Cabrini Green
At its height, Cabrini-Green was home to 15,000 people, living in mid- and high-rise apartment buildings. Over the years, gang violence and neglect created terrible conditions for the residents, and the name "Cabrini-Green" became synonymous with the problems associated with public housing in the United States.
As of 2008, around 2,000 residents remain in Cabrini-Green. Most of the buildings have been razed and the entire neighborhood is being redeveloped into a combination of high-rise buildings and row houses, with the stated goal of creating a mixed-income neighborhood, with some units reserved for public housing tenants.
Controversy regarding the implementation of these plans has arisen.
History
Buildings & residents
Cabrini-Green was composed of 10 sections, built over a thirty-year period: the Frances Cabrini Rowhouses (1942), Cabrini Extension North and Cabrini Extension South (1958), and the William Green Homes (1962) (see Chronology below). The construction reflected the "urban renewal" approach to United States city planning in the mid-twentieth century.
The Extension buildings were known as the "reds," for their red brick exteriors, while the Green Homes, with reinforced concrete exteriors, were known as the "whites." Many of the high-rise buildings originally had exterior porches (called "open galleries").
According to the CHA, the early residents of the Cabrini rowhouses were predominantly of Italian ancestry. By 1902, however, a majority of residents in the completed complex were African-American. White flight from the complex escalated over the following decade; by the 1970s, its population was almost entirely black.
How problems developed
Poverty and organized crime have long been associated with the area: a 1931 "map of Chicago's gangland" by Bruce-Roberts, Inc.
notes Locust and Sedgwick as "Death Corner": "50 murders: count 'em" At first, the housing was integrated and many residents held jobs. At the same time, the cash-strapped city began withdrawing crucial services like police patrols, transit services, and routine building maintenance.
Lawns were paved over to save on maintenance, failed lights were left for months, and apartments damaged by fire were simply boarded up instead of rehabilitated and reoccupied. Later phases of public housing development (such as the Green Homes, the newest of the Cabrini-Green buildings) were built on extremely tight budgets and suffered from maintenance problems due to the low quality of construction.
Residents lived with substantially subsidized rents.
However, many neglected their units and vandalized common areas both in and around the buildings. The buildings' proximity to these affluent areas made Cabrini-Green a lucrative site for illicit drug sales; in the absence of other employment opportunities, intense competition in this underground economy fostered gang formation and violence.
Gang members and miscreants covered interior walls with graffiti and damaged doors, windows, and elevators. Rat and cockroach infestations were commonplace, rotting garbage stacked up in clogged trash chutes (it once piled up to the 15th floor), and basic utilities (water, electricity, etc.) often malfunctioned and were left unrepaired.
On the exterior, boarded-up windows, burned-out areas of the façade, and pavement instead of green space—all in the name of economizing on maintenance—created an atmosphere of neglect and decay. The high "open galleries" were enclosed with steel fencing the entire height of the building to prevent residents from throwing garbage over the edge, from falling, or from being thrown off (giving the visual appearance of a large prison tier, or animal cages, which further enraged community leaders).
Newly-built market-rate housing sharply contrasts with Green Homes, under demolition.
Demolition of Cabrini-Green homes.
Tenant activism
In response to the various problems associated with living in Cabrini-Green, residents have organized over the years both to pressure the city for assistance and to protect and support each other.
In 1996, the federal government mandated the destruction of 18,000 units of public housing in Chicago (along with tens of thousands of other units nationwide).
In response, some Cabrini-Green tenant activists have organized to prevent themselves from becoming homeless and to protect what they and their supporters see as a right to public housing for the city's poorest residents. The activists succeeded in obtaining a consent decree guaranteeing that some buildings will remain standing while the new structures are built, so that tenants can remain in their homes until new ones are available. The document also guarantees displaced Cabrini residents a home in the new neighborhood.
In 2001, a tenants group sued the CHA over relocation plans for displaced residents of Cabrini-Green under the city's Plan for Transformation, a $1.4 billion blueprint for public housing renewal.
In 1992, seven-year old Dantrell Davis was killed by a stray bullet while walking to school with his mother. In 1997, nine-year-old "Girl X", whose real name was Shatoya "Toya" Currie, was viciously raped and poisoned in a stairwell, leaving her blind, paralyzed and unable to speak. Members of the infamous street gang, the Gangster Disciples, who controlled most of Cabrini-Green, were ordered by the gang's leaders to find the person responsible for the crime and brutally assault him.
This incident, too, contributed to public perception of Cabrini-Green as the worst of the worst of public housing. This had the unforeseen impact of creating a fortification for gang members when Byrne left.
Many other gangs copied this technique in other units.
While many non-residents regarded Cabrini-Green with almost unalloyed horror, long-term residents interviewed by a Chicago Tribune reporter in 2004 described mixed feelings about the end of the Cabrini-Green era. They told the reporter that, in the face of their shared hardships, many residents had developed bonds of community and mutual support. Recent history and future plans
While Cabrini-Green was deteriorating during the postwar era, causing industry, investment, and residents to abandon its immediate surroundings, the rest of Chicago's Near North Side underwent equally dramatic upward changes in socioeconomic status.
Then, in the 1980s, the Lower North Side industrial area (just across the river from the Loop, west of Michigan Avenue, and south of Cabrini-Green) was transformed into the "River North" neighborhood, a focus of arts and entertainment. Shortly thereafter, in June 1996, the city of Chicago and the CHA unveiled the Near North Redevelopment Initiative, which called for new development on and around the Cabrini-Green site.
Under a ten-year Plan for Transformation officially enacted in 2000, the city plans to demolish almost all of its high-rise public housing, including much of Cabrini-Green (except the original rowhouses, which will remain). Demolition of Cabrini Extension was completed in 2002; part of the site was added to Seward Park, and construction of new, mixed-income housing on the remainder of the site began in 2006.
Subsidized development of mixed-income housing on vacant or under-used parcels adjacent to Cabrini-Green, including a long-shuttered Oscar Mayer sausage factory, the former headquarters of Montgomery Ward, and an adjacent senior housing project named Orchard Park, began in 1994. New market-rate housing now almost completely surrounds the remaining public housing.
Cabrini-Green once housed 15,000 people but as noted above, this number is now down to around 2,000 (plus an unknown number of squatters occupying vacant apartments that are slated for demolition).
Plans for demolition and redevelopment of Green Homes are still under negotiation, while the original Cabrini rowhouses are currently undergoing rehabilitation.
The Plan for Transformation's relocation process was the subject of a lawsuit, Wallace v. Chicago Housing Authority, which alleged that many residents were hastily forced into substandard, "temporary" housing in other slums, did not receive promised social services during or after the move, and were often denied the promised opportunity to return to the redeveloped sites. The lawsuit was settled in June 2006, as the parties agreed to two relocation programs for current and former CHA residents: (1) CHA’s current relocation program, encouraging moves to racially integrated areas of metropolitan Chicago and providing for case-managed social services, would be applied to families initially moving from public housing; and (2) an agreed-upon modified program run by CHA’s voucher administrator, CHAC Inc., would encourage former CHA residents to relocate to economically and racially integrated communities as well as give them increased access to social services.
Some former CHA residents have moved out of Chicago, to nearby suburbs such as Harvey or to other housing developments in nearby cities, such as Aurora, East St.
New residents have successfully moved into CHA replacement housing, and to date residents of the mixed-income developments have reported fewer problems.
Crime has dramatically decreased as the area's population has shifted; in the first half of 2006, only one murder occurred. Since most of the new housing post-dates 2000, no census figures are yet available, but the area is no longer predominantly African American.
Demolition of Cabrini-Green continues slowly and is expected to be completed by late 2008. The film chronicles the legendary life of the infamous Candyman (played by Tony Todd), a black man who was brutally killed because of a love affair with the daughter of a local (and white) plantation owner.
Exterior, hallway and stairway scenes were actually filmed in Cabrini-Green, though the producers had to make a deal with the ruling gang members to put them in the movie as extras to ensure the cast and crew's safety during filming. Even with this arrangement, a sniper put a bullet through the production van on the last day of filming, though no one was injured.
Danitra Vance, Saturday Night Live's first black female repertoire player (first appearing in the show's 1985-1986 season), had a recurring character named Cabrini-Green Jackson, a poor, black, teenage mother who acted as a motivational speaker to young, unwed mothers.
The sitcom Good Times (1974-1979) was ostensibly set in Cabrini-Green.
Whitaker, 2000) tells the story of this community from the perspective of those who lived there. Through interviews with three generations of residents, young and old share thoughts and memories of a place they called home.
Although Cabrini-Green is often mistaken as the locale for the 2001 film "Hardball" starring Keanu Reeves, the movie was actually shot in the nearby ABLA homes.
The 1990 futuristic fictional comic book series Give Me Liberty by Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons begins in Cabrini-Green.
As of 2008, only three of the schools remain in use.
During the 2003-2004 school year, fifth-grade students from Room 405 at one of the neighborhood schools developed a comprehensive action plan to push the City of Chicago and the Chicago Board of Education to fulfill an old promise of building a new school for the community. Acquires "Little Hell" name due to nearby gas refinery, which produced shooting pillars of flame and various noxious fumes.
CHA was found liable in 1969, and a consent decree was issued in 1981.
July 17, 1970 - Sergeant James Severin and Officer Tony Rizzato of the Chicago Police Department are fatally shot.
1974 - Television sitcom Good Times, set in the Cabrini Green projects, and featuring shots of the structure in the opening and closing credits, debuts.
1981 - Mayor Jane Byrne moves into Cabrini-Green as part of a publicity stunt.
October 13, 1992 - Dantrell Davis was holding his mother's hand, on his way to school, when he was fatally shot by a sniper.
1992 - Candyman is released, the story taking place at the housing project.
The demolition of one of the Cabrini-Green buildings
1994 - Chicago receives one of the first HOPE VI (Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere) grants to redevelop Cabrini-Green as a mixed-income neighborhood.
September 27, 1995 - Demolition begins.
January 9, 1997 - Nine-year-old "Girl X" found in a seventh-floor stairwell at 1121 N. She was left for dead but survived, though the attack blinded her.
1997 - Chicago unveils Near North Redevelopment Initiative, a master plan for development in the area. It recommends demolishing Green Homes and most of Cabrini Extension.
1999 - Chicago Housing Authority announces Plan for Transformation, which will spend $1.5 billion over ten years to demolish 18,000 apartments and build or rehabilitate 25,000 apartments.