rise buildings. A community already in shock from the injuries to the two youths now grieved for the family of the young girl and for her friend, who lay in critical condition at a local hospital. The exhaustion on residents’ faces showed the toll that the violence had taken on their lives: Their energies were spent navigating safe excursions to the grocery store.
The initial gathering at the Grace Center proved to be a catalyst for a novel forum that allowed tenants to address not only conflicts between street gangs but also a range of practices that involved gang members. Edith Huddle and Jeremy Coals formed a jury of peers that included themselves, staff members of the Grace Center, and a few ex-street-gang leaders. Several times each month, tenants would relay to this mediating body incidents in which gang members had harassed residents or been involved in domestic abuse or other criminal acts. Instead of immediately resorting to physical or armed conflict, the gang leaders from warring families would attempt to resolve their own disputes in front of this body. In public, the gang leaders justified their participation altruistically, with claims that they were “helping the community,” but when pressed they did not deny more selfish motives: Namely, reduced conflict also helped to stabilize their underground economic ventures-most notably their drug trade and extortion of local businesses and entrepreneurs. Edith Huddle and the other jurors adjudicated the reported infractions and then meted out punishments. They assigned monetary redress or commanded apologies from gang members, and, in their separate closed-door meetings, the gang leaders inflicted physical punishment and imposed their own monetary fines on their members.
In public and private forums, tenants passionately debated the value of this kind of local control. Some expressed outright disgust that gang members were being used for policing and enforcement; others shared this opinion but added that tenants should organize protests against law enforcement agencies that should have been performing such functions. Dissenting voices argued that the housing development was in a state of emergency and should use any resource available to address its needs. Some extended this line of argument by stating that since gangs were deeply entrenched in local affairs, any realistic attempt at mediation would have to include them. In public “townhall” meetings with representatives of several government agencies, tenants used the success of the community court to critique existing law enforcement tactics; local police officers responded by urging caution when cooperating with street gangs.
Throughout the discussions and debates, the word “community” anchored the expressed sentiments of the parties involved. In formal meetings with tenants, gang members asked to be recognized as legitimate “members of the community.” In the townhall meetings, Housing Authority representatives warned that gangs were “taking over the community,” to which tenants would often reply, “It’s our community, not yours.” Tenants criticized their own elected leaders for “not fighting for the community,” and the leaders responded to these allegations by saying that the highly critical tenants “only complain and don’t get involved in the community.”
In many of their invocations of “community,” tenants repeatedly made reference to the past. One tenant said, “It used to be our community, but it’s theirs now. [The gangs] have taken over.” Edith Huddle stated another common opinion: “Gangs have always been part of the community, they always will be. It’s just that now, they control us.” Along with general assessments of how gangs had changed, tenants referred to specific times when gang activity was not so threatening. For each of those periods, they could list individuals who had control over gang members, as well as gang leaders who minimized conflict and lent assistance to residents. There appeared to be a strong, established history of innovative attempts by tenants to supplant or supplement the work of law enforcement, with respect not only to street-gang violence but also to domestic abuse, theft and burglary, and enforcement of contracts in the underground economy.
The street gang did not necessarily appear as an “enemy within” that preyed on the housing development but rather as one of several threats to household security. Controlling the behavior of young people was the most recent and highly visible challenge, and it made extraordinary demands on personal and collective energies. However, tenants also had to work diligently to ensure adequate building maintenance, apartment repair, and usable public space, all of which affected personal safety and ease of intercourse in the housing development. In fact, tenants did not draw sharp distinctions between security- and maintenance-related issues, and when discussing the challenges posed by gangs, they referred to such issues as stairwell lighting, accessible lobbies, and vacant apartments. Attending to gang-related activity, then, was part of a larger, ongoing struggle to reproduce a safe living environment-however tenuous and fragile that equilibrium might be.
The struggle by tenants of Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes to create a safe, habitable “community” is one that has engaged public housing tenants nationwide. Coping with crime and socioeconomic hardship, battling local government agencies over inadequate service provision, and searching for external resources to meet local needs have become commonplace for those who live in public housing. The weight of their hardship has led to heated public debate in America over the question, Can people living in large public housing complexes such as the Robert Taylor Homes sustain a viable, healthy community? The future of public housing depends on how this question is answered.
