For weeks before the building next to Jamie Kalven’s Stateway Gardens office was demolished, he went home with dust in his hair and clothes.
“You were breathing it in. You could hear the pounding all day, every day, ” he says.
And when the building finally crumbled, “It was a spectacle,” he said. “You couldn’t help but watch.”
Kalven is a local community activist in Stateway Gardens, one of the Chicago public housing communities nearing extinction with the advent of the Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan for Transformation. On Saturday, his office was one stop on a tour of Chicago’s public housing, organized by Northwestern undergraduates. Over 30 students from NU and other universities sat on folding chairs in the small meeting room as Kalven related stories from his lifelong work in public housing.
“This is a community in apocalypse,” he said. “It’s a profound thing in people’s lives and it’s not registering.”
The tour started earlier that day as more than 30 students huddled outside Pick-Staiger, clutching folders and bundled in gloves and scarves. The tour was a culmination of the three-day Undergraduate Lecture Series on Race, Poverty and Inequality. Organized by Weinberg seniors Laurie Jaeckel and Dale Vieregge, the tour was a day-long look at three major public housing projects in Chicago: Cabrini Green, Lathrop and Stateway Gardens.
“Sometimes you don’t really understand problems of poverty until you see them up close,” said Jaeckel. “It’s one thing to talk about it and describe the situation. It’s another thing to talk to residents and talk to people on the ground.”
Education professor Dan Lewis, who went with students for the first half of the tour, called the still-standing buildings “ruins of another time.”
“It’s a complicated story,” he said of Chicago’s long history of housing inequality. “There’s no easy answer to any of these problems.”
The CHA’s new 10-year plan involves demolishing old public housing buildings and building revamped, mixed-income living spaces. The controversial plan has met with public outcry because of the overall reduced number of housing units and lessened public assistance.
The CHA’s plan could cause more problems by dispersing poverty throughout the city, Lewis said.
“Instead of hiding it in a black area, it’s scattering it, making it harder to understand what’s going on. This diaspora could be a way to ‘disappear’ the problems of poverty,” he said.
Lewis said that there’s already countless numbers of people who have disappeared.
“Falling through the cracks doesn’t capture it. It’s almost like there’s a funnel, and we don’t know where these people are swishing to.”
At Cabrini Green, students walked through the remaining tall buildings, windows boarded and walls blackened by fires. Then they toured one of the new, condo-style models. Bordered to the north by Rogers Park and to the south by the shimmering buildings of the Loop, Cabrini Green was built on some of the most valuable land in Chicago.
Many current residents of Cabrini Green who have received a notice that their homes are being demolished aren’t making plans to move, said Rita Sodipe, an employee of Employment and Employer Services, Inc., a company that connects government services with residents of the housing project.
“Residents just don’t believe it,” says Sodipe. “But what (residents) don’t know is after the 180 days, they cut the heat off, cut the lights off, cut the water off,” she says.
Sodipe and her co-worker Roxanne Gilsen (NEED TO CHECK SPELLING) expressed frustration about some residents’ situations and the switch to mixed-income housing, which theoretically has families on public assistance living next door to middle-class professionals.
“You can’t take a fish out of his bowl and expect him to live,” said Gilsen. Some residents have become “part of the environment,” she said. Sodipe and Gilsen distribute bus cards and other free services to residents, and say that services are either not used or abused.
And many residents won’t qualify for housing assistance after the buildings are demolished. Residents who qualify for a Section 8 Voucher must pass a drug test and have a clean criminal record.
Kurt Miller, a service connector for the CHA, estimated that only two out of any 10 families currently living in Lathrop Homes could qualify for a voucher. The new homes, which allocate 20 to 30 percent of space to households on governmental assistance, may prove to be an impossible goal for some.
“You got million dollar houses up the street,” says Miller. “If (residents of Lathrop) don’t get their acts together, they’re gonna have to go.”
Due to the one-strike policy that prohibits anyone who has been convicted of a crime from living in public housing, some families must choose between living with their relatives and breaking the law, Miller said. “One chance is not a whole lot.” nyou
