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The last days of Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes.
By Tess Taylor
The Metropolis Observed
January 2002
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As ideas about public housing change, high-rise projects like the Robert
Taylor Homes are being demolished and replaced by new building types. But
that transition may cause more problems than it solves.
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From the 16th floor of 4525 South Federal Street, in what remains of
Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes, we can hear an ice-cream truck playing a
familiar tune. We can't see the truck or the street below--instead our view
opens across an empty field of grass bordered at its far edge by three
London plane trees. Beyond this the broken low-rise city blocks stretch
on to end in the blue of Lake Michigan. It is a lovely view. If we squint
ever so slightly, we can blur out the wrought-iron grate we are looking
through.
In form, the 28 identical towers of the Robert Taylor Homes resemble nothing
so much as a realization of the Corbusian dream. But they have spent the
better part of their days as one of the nation's most infamous addresses.
A search in any library archive uncovers stories about gang warfare, glassy-eyed
addicts, cop shootings, and single mothers hitting bottom. But by 2005--just
43 years after they were conceived in the offices of Skidmore, Owings
& Merrill--the towers will be torn down to make way for a new kind of
housing. Much of Chicago is happy to see them go. But demolishing these
"vertical ghettos" also means destroying the homes of several
thousand people.
Today I am touring the towers with three public-housing advocates who see
their end as bittersweet: Sudhir Venkatesh, Camilo José Vergara,
and Beauty Turner. The gray halls are familiar to each of them. Venkatesh,
an assistant professor of sociology and African American studies at Columbia
University, wrote his book American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern
Ghetto after residing in the Robert Taylor Homes. Vergara has spent
the past 20 years photographing the country's poorest census tracts, including
the surrounding neighborhoods. Turner, an activist, writes for the Residents'
Journal, a publication for Chicago's public housing residents. Together
they are trying to draw greater attention to how the transformation of Chicago's
public housing will affect the city's neediest residents. "These people
live very close to their margins," Venkatesh says. "They feel
the smallest upsets very keenly."
Recent federal policy has cleared the ground for mass razing of high-rise
public housing, and cities nationwide are dismantling their towers. In 1995
Congress authorized housing officials to determine which of their projects
were unsalvageable and allocate funds for their demolition. That year, with
little fanfare, Congress repealed a 1937 law requiring that every unit of
public housing be replaced. As cities tear down projects, tenants will be
eligible to apply for Section 8 vouchers for housing in private markets.
In Chicago the acres that once contained high-rises will become mixed-income
lots of townhomes and single-family dwellings.
In theory this would appear to herald a hopeful transition. Carl Byrd, director
of development management at the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), is eager
to see tracts of high-rise public housing converted into integrated mixed-income
communities. "When you think of the history of public housing in Chicago--the
legacy of ghettoization--this redevelopment represents an enormous opportunity
to right many old wrongs," he says. "We want to be a model for
the nation."
But to benefit from redevelopment, public-housing residents will first
have to survive it. During the next five years all of Chicago's 25,000
public-housing residents will be displaced at least once. Many have already
had to move two or three times as the CHA has been consolidating residents
from buildings slated for demolition into temporary lodgings. Turner brings
up the case of Mary Sistrunck, who needs to find a new home for herself
and her six children. "She looked at more than 75 apartments, spent
over $325 in application fees, and still wasn't able to find a place
to stay," Turner says. "Her kids have had to change schools several
times. She's afraid of being homeless."
Other residents report moving nightmares, such as accepting apartments shown
to them by the CHA only to find they haven't passed basic inspections.
"Private landlords don't have a lot of incentive to maintain housing
for Section 8 residents," Vergara explains. "When your building
fails, you need to apply for new subsidies and move again." And new
neighborhoods are not necessarily better, safer places than the projects.
"People leaving public housing are moving into dilapidated housing
stock in isolated resource-poor communities with decayed physical infrastructures,"
Venkatesh says. "There is a lot of doubling up and overcrowding."
He points out that these settlement patterns bear striking resemblance to
the horizontal ghettos that public-housing projects were designed to alleviate.
Renters are also looking for housing in a shrinking pool. Nearby neighborhoods
such as Chicago Heights and Blue Island have recently declared themselves
historic districts, effectively preventing any units from being converted
to Section 8.
Meanwhile at Robert Taylor, many families seem to have found their own temporary
solutions. Balconies--scarred with grafitti and burn marks--are strung
with cords: squatters have run electricity from functional apartments into
ones that have been closed by the CHA. "It is hard to know who is here
legally and who is not," Turner says. We stop in to visit Betty Sims,
who has been working with Turner to get maintenance records for her apartment.
A future landlord is coming to inspect the place she has lived in for the
past five years. "It looks real bad," she says, eyeing her
one-bedroom flat. "I've been trying to get the building authority
to come help me out, but you know it's a long wait. I had to wait about
eight months for them to replace my stove." Her ceiling is bloated
with water bubbles and her kitchen cabinets sag. Along the floor there
are rat-size holes. "I don't think any landlord that sees this apartment
is going to rent to me," she says. "But I can keep my place clean--if
they would come and do their part."
As they empty, the Robert Taylor Homes now seem like a textbook example
of how an architectural ideal can be mangled in context. Venkatesh points
out that after welcoming the first tenants to Robert Taylor in 1962,
Mayor Richard J. Daley created a barrier between the housing project and
nearby resource-rich Bridgeport in the form of the Dan Ryan Expressway.
"Daley grew up there," Venkatesh says, "and he didn't want
the African-American population going over." Isolated in neighborhoods
with crumbling infrastructures, poor schools, and little access to transit,
the high-rises that once posed as islands in the sky soon became indistinct
from the idea of a vertical ghetto.
On our way back down a treacherous open-shaft elevator and past a pay phone
held in place by two padlocks, we try to retrace the questions, "What
went wrong here?" and "What should be done?" Driving into
Chicago this morning, we had stopped at Henry Horner Homes across town,
where one example of new development is already in place. The project replaces
six-story cruciform tracts with several rows of nouveau Victorian houses.
As we paused to look at the neatly mown lawns, Vergara reported that the
new Henry Horner replaces only a third of the units that were demolished
to create them. "It is significant also to note that they are
designed only along the stretch where presidential candidates would see
them while traveling to the 1996 Democratic convention," he said. "The
idea was that these would become mixed-income communities, but so far the
demand for public housing has outstripped any ability to do that. They have
become primarily Section 8."
As we leave Robert Taylor, Venkatesh explains that he is calling not for
a revolution but for a critical reevaluation of housing policy and an independent
body to monitor the process. In November he gathered academics, planners,
and architects from around the country to begin a series of meetings about
current federal housing policies; to share research about transformation
in Chicago, Boston, and Atlanta; and to discuss the future of low-income
housing in cities. "Housing may no longer be public in the sense that
we have understood public in the past," Venkatesh says, "but the
lack of affordable housing in urban areas is a crisis that affects everyone:
teachers, nurses, janitors, the working poor."
It has been a long day. We are tired. Nearby at the Illinois Institute of
Technology, we stop in the shadow of Mies van der Rohe's Chapel of Saint
Savior. Vergara takes a picture. Sheltered on Mies's indomitable architecture
campus, it is a tribute to the best architectural ideals of its era. With
clean lines and simple proportions, the minimal chapel would serve whatever
religion might choose to rest there. Meanwhile, for those leaving the Modernist
tracts of Robert Taylor to the wrecking ball, it seems that there is little
rest in sight. "Condos are popping up around us like Jiffy Pop,"
Turner says. "Even the buses are designed so tourists can circle the
buildings downtown--not to get us real folks around."
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