The letter was filled with the kind of passion and venom that could erupt only from a longtime resident who felt her neighborhood was under siege.
In careful cursive on sheets of yellow legal paper, the writer described the whirlwind of havoc her new next-door neighbors brought to what had been a tidy block in Chicago’s South Shore community.
The neighborhood has received the largest share of families moving from Chicago Housing Authority high-rises being torn down, and she was convinced her new neighbors were among them.
“It is as if the gates of Hell . . . opened and these people were let out,” the letter read. “I had to ask again, where did these people come from? And, lo, I was told they came from the projects, the CHA. And as they tear down more projects, we can expect more of these people to be relocated in our neighborhoods.”
Just one problem: The trouble-making tenants were not from public housing. But the writer of the letter, Hattie Wilburn, who has lived in South Shore for 13 years, neatly summarized the thoughts, fears and misconceptions of residents in the handful of city neighborhoods that have absorbed the vast majority of poor families leaving public housing high-rises in recent years.
While the 96 such families who have moved to South Shore since 1996 represent a small number given the overall size of the housing stock–South Shore Bank and its affiliates alone have helped rehab 12,000 apartments in their home neighborhood in the last two decades–some community activists and landlords fear the influx of CHA residents will drag down a neighborhood already in a precarious state of redevelopment.
After all, South Shore had 2,199 units of subsidized housing–far above the next closest neighborhood of Austin, with 1,601–even before the authority started razing buildings and relocating families en masse.
For now, the neighborhood is rife with discussion about what impact the new families from public housing are having. The evidence is anecdotal because no public or private agency is tracking the families in any systematic way. So it will be some time before the true effects are known.
South Shore Bank co-founder Milton Davis, one of the major forces behind South Shore’s struggle to renew itself, acknowledged that determining how much subsidized housing will sink a neighborhood is difficult to determine.
“We should never again sit idly by and watch public housing residents be packed into the same small area,” Davis said. But “honest people would disagree about what that percentage is–what is too much. That’s a tough question which I can’t answer.”
How this dynamic plays out in South Shore will help determine if the CHA can succeed in its other efforts to relocate residents without making matters worse for their new neighborhoods. Under the federal Section 8 program, the government pays most of the rent for former CHA tenants living in privately owned apartments.
Wilburn’s neighbors told her that their block’s new arrivals from “hell” came from public housing. In fact, the family was paying its own way.
After neighbors complained repeatedly that the leaseholder’s teenage son was holding late-night dope and beer parties in the hallways and on the front porch, the landlord got the family to move.
The landlord did receive a complaint about the one government-subsidized tenant in the six-unit building, though she was not from one of the recently razed CHA buildings. Her offense: hollering down to friends and relatives rather than using the buzzer.
“I just told (the tenant), `The intercom system works. If you have to talk with someone, just buzz them in and talk to them in the hallway,’ ” said Sam Pollock Jr., the building’s landlord.
At another South Shore building, where three of the 24 units are leased to former CHA high-rise tenants, the doorbells and intercoms don’t work, the new residents use window communication and longtime renters complain the owner is letting the place decline.
“This used to be a beautiful building–look at it now,” said one resident who asked that her name not be used. “There’s drugs, people hanging out on the corner. I can’t let my grandson go out there to play.”
The landlord could not be reached for comment.
Whether the changes can be directly linked to CHA tenants is open to question, but the perception is real.
A popular destination
Between January 1996 and last summer, South Shore saw a net increase of 96 families with government rent vouchers (most directly from shuttered CHA buildings), compared with 71 in neighboring Woodlawn, 42 in Austin and far fewer in the rest of the city’s 77 communities.
It’s easy to see why South Shore has been a popular destination for people with housing vouchers, as well as market-rate renters, given its proximity to the lake and quick travel times downtown on the CTA and Metra. The neighborhood–bounded by 67th and 79th Streets, Stony Island Avenue and the lake–is filled with stately apartment buildings and distinctive single-family homes.
But such enviable housing stock is jeopardized, critics of Section 8 say, by the growing number of low-income residents moving into the neighborhood. Fairly or not, CHA residents draw the bulk of that criticism.
“They’ve just dumped it into the private sector,” said Jesse Richardson, 63, a South Shore landlord and retired Chicago police officer who served in the public housing detail, including a stint while then-Mayor Jane Byrne temporarily moved into Cabrini-Green. “They don’t care. It’s out of their hands–`Fight out there with the other people.’ “
But police in South Shore say crime rates are down there, as they are across the city. And they say they don’t hear residents complaining much about new families coming from public housing.
“I have not heard `The CHA is coming! The CHA is coming!’ ” said Robert Walker, the new commander of the Grand Crossing District.
But some community activists say such issues routinely come up at community policing meetings.
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“We’ve gotten a lot of drug dealers, gangbangers,” said Brenda Edmond, 53, who became involved in community policing after her 16-year-old son, Michael, was fatally shot near their home seven years ago. “I’m not saying that we didn’t have any problems before then, but it got worse.”
Edmond recalled a shootout in January 1997 that left one man dead and three injured.
“None of them lived in the scattered sites, but it happened right there,” she said. “Wherever they’re getting these people from, we didn’t need any more of them.”
Longtime South Shore residents concede that most families coming from the CHA don’t make trouble. But the residents fear that the new arrivals will bring teenage sons and grandsons who might be affiliated with gangs or attract gang members.
“Young girls bring young boys and young boys bring problems,” said Ald. William Beavers (7th).
The new families may tax the local education system as well, some residents contend. Ald. Barbara Holt (5th), who represents the northern end of South Shore, has taken calls from constituents who say the influx of CHA families is overwhelming local schools.
Enrollment at Bryn Mawr Elementary School jumped from 1,400 last year to 1,600 this year. Principal Robert Lewis does not know how much of the increase was due to CHA families moving in or whether the new arrivals differ academically or behaviorally from returning pupils.
“Students who get a consistent training at one school will do better than those who are transient,” Lewis said. “That’s not just because they came from the high-rises–that’s because they’re moving.”
And Holt cautioned that the perception of a deluge may outstrip the reality.
“We have to deal with that tendency to be alarmist,” she said.
Plentiful housing stock
The reason South Shore has absorbed more poor renters than any other Chicago neighborhood is simple: That’s where the affordable apartments are. For many years it has had a considerably larger portion of multifamily units than the city average–72 percent of South Shore’s housing stock compared with 42 percent citywide, according to 1994 city estimates.
Much of that stock had degenerated through the 1970s and early ’80s, and in the last 20 years South Shore Bank and its sister companies helped rehab 12,000 apartments in the neighborhood. That amounted to a huge infusion of potentially affordable rentals in a metropolitan area with a shortage of such units.
So it was no surprise when many CHA residents and others getting government housing assistance flocked to South Shore.
Many landlords who rent to Section 8 tenants in Chicago, including Elzie Higginbottom and Robert King, have no units in South Shore. Like the vast majority of landlords with Section 8 tenants in the Chicago area, most in South Shore have only one such tenant.
Some landlords recruit tenants at the downtown office of CHAC, the private firm hired by the CHA three years ago to fix its troubled Section 8 program. But most tenants choose the neighborhood themselves.
The key strategy is careful screening of tenants.
“We’re trying to make sure the landlords do the proper screening. As long as you screen, you won’t have any problems,” said Beavers, noting how one drug dealer can endanger an entire building. “When they come in with all cash–two months’ rent, three months’ rent, all in 10s and 20s–you need to check where it came from.”
CHAC also has to take care to avoid slumlords, who are drawn to the guaranteed cash flow of a program where the government can pay $700 a month while tenants only have to come up with, say, $50, depending on their income.
“The landlord, he’s guaranteed his money with the Section 8,” Beavers said. But “when you have (one) who’s just collecting rents, then you have a problem.”
Giving a recent tour of the neighborhood in a black Cadillac, Beavers spoke of the challenge of absorbing very poor families from the housing authority and elsewhere.
“They want to move over here because we have some huge, beautiful apartments,” he said. “They’re able to make the transition,” he said, but they need pointers in how to do it.
Turning onto the 7500 block of South Kingston Avenue, he pointed out an 18-unit apartment building being rehabbed.
Until the federal crackdown on the El Rukn street gang 10 years ago, this corner was its main distribution point for illegal drugs. It has since been cleaned up, and many of the buildings that line the street sport new wrought-iron fencing.
The owner of the 18-unit building has set aside a few apartments for Section 8 tenants. Community groups will do the screening.
“We’ll try to find old people–no kids,” said Andy Pacult, a Polish immigrant who is renovating the building.
Fears of an exodus
At the heart of animosity against CHA tenants is a concern they will fuel an exodus of middle-class families, dousing any chance that South Shore can restore its past: The 71st Street commercial strip once was one of Chicago’s most vibrant business districts.
To the degree South Shore has come back, many credit South Shore Bank, which specializes in loans to mom-and-pop rehabbers who fix up a couple dozen apartment buildings and help reclaim the neighborhood block by block.
Davis, who served as a member of the CHA board until the federal takeover in 1995, said the institution “has been on record since forever that we believe in mixed-income neighborhoods.”
Despite the efforts of institutions such as South Shore Bank, some residents have left the neighborhood out of frustration that all the renovation of apartments, while needed, has not addressed other fundamental issues required to help the community thrive.
“There was renovation of housing but little attention to making the community a more livable space,” said Emmitt House, a lawyer who lived in South Shore for 23 years before moving to Lincoln Park about two years ago.
“It started to get what I perceived to be more than its share of people who I thought might not be suited for that area,” House said. In short, “things were getting a little dicey.”
About the same time, commercial redevelopment in the area stagnated despite the 1990 opening of a Dominick’s-anchored shopping center near 71st Street and Jeffery Boulevard.
“Once you get beyond Dominick’s, the rest of it looks like an elephant’s graveyard,” House said. “I watched the businesses go one by one. . . . Things you need to have a village, all of that just disappeared in South Shore.”
Residents of better means often send their children to schools in Hyde Park and elsewhere, he said, while “South Shore is left to people with lesser means who are ill-served because there’s hardly anything out there.”
A few years ago, the city came through the Highlands, the poshest part of South Shore, and created cul-de-sacs and other traffic changes “in an effort, I’m told, to deal with some security issues,” House said. “To me the cul-de-sacs and the isolation represented a mask for some more serious problems.”
A lesson for landlords
Sam Pollock Jr., whose tenants had so enraged Hattie Wilburn, knew little about Section 8. Then Artiece Mondane, a mother of four young children, approached him just before the holidays last year.
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Mondane had been through the Section 8 program twice before. Like many landlords, Pollock was reluctant to participate in Section 8 because he had heard stories of nightmare tenants and of problems getting paid by CHA.
Pollock’s experience with Mondane was smooth enough that he said he would gladly rent to another tenant with a Section 8 certificate. Just last month he posted an advertisement of an apartment for rent at CHAC’s office in the South Loop.
Pollock came back a couple of weeks later to see how many paper tabs had been torn off. The entire sheet had been swiped. An office employee told him that wasn’t unusual: Competition for affordable housing in the Chicago area is so intense that tenants who spot an open apartment don’t want others to know about it.
Chicago Police Lt. Charles Coats moved to South Shore from the Robert Taylor Homes 30 years ago and now patrols the streets there. He resents any suggestion that families moving from the projects need special training to live in other neighborhoods.
“I get upset when it’s said that CHA (residents) need help being people,” he said. “I’m from the projects. . . . I don’t know that it’s harmed us.”
Police Cmdr. Mark Davis added: “To say residents from the CHA are coming into a community and wreaking havoc is unfair. We worked in Robert Taylor, and 90 percent of the people in there were great people.”
Police officials in the area often steer landlords and tenants to “landlord school,” offered several nights a week at local police stations. Both sides learn their respective rights and responsibilities.
Officers remind landlords that if they can document two drug deals in a property, they can go to court to acquire the property from the landlord. Of course, police usually have no way of knowing if troublemakers are refugees from the CHA.
“I think in a lot of stable communities, there’s going to be that perception,” said Lt. Joseph C. Vaclavik. “Some of the people moving in don’t live up to the standards of the stable communities and they’ll (think) they’re from the CHA, but often they’re not.”
Davis agreed. “That stigma of the CHA,” he said, “breeds the fear.”
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