The Towers Came Down, and With Them the Promise of Public Housing
- 6 years ago
The Towers Came Down, and With Them the Promise of Public Housing
She moved her aging mother in with them, and Ricks’s grown children found jobs in construction, home health care, retail
and at a new residential complex built atop the old Madison Street “skid row,” an area refashioned into the “West Loop.” Ricks didn’t leave Cabrini after one of her nephews was hit with several bullets through her apartment window — his heart stopped twice before he survived.
The fate of public housing in America — its rise, much of it in the form of towers like Cabrini-Green,
and its fall as those towers came down — is the story of urban poverty as an unsteady political priority.
In 2003, an independent monitor of the C. H.A.’s first years of relocations offered a bleak assessment: “The result has been
that the vertical ghettos from which the families are being moved are being replaced with horizontal ghettos, located in well defined, highly segregated neighborhoods.”
The families that were dispersed from Chicago’s demolished public housing have been blamed for the city’s recent
surge in gun violence, as well as for crime in the suburbs, the greater Midwest and even parts of the South.
“I’m just going to say it like this,” Ricks said later that night, “we did whatever we had to do to get their asses out of our house.”
For the next two weeks, Ricks stayed with a son in the Cabrini rowhouses.
Even today, the federal government devotes three times as much each year to mortgage-interest deductions
and other subsidies to the speculative real estate market — essentially public housing for homeowners — than to the entire annual budget of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Many more families were like the Rickses, people who went from run-down public housing
to rehabbed public housing, albeit still in areas of concentrated poverty.
She moved her aging mother in with them, and Ricks’s grown children found jobs in construction, home health care, retail
and at a new residential complex built atop the old Madison Street “skid row,” an area refashioned into the “West Loop.” Ricks didn’t leave Cabrini after one of her nephews was hit with several bullets through her apartment window — his heart stopped twice before he survived.
The fate of public housing in America — its rise, much of it in the form of towers like Cabrini-Green,
and its fall as those towers came down — is the story of urban poverty as an unsteady political priority.
In 2003, an independent monitor of the C. H.A.’s first years of relocations offered a bleak assessment: “The result has been
that the vertical ghettos from which the families are being moved are being replaced with horizontal ghettos, located in well defined, highly segregated neighborhoods.”
The families that were dispersed from Chicago’s demolished public housing have been blamed for the city’s recent
surge in gun violence, as well as for crime in the suburbs, the greater Midwest and even parts of the South.
“I’m just going to say it like this,” Ricks said later that night, “we did whatever we had to do to get their asses out of our house.”
For the next two weeks, Ricks stayed with a son in the Cabrini rowhouses.
Even today, the federal government devotes three times as much each year to mortgage-interest deductions
and other subsidies to the speculative real estate market — essentially public housing for homeowners — than to the entire annual budget of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Many more families were like the Rickses, people who went from run-down public housing
to rehabbed public housing, albeit still in areas of concentrated poverty.