The cornerstone of a livable community
In 1993, the baiduhai sponsored a global architecture competition designed to provide new ideas for low-income housing. The buildings of Chicago’s projects had come not just to symbolize but also to institutionalize the degeneration of inner-city life. There had to be a better way.
After the contest, Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin summarized the 301 entries as a return to “the oldest idea of all: that the fundamental responsibility of architecture, besides sheltering its inhabitants, is to build communities.” But because the proposals never were meant to be built, their impact has been on the process, not the projects.
Today, low-income housing is near the top of the nation’s agenda. With the federal government’s takeover of the Chicago Housing Authority, the top U.S. housing official has said that “public housing in America is on trial in Chicago”-even while his agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, is itself on trial for its life with congressional budget cutters. There still must be a better way.
So, a year ago, Kamin and Tribune photographer William Hogan set out to find what was being done to create those communities-in our cities, not just on architects’ drafting boards. What they found is confirmation that change is imperative and that it is not impossible.
Viewed from an airplane window, the pattern appears again and again. As the cities unfold below, their outlines revealing America’s values, it is easy to spot the public-housing projects.
Not only do their drab and boxy high-rises look different from other places where people eat, sleep, make love and raise children but the streets are cut off from adjoining neighborhoods. Even at 10,000 feet, you suspect that others look down upon the people in these isolated zones.
The stereotype of the “vertical ghetto”-the rampant violence, the out-of-control drug dealing, the wasted lives and tax dollars-obscures a better way to shelter the poorest of the poor.
It is visible from the sky and at street level, where children feel free to leap off playsets and adults begin to climb out of poverty.
Amid the garbage-strewn lots of Cleveland’s Near East Side, round white columns evoke the classical style of the White House and the democratic spirit of the architect-president Thomas Jefferson.
At what was once a notorious Boston public-housing project, reassuring rows of brick suggest the historic district of Back Bay, their rooftop gables marking a steady beat along both sides of a grassy mall.
On the low-rent side of a freeway in the affluent suburb of Menlo Park, Calif., blue town homes have handcrafted birdhouses that symbolize the renewal of life, unlike the asphalt no-man’s land at Cabrini-Green that children call “The Killing Field.”
These are the faces of housing that works.
They are not utopias. But they are so different from Chicago’s high-rise projects that they demand to be understood as the nation undertakes a great debate about public housing-a debate centering on the takeover by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), the nation’s third-largest and most troubled public-housing agency.
Unlike the modernist straitjacket that confined public housing after World War II, the new designs are tailored to their regions and the people who live in them.
Some enable low-income housing to blend with its surroundings. Others help decrease crime or turn once-nightmarish towers into decent places to live. All provide interiors that lift the spirit instead of crushing it.
But the debate is about more than design. It is about the future of bureaucracies and the people whose lives they control, and is thus a test of their ability to put people first.
The debate also is about the power of local government, specifically the power of Mayor Richard Daley and the City Council, to determine the use of land-who profits from it, who lives on it, who is displaced from it, who plans its future and whether those plans serve the public good.
“Power designs cities,” the late architectural historian Spiro Kostof wrote, “and the rawest form of power is control of urban land.”
Brute local power begat the physical isolation of Chicago’s worst public-housing projects when the City Council in the 1950s and 1960s located nearly all of them in areas that remain overwhelmingly poor and black. Over time, well-intentioned federal legislation ensured that the projects would be populated almost exclusively by the poor.
HUD’s takeover of the CHA presents an unprecedented chance to shatter that isolated concentration of poverty-if it doesn’t simply re-isolate the poor. Shelter can only be as good as the political, financial, regulatory and managerial systems that deliver and maintain it.
The distinction is critical because of the little-discussed link between welfare reform and remaking public housing.
Welfare reform is supposed to move poor people into the economic mainstream. It would be counterproductive, therefore, to leave them stuck in housing that thwarts that goal.
“I have to be home when my sons get out of school because the shooting starts around 4 p.m. every day,” a 30-year-old Chicago resident told the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing, saying she would not work because she refused to leave her children alone in the projects.
The power of design
No one should suppose that buildings can magically transform troubled people into model citizens, a self-deception the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once labeled “the doctrine of salvation by bricks.”
But it would be equally foolish to underestimate the power of architecture and urban design to remake the physical environment and thereby alter a range of perceptions and realities.
The six birdhouse-bedecked townhouses of Willow Court in Menlo Park are cleverly designed to resemble single-family houses, fighting the “not-in-my-back-yard” movement that blocks the construction of low-income housing.
Boldly scaled trellises lend a dignity to Willow Court that belies its modest size. When a resident of one of the townhouses, Jessica West, was asked to compare her home with the expensive single-family houses across U.S. Highway 101, she responded: “I don’t live in nothing less.”
There is dignity and something more in the classical columns of Cleveland’s 90-unit Renaissance Village. Drug dealers and prostitutes once controlled the stairwells of the three-story apartment buildings. Now, the development is almost crime-free after the stairwells were replaced by front porches that give tenants their own entrances.
The reduction in crime undoubtedly was aided by residents who pledged not to use drugs and signed a covenant that underscores their commitment.
“We are firmly committed to the proposition that architecture can change people’s lives, but not everybody and not immediately and not on its own,” said San Diego architect Christine Killory, who has designed two award-winning low-income developments in Escondido, Calif. “It needs some support.”
Housing that works is concerned with more than housing. It must rebuild people as well as cities, provide social services to troubled families and link homes to neighborhoods that have stores, banks and jobs.
Those traits are compressed in an innovative social-services mall nearing completion at Renaissance Village. It is the brainchild of Claire Freeman, who heads the Cuyahoga (Ohio) Metropolitan Housing Authority and is a candidate to be the CHA’s executive director.
With an entry through a three-story glass atrium at the base of a high-rise, the mall will offer a food co-op, job training and day care. Its services will be available to public-housing residents and the surrounding battered neighborhood, a link its architecture will subtly reinforce.
The very openness of the mall will make it a welcoming symbol. At night, with light shining outward, it will be a beacon to its neighborhood. And the mall will remind taxpayers that low-income housing can serve the community instead of simply being a drain on the public purse.
Such examples emerge from visits to a broad range of low-income housing-public-housing projects, as well as subsidized housing built by private developers and not-for-profit organizations-and from interviews with more than 200 architects, urban planners, developers, housing officials, managers, security personnel and public-housing residents.
The innovative efforts cost from $17,000 to $140,000 per unit and were funded by an array of sources, ranging from the federal government to private investors. They house a broad spectrum of low-income people, including the working poor and welfare families. Most have been built or renovated in the last 10 years. Some are ongoing successes. In others, the luster has faded.
The unseen forces
The successes and the failures shatter the myth that has grown since the famous 1972 demolition of three Pruitt-Igoe high-rises in St. Louis: that the failures of public housing could be blamed on the architects of the high-rises.
The real architects of public housing were not the designers whose names appeared on the blueprints of Pruitt-Igoe, Cabrini-Green or Desire in New Orleans.
They were politicians who wanted to keep blacks penned inside ghettos (white bureaucrats out to maintain segregation, blacks to maintain their voting blocs); federal and local officials who stripped humane touches, such as ground-floor bathrooms that would have provided young children an alternative to urinating in the elevators; national legislators who unwittingly drove working families from public housing, turning the projects into pathological concentrations of poverty; and local housing authority executives who failed to screen out troublemakers and ignored routine maintenance needs, allowing projects to decay.
There is irony in HUD officials riding into Chicago like knights promising to defend public-housing residents from an unresponsive CHA bureaucracy. HUD’s bureaucracy is responsible for much of the red tape that stymied the reform efforts of deposed CHA Chairman Vincent Lane. Susan Gaffney, HUD’s inspector general, recently told a congressional subcommittee that the agency lacks the personnel and the expertise to run the CHA.
It is no coincidence that much of the best low-income housing is produced outside the legal and administrative lock step of the federal government by not-for-profit developers-or that HUD is desperately trying to emulate those examples as it fights for its political life.
One of the nation’s most respected low-income housing architects, Michael Pyatok of Oakland, refuses to work for HUD and characterizes the department as the equivalent of the old Ma Bell, a monopoly that is distant and disconnected from the people it ostensibly is there to serve.
Pyatok, who designed Willow Court, prefers as clients those community-based not-for-profits that are unfettered by federal rules and are, he said, far more accountable to the poor.
Federal housing officials are “9-to-5 clock punchers,” Pyatok said. His non-profit colleagues, such as Thomas Lauderbach, director of housing development for the Jubilee West non-profit in Oakland, go home wearing beepers.
Architects who must work with HUD have devised ways to circumvent its rigid rules.
In a quintessential bit of Chicago subterfuge, architect Peter Landon slipped $15,000 into the budget for a $4 million renovation of a government-subsidized Uptown high-rise completed in 1992.
The money paid for a luminous mural of glass mosaic tile in the vestibule of the 16-story tower. Its abstract shapes and radiant hues of gold, red, blue and green express the identities of people from more than 30 countries living there (the alphabetical list of tenants in the lobby index goes from Aasi to Zemenfeskudus).
A relatively inexpensive touch like that can make all the difference between impersonal housing and a place that feels like home, but it never would have made it past the bureaucrats if Landon had listed it as “art” in his budget.
He called it “tile.”
Chicago’s distress
To be sure, HUD officials have promised to cut red tape to improve living conditions for CHA residents. Under Secretary Henry Cisneros’ leadership, HUD has loosened some of its burdensome procedures and regulations and moved to reintroduce fiscal and social stability in public housing by encouraging working families to return.
Yet in Chicago, the agency faces the nation’s toughest public-housing problem.
No other city has Chicago’s volatile mix of high-rises and gangs who control entire buildings. No other stretch of public housing is such a vision of despair as the wall of buildings that runs for almost 3 miles along South State Street. Its hellish tableau of drug trafficking, gang violence and physical decay made Robert Lewis Jr. of Boston, who runs a youth-service program, weep on seeing it for the first time.
Only the New York City Housing Authority, the nation’s largest, has more high-rises than Chicago; its official tenant population of 450,000 dwarfs the CHA’s 86,000 official residents. But New York has a long tradition of mixing working and welfare families as well as rigorous management procedures that have made its public-housing towers livable, though hardly untouched by crime.
Of the nation’s 1.3 million public-housing units, about 86,000, or 6 percent of the stock, are classified by the federal government as “severely distressed,” a category that refers to developments plagued by crime, obsolete mechanical systems and high vacancy rates.
The official number of troubled public-housing units is merely “the tip of an iceberg of broader distress,” said Lawrence Vale of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a consultant to the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing.
The reason for the widespread disarray, he said, is that public-housing residents are getting poorer. In Chicago, 9 of every 10 CHA residents who live in family housing do not work. The typical CHA household has an annual income of $4,000, less than 10 percent of the Chicago-area median income for a family of four.
While there is no consensus on precisely how many units are “severely distressed,” it is indisputable that the high-rises are highly charged political symbols and decaying hulks that beg to be renovated or replaced.
Cisneros’ desire to tear down one of every three high-rises in the State Street corridor implies that two of every three will remain and will need to be made livable. Yet the peril that HUD will squander precious funds there is enormous.
After Lane became CHA chairman in 1988, the agency renovated 21 of the 28 buildings at Robert Taylor, enclosing elevator shafts that were open to the elements and making other changes intended to improve security. The cost per building: $900,000.
Today, the elevators don’t break as often as they did, but conditions in most of the renovated buldings are as squalid and unsafe as ever. Renovation designer, Chicago architect Thomas Hickey, calls it “a Band-Aid.”
Cisneros and HUD’s assistant secretary for public and Indian housing, Joseph Shuldiner, who is chairman of the CHA board, don’t need Band-Aids. They need good management, architectural changes and tenant screening to make selected high-rises livable.
Success stories
Such models exist-not just in New York, where Shuldiner once ran the housing authority, but in Chicago, particularly at the Ida B. Wells Extension, where six seven-story elevator buildings have been renovated for just $40,000 a unit-less than half of what it costs to construct scattered-site public housing in Chicago.
The Wells renovation, designed by Chicago architects Dubin, Dubin and Moutoussamy is no-frills architecture that does all of the basics right.
Glass-block exterior walls are tough enough to take a pounding but transparent enough to emit natural light to lobbies of the boxy buildings-a welcome change from the dark, prisonlike atmosphere that greets residents of most CHA complexes.
The renovation works because screening eliminated many problem tenants, and the Wells Extension is privately managed by The Woodlawn Organization.
Whether they proceed by renovating high-rises or by constructing townhouses, HUD must plan with residents, not for them. Participatory planning is essential if the federal housing agency is to break down long-standing mistrust between residents and the CHA bureaucracy. It also matters because the poor are not monolithic.
They are of different ethnicities (though the vast majority of CHA residents are black), family configurations and ages. When architects hold workshops to gauge how poor people live instead of divining that essential information secondhand or thirdhand, the fit between form and function is usually airtight.
As he shaped the nearly completed Villa Del Norte rental complex in the Los Angeles suburb of Rancho Cucamonga, Pyatok took note of a demographic reality that occurs with increasing frequency among the poor: live-in grandmothers who provide day care for the children of single mothers.
So he carved out a special area in many of the development’s 88 apartments, essentially a bedroom with its own bathroom. The unit is next to the kitchen and just off the rear door of the apartment, allowing the grandmother a measure of independence because she doesn’t have to march through the family’s living room to get to her special space. And there are other advantages.
“Frequently there are clashes between the generations, and the grandmother doesn’t want to talk to anyone for a couple of days,” Pyatok said, “so she can sulk at her own end of the house.”
At the other end of the age spectrum, some public-housing projects are virtual communities of children; in Chicago, more than 45 percent of the residents in family housing are under 15 years old. But here and nationwide, their needs are underserved.
All too rare is the attention to detail shown at the two 15-story towers of Lake Parc Place, the CHA’s mixed-income development in the 3900 block of South Lake Park Avenue, where basketball courts and splash pools are reserved for different age groups.
That there is no “one-size-fits-all” model for such small things is an idea that applies equally to the large-scale question of urban design and how to connect public housing with the rest of America.
An example of that link is in Boston, where a public-housing project that was that city’s Cabrini-Green is now a mixed-income development called Harbor Point.
The 1,283-unit complex has red and brown brick apartment houses, blue and gray clapboard-covered townhouses, a waterfront promenade, a grassy mall-and a 97 percent occupancy rate that has confounded skeptics who predicted that white middle-income professionals would never live alongside black welfare families.
A matter of priorities
Can that be done in Chicago?
It all comes down to questions of money, power and political will.
The CHA has funds available for major renovation and construction-about $600 million, including $120 million in unused modernization funds, according to HUD officials. But that will not be enough to address the backlog of modernization needs.
So leveraging private funds with public money will be critical. Those who control public dollars must engage in the urban-planning equivalent of triage: directing their funds to housing that has a chance to live.
As always, the conflict will be between quality and quantity, providing decent housing for as many people as possible versus making sure that what does get built benefits its inhabitants and its neighborhood for decades, not just on move-in day.
The political choices largely reside with Daley, who will have a major say in any HUD policy regarding the CHA, and Daley has signaled that he wants to keep public housing isolated within its present borders.
Cisneros has spoken eloquently about reintegrating public-housing residents into American life and building “communities of opportunity.” But so far, he has not challenged Daley’s course.
In the short term, the mayor has every reason to move cautiously, not only because he would alienate his Bungalow Belt voter base by dispersing large numbers of public-housing residents throughout the city but also because Chicago can ill afford the flight of middle-class residents that probably would occur.
No one, as the African-American Ald. William Beavers (7th) bluntly acknowledges, wants public housing in his ward.
But in the long term, there should be but one policy: The wall, both actual and symbolic, that separates Chicago’s projects from the rest of the city must come down. Otherwise, the rhetoric of Cisneros and the words Daley uttered last April on the night of his re-election will forever ring hollow:
“My administration has been an administration of breaking down barriers, of taking race and religion and ethnic identity out, and of moving the city forward.”
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Next: Connecting with the city.