It stood 16 stories tall, a high-rise morgue for her daughter’s body.
“I don’t feel no sadness,” Gladys McLaurien said in May as a demolition crew tore into 5326 S. State St., one of three infamous Robert Taylor Homes buildings known as the Hole. Hers was the first to fall.
She had suffered enough in a place that gangs had turned into a 24-hour drug market; where her neighbors were afraid to retrieve their mail. And where, a decade ago, her 26-year-old daughter was left strangled in a vacant apartment.
“For a long time, I hated everybody I saw. I hated so hard,” McLaurien said. “I hated so, it changed my whole personality.”
When McLaurien had the chance to leave, she seized it, joining an exodus of mainly women and children who are part of the most dramatic change in public housing in Chicago and indeed the nation. In the coming decade, as many as 19,000 Chicago Housing Authority units considered irredeemable will be demolished. It will cost an estimated $1 billion to find these residents new homes and to renovate the projects that will remain.
But as McLaurien sought to reconstruct a life, she soon realized that she’d traded a CHA high-rise for a low-rise slum: Her new apartment was burglarized within a week, and soon she had to move again.
The CHA’s stated goals have been to see residents end up in economically thriving neighborhoods. But the experience of McLaurien and others in the first wave of families to relocate–more than 1,500 since January 1996–suggests the CHA has simply reshuffled the city’s poorest residents from one segregated community to another.
A Tribune analysis shows that nearly half the families have moved into census tracts where more than 50 percent of their neighbors live below the poverty line. Many also live in neighborhoods where an average of 1 out of 6 buildings are in Housing Court, according to an analysis of figures from the Center for Neighborhood Technology.
While a 1966 court case that led to the historic Gautreaux decree was supposed to end the quarantining of Chicago’s poorest blacks, most of the CHA’s current effort is not subject to those conditions. More than 1,200 families have resettled in census tracts that are more than 90 percent black, leaving the ideal of integration in the dust.
The Tribune is following scores of families as they attempt to leave not only Robert Taylor but other pillars of poverty such as Cabrini-Green and the Henry Horner Homes, which have long defined America’s failure to house its poor.
At the same time, they are struggling to cope with the challenges of leaving the welfare rolls.
Already, some families have moved on to new lives and fresh hopes. Others, such as former residents of the Hole, Arletha Coleman and Billy Kimmons, started optimistically but ended up in homes where they are too afraid to sit on the new front porch, or have had to flee to avoid gunfire. Still others, such as Jennifer Brown, went from one dilapidated high-rise to another, where the main difference is the local gang that controls her building.
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Some individuals with criminal records and drug problems only ventured across the street from the Hole. Until police rousted them, they huddled in cardboard boxes nostalgic for the anarchy of a housing complex where 96 percent of the residents were unemployed last year, 95 percent received public aid and the average annual income was $5,905.
Even working families with immaculate tenant records are hemmed in by strict budgets and landlords who don’t trust people from the projects or the CHA’s ability to help them pay rent on time.
CHA Executive Director Joseph Shuldiner admitted the shortcomings of the relocation effort. “Are we satisfied? No. We’d like to do better.” But he noted that his agency is devoting up to $9 million over the next two years to better integrate families throughout the city and suburbs.
“The first step is to get them into better housing–regardless of where it is,” Shuldiner said. “If we can’t get everybody into the perfect environment the first time around, let’s at least get them into a safer environment.”
For many CHA families who have been moved, though, safety has proven to be elusive.
A fresh start
When McLaurien first saw her new apartment, in her eyes it gleamed.
By then, she had a precious rent certificate in hand, having proven to the CHA that she had paid her rent on time and had no criminal background. The federal Section 8 rent subsidy–a maximum of $756 for a two-bedroom apartment–allows recipients to move anywhere they want.
Once approved, McLaurien combed her neighborhood, eyeing “For Rent” signs and checking newspaper ads. She noticed a lot of newly rehabbed structures. “For us, we go in there seeing these nice white beautiful walls–and most of them have carpeting,” she said. “When I saw my apartment, it looked wonderful.”
On an October morning last year, McLaurien moved about six blocks from the Hole. The apartment had a back porch to relax on and the building was blissfully quiet, compared to her old one.
The contrast was made clear each day when McLaurien returned to work as a janitor in her old building until it was destroyed. She had moved to 5326 S. State St. in the 1970s with her five children. After her daughter’s violent death in 1988, the building had become an ugly trap, where even neighbors seemed like enemies. Moving had been her dream.
About a year before the Hole was to be torn down, a pair of CHA employees became fixtures alongside the buildings’ busy drug dealers and glassy-eyed addicts. Clipboards in hand, Brenda Hunter and Sonya Franklin knocked on doors, collecting documents required for Section 8. In all, 298 families were to leave their homes.
When McLaurien returned to the Hole to work, the familiar rapid-fire shouts of “Rocks, rocks, rocks!” rang out around her, hawking crack cocaine. But “I ain’t got to listen to this when I get home at night,” she said. “Section 8 was a godsend for me. So many years, all this noise. So many years.”
It wasn’t a godsend for long.
McLaurien had been so eager to leave Taylor that she had overlooked something when she moved: “It’s my own fault in a sense. I moved on the first floor and automatically assumed there were bars or screens (on the windows).” There were neither.
She was burglarized in her first week there; after that, she left her windows shut tight. Meanwhile, she repeatedly requested bars and screens, but got none. When spring arrived, she was afraid to open the windows.
With the windows closed, “I was about to suffocate,” she said. With them open, “you didn’t dare to sleep. Either the cats would come in–or the two-leggeds would.”
Other things went wrong. Leaks broke out in the bathroom ceiling, so that “if you had to use the commode, you had to sit there with an umbrella.”
Her repeated requests for repairs went unanswered, and CHA finally terminated the lease, said the CHA’s Franklin.
In May of this year she moved. Again.
This time, she found a two-bedroom apartment in the same troubled neighborhood, on Garfield Boulevard. She has a freshly painted third-floor apartment that she has lined with her family photos. She feels more secure, at least for now.
Not worth fixing
McLaurien’s former home in Robert Taylor was among the dozens of CHA buildings that failed a federal “viability test,” which called for demolition of complexes if they were more expensive to maintain than to simply relocate residents with Section 8 subsidies.
In all, some 100,000 public-housing units failed that test nationwide. Chicago was hardest hit with 19,000, about 4,400 units in Taylor alone, a stretch of high-rises from Pershing Road to 54th Street built in 1962.
As residents begin to stream out of such projects, critics contend that CHA officials may be setting up many families for failure.
“I fear what Shuldiner is concerned with is getting rid of some of those buildings as quickly as possible and getting the people out as quickly as possible,” said Alexander Polikoff, who still represents plaintiffs in the Gautreaux case. “If you . . . really inform people and assist them in making good choices, it’s going to take longer. And he’s an impatient man.”
The vast majority of Taylor residents, like McLaurien, wanted to see their buildings fall. In two surveys, some 80 percent approved demolition of all the complex’s original 28 high-rises, said Mildred Dennis, one of two Local Advisory Council presidents at Taylor.
“It’s been four or five generations of the same families at this development,” Dennis said. “It’s time for a change. It’s time for us to take responsibility for ourselves.”
The Hole had been home to Arletha Coleman since she was 9 years old.
After she was moved out earlier this year, Coleman, now 37, was bounced among family members, a decent hotel paid for by the CHA for two weeks, and a temporary apartment in a CHA row house.
Coleman said CHA relocation employees are “working real hard” to find her a permanent place, but some units were in the middle of gang-ridden neighborhoods. Others weren’t handicapped-accessible for her brother who uses a wheelchair. Or they “were real nice but way over budget” for her Section 8 certificate, she said.
Eventually, the authority decided to place her in the row house in its Washington Park Homes development on the South Side. Unfortunately, the unit was in easy range of two high-rises so notorious for gunfire that a longtime local resident said anyone who chose to move to the community “must’ve lost her mind.”
Still, at first she liked the temporary digs–a freshly rehabbed unit that works nicely for her disabled 35-year-old brother.
Two weeks into their stay, gunfire changed her mind.
At about 8:45 one evening, young men from the nearby CHA high-rises started exchanging shots with others in low-rise buildings.
“We just closed our door and turned off the lights,” said Coleman. She and her two daughters made their way upstairs, but her brother, unable to move, lay down on the floor beside his bed.
“I said, `Don’t talk, as long as you’re all right,’ ” Coleman recalled. At least when they lived in the Hole, she said, the local gang members “would come by and say, `Get your family in–we’re fixin’ to go to war.’ “
After that incident, Coleman and her family moved into the South Side apartment of her eldest daughter, who moved from the Hole last year.
Until she found a permanent home, the CHA suggested that Coleman move into 4848 S. State St., a Taylor building where rats run rampant in the daylight and where gang members traditionally battled with rivals from the Hole.
Coleman passed on the offer. But other residents of the Hole–about a half-dozen families–have been moved there because they had nowhere else to go.
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Jennifer Brown, a mother of three children who was refused Section 8 because she owed back rent, was drawn into the rivalry when she moved there from the Hole.
“They even put guns to the movers’ heads,” Brown said.
Eventually, she convinced them that she and her family weren’t gang-affiliated, and the gang members allowed them entry.
The CHA recognizes the gang rivalries complicate the relocation process.
It is “something that we ought to be more sensitive to,” Shuldiner said. “But I don’t think government should be making policy based on gang structure.”
`See the world’
When word spread around Robert Taylor that the Hole would fall, many were startled by the news.
“What are we gonna do? How we gonna do it?” Kimmons recalled them saying. “Some knew it was a better start, and others couldn’t take it.”
Kimmons had spent all of his 23 years in the Hole. “I was stuck,” he said.
His mother died when he was 18, leaving him alone in a ninth-floor apartment at 5326 S. State St. At first he was even unsure how to pay the rent, living on $120 a month in welfare payments and about $100 in food stamps.
“I was depressed, frustrated.”
Then, as the end of the Hole approached, Kimmons watched moving vans come and go from the concrete lot out front, carrying his neighbors away.
“When they started bringing the people out of there, I couldn’t wait till they got to me,” said Kimmons. “I started seeing things differently, wanting to do something with myself.”
He said it was as if the CHA was telling him, “It’s time for you to see the world.”
Kimmons got his first real job in January: as a part-time attendance officer at his old school, Terrell Elementary. Among other duties, he escorted pupils to school after a gang war had threatened the children’s safety.
When Kimmons was approved for Section 8 housing, he faced an obstacle: He had to persuade a landlord to accept him.
“I was a young black male, and they thought I’d bring trouble,” he said. “They found out where I came from, and they said `No.’ “
After several rejections, a landlord–an African-American man who said he understood Kimmons’ plight–offered him an apartment.
Kimmons moved in March, leaving most of his tattered old furniture behind, taking little more than a bed. Today what he calls his “palace” on the Far South Side is still mostly empty, but he keeps it sparkling clean.
“It’s all new. It’s a challenge,” he said.
He’s planning to take courses toward a high school equivalency degree. After that, he said, he’ll pursue full-time work. He continues to return to his old block to work at the school, reminding him of how far he’s traveled.
“You can’t be afraid,” said Kimmons. “Whatever happens, happens. You can’t be afraid.”
Sometimes, though, that’s easier said than done. Even though Kimmons has settled into a comfortable apartment, he finds the surrounding community threatening.
When he first arrived, local men eyed him suspiciously and one yelled as he walked past, threatening to “come over and knock me out,” said Kimmons. “I just kept walking.”
A neighbor advised him to speak to a young man who had “rank” in the neighborhood, who could influence the others.
Kimmons did. “I told him I didn’t want no problems. I work. He said, don’t worry about it, that one day he’d pick me up and ride me around the neighborhood, that if people saw me with him, it’d be OK,” said Kimmons. So far, though, “he never did that.”
Today, Kimmons feels so intimidated that he won’t sit on his new porch at night. Still, he has no regrets when he sees the empty lot where his lifelong home once stood. However flawed, he said, the CHA’s initiative has pushed him out of the projects and into a new world.
“I can deal with this. I can survive,” said Kimmons. “What I have right now is a start. And I want to keep on moving.”