Three and a half years ago, Chicago Housing Authority residents were toasting the dawning of ”a new day.”
Harold Washington had been elected Chicago`s first black mayor, and his victory had been made possible, in part, by the overwhelmingly one-sided returns from CHA developments–many of which gave him more than 99 percent of the vote.
Washington, in turn, had appointed Renault Robinson as the first black chairman of the CHA board in more than three decades, a move that Robinson himself called ”a first giant step to raise the level of conditions our people have suffered under past administrations.”
It was a time of high hopes and great expectations.
It didn`t last long.
Today, CHA residents have little to show for their help in electing Washington. Living conditions in the developments are as bad as ever, if not worse. Politics, patronage and mismanagement are still facts of life at the agency.
The future is increasingly bleak. The CHA`s day-to-day operations are running millions of dollars in the red. Federal funding is being drastically cut back. The CHA says it needs three-quarters of a billion dollars to rehabilitate its deteriorating buildings.
And Harold Washington says there`s little he can do.
In fact, he and members of his cabinet portray his administration as one so overwhelmed by cutbacks in federal funds that it has been unable to give public housing more than passing attention.
”When you come right down to it, it may be impossible to manage a public housing authority today, given the shortage of federal dollars,” Washington says.
”When they cut the ground from under you, what can you do? We`re dealing with a monster here.”
But 145,000 people, almost all of them black, almost all of them poor, live in that ”monster.”
They live amid the crime, violence, poverty, aimlessness and deterioration that characterize most public housing in Chicago.
They live isolated and ignored behind the physical and psychological barriers that have been built up over the years by successive white administrations, at the behest of their white consti-tuents, to keep blacks, particularly poor blacks, in ”their own” communities.
In his 3 1/2 years in office, Washington has done little to change that, even though he says, ”We have made public housing a high priority.”
Those who live in public housing and those who work to improve it complain that the mayor has provided little leadership in the search for solutions, offered little hope to CHA residents and given them little indication that he is at least aware of their plight and trying to find ways to improve it.
”There are a lot of dissatisfied people here,” says one longtime Cabrini-Green resident who didn`t want to be identified because she works for the CHA.
”There are many people who feel that, as a black man, he should have done more for housing. Look how it has deteriorated more in the four years he`s been mayor.”
Despite Washington`s complaints about the lack of federal funds, housing advocates argue that there is much that the mayor–and the rest of the city
–could do to improve living conditions in the CHA developments.
”The mayor of Chicago can do more than any other person in the city about public housing, but he cannot do it alone and without support,” says Msgr. John Egan, director of the office of human relations and ecumenism for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago.
”The mayor must get personally involved in the public housing situation immediately, meet with and listen to the people who are living there. The mayor and the aldermen must be visible advocates for those living in public housing.”
Any attempt to deal with the problems of public housing in Chicago and elsewhere is hamstrung today by the cutbacks in federal funding. Operating subsidies are being reduced; money needed to rehabilitate decaying buildings isn`t available. Without federal funding, much that needs to be done can`t be done.
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In addition, the State of Illinois has done nothing to improve public housing and little for low-income housing in general, housing advocates say.
Despite a decade in office, Gov. James Thompson has yet to develop a housing policy, and the General Assembly isn`t much better, says Michael O`Connor of the Statewide Housing Action Coalition.
This year, the legislature passed a joint resolution to appoint a committee to study the problem of affordable housing in Illinois and report back by Jan. 1, but the committee never met because the appointments under the control of the Republican leadership were never made.
The Washington administration has worked hard to help community groups put together creative financing packages to preserve moderate- and low-income housing in the city`s neighborhoods.
But it has paid little attention to public housing. That was apparent when Washington devoted only six sentences to public housing in the 3,300-word keynote address he gave on Sept. 28 to open the annual convention of the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials, held in Chicago. Of course, public housing is an issue many government officials try to avoid.
”It`s sort of like prison reform; there`s very little constituency for it,” says John McDermott, a longtime civil rights activist and now urban affairs director for Illinois Bell Telephone Co.
”It`s a can of worms,” he says. ”So much has to be done. Urban poverty is like a leper colony. Nobody wants to mess with it.
”These are poor people. They are not well-organized. These people are depressed. The leadership gets out as soon as it can.”
Even so, the problems of public housing have an impact on all of the metropolitan area.
By fostering and exacerbating crime, poverty and other social problems, public housing in Chicago, as elsewhere, increases the financial drain on society for social services. And, because Chicago has used the CHA as a way to isolate blacks, the city has very little public housing for low-income whites or Hispanics, particularly families.
In addition, many CHA buildings, located on the fringes of the downtown area, are now barriers to economic development, dampening a land boom there.
Because of the racial and economic implications, any move to improve and change public housing in Chicago would be a sensitive one, but McDermott notes, ”A black mayor is uniquely able to deal with some issues that a white mayor would be afraid to touch.”
McDermott and other housing advocates say that an important step Washington could take would be to end the political infighting between CHA chairman Robinson and executive director Zirl Smith.
Gary Orfield, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, says, ”One thing that disappoints me about Harold Washington is the shabby management of the CHA. He hasn`t put in competent management and left it alone.”
Instead, Washington has given almost free rein to Robinson, one of his strongest political supporters. And that has led to a running battle for day- to-day control of the agency between Robinson and Smith that has hurt staff morale and subverted many attempts to improve life at CHA developments.
Smith, a respected housing professional, was originally brought to Chicago in 1984 to straighten out the CHA`s operational problems.
Those problems were due mainly to years of neglect under former chairman Charles Swibel, but they had been aggravated in late 1983 when, for four months, Robinson tried to act as both chairman and executive director. In that dual role, Robinson sparked controversy by making questionable management decisions and hiring several cronies, including his brother-in-law.
Informed sources say that the fighting between Smith and Robinson got so bad earlier this year that Washington had to intervene to arrange a truce. They say the battles have so demoralized Smith that he plans to leave the CHA in May when his contract expires.
”That`s news to me,” Washington says. ”I`m not aware of any friction.”
A major reason for the problems of the CHA, social scientists and housing officials agree, has been its failure to adequately screen tenants and kick out those who fail to pay their rent or who engage in criminal activity.
McDermott contends that ”a misguided form of liberalism” is responsible for the lack of standards for public housing residents. ”Many well-meaning people are paralyzed by the thought of doing something about public housing,” McDermott says. ”They`re afraid of being called elitist or racist.”
But such standards are essential to improving public housing, he says, and would be relatively inexpensive to impose.
”I don`t see enough attention being paid to this, and it`s something that`s doable,” McDermott said.
”The mayor`s not responsible for this mess. But, in terms of breaking the logjam of will–the indifference and sentimentalism that fears to make demands of public housing residents–the mayor could provide the leadership to break that logjam.”
There is also much that the mayor could do to help tenants take control of their own destiny by taking over management of their developments, McDermott says.
Nationally, tenant management has had a spotty record, and the successes, such as at the Cochran Gardens development in St. Louis, have been fragile at best. In fact, the residents who have run Cochran for 10 years say much of what they`ve accomplished is now being threatened by circumstances beyond their control.
”Tenant management is no snap,” McDermott acknowledges, ”but we`ve seen enough successes to see that we need a very serious effort to spread that as much as possible, and make these projects something that other tenants can aspire to.”
Egan says Washington should endorse the concept and throw ”the full weight of his office” behind tenant management at selected developments.
Right now, there are the beginning stirrings of tenant management at five CHA developments, but, in every case, it was outside groups rather than the city or the CHA that assisted in the initial organizing efforts.
At LeClaire Courts, where tenant management is furthest along, the residents have been aided by the Clarence Darrow Community Center, located in the development, as well as by the Nathalie P. Voorhees Center for Neighborhood and Community Improvement and by the Amoco Foundation.
Over the last year, the Metropolitan Planning Council has helped get residents working toward tenant management at buildings in Cabrini-Green, Wells, Washington Park and Ogden Courts. The CHA agreed this fall to help pay for a liaison person between the residents at these buildings and the housing authority.
In addition, Egan says Washington should back ”safe housing”
legislation in Springfield, patterned after the state`s safe school law, which imposes stricter penalties and mandatory sentences for certain crimes committed at or near schools.
Robert McKay, who was active in housing issues in Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s and is now director of the Boston-based Council of Large Public Housing Authorities, says better planning about the future of public housing is something that Washington should have done from the start of his term.
”There`s no planning being done,” he says. ”No one seems to be saying which direction things should be going.”
That may change next year.
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Washington says he is planning to appoint a blue-ribbon commission–”a massive thing,” he says–sometime next spring, apparently after the mayoral election, to study and make recommendations on what can be done about public housing in Chicago.
The idea of a blue-ribbon panel isn`t new, however. Robinson has been talking about it for at least six months, and it was one of the major recommendations of the report of the housing task force of Washington`s transition team following his 1983 election.
”What we need to do now is strike out to provide new forms of public housing,” Washington says.
One alternative, he says, might be to convert portions of the family-occupied CHA high-rises for use by the elderly. But this idea, a pet plan of Robinson, would require the massive relocation of families.
Robinson suggests that they could be moved to new low-rise units at scattered sites in the city. But, despite a call early in his term for an increase in the CHA scattered-site program, Washington hasn`t done anything to bring that about. Indeed, until recently, the housing authority hadn`t bought any new scattered-site units for at least two years.
Another idea, Washington says, might be to convert portions of the high-rises into commercial and office space. In fact, he says that, when he was in Congress, he tried unsuccessfully to convince the Pentagon to move the 5th Army headquarters from Ft. Sheridan near North Chicago to the upper floors of some buildings at the Robert Taylor Homes.
Selling some buildings, such as those at Cabrini-Green, to raise money also might be an alternative, Washington says, but he opposes the outright demolition of any buildings as ”a tremendous waste.”
In the end, Washington says there may be no good solution to problems of Chicago`s public housing.
”When we walked into this, we felt it was possible to put all the buildings back in shape,” he says. ”I`m not sure it`s possible now. The dollars aren`t there, and it might be forever impossible to get more money out of Washington for public housing.”
Yet, soon after the mayor took office, the housing task force of his transition team noted the decline in federal spending for housing, and warned: ”It is imperative that the federal government`s abdication of its housing responsibilities not be used as an excuse to do nothing.”