High-Risers by Ben Austen

Author:Ben Austen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-12-11T00:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

ROTATIONS ON THE LAND

12

Cabrini Mustard and Turnip Greens

DOLORES WILSON

VINCE LANE SHOWED up at Dolores Wilson’s church in February 1993 to talk about the impending demolition at Cabrini-Green. He said change was coming—Dantrell Davis’s death, four months earlier, guaranteed it. High-rises were going to be torn down. Two of the twenty-three towers had already been cleared of tenants and boarded up. The world of gangs and drugs had to go. Forty residents had come to hear him at Holy Family, and Lane wanted them to understand that all the attention from Dantrell’s murder also meant there were tens of millions of federal dollars available to rebuild. Lane asked the tenants to partner with him in making the new Cabrini-Green. He promised that nothing would be done without their input and approval.

To give a sense of what a revamped Cabrini might look like, Lane pointed to what he’d done at Lake Parc Place, a public housing development on the South Side. Four of the six high-rises along the lakefront were vacated and eventually demolished. In the two rehabbed towers, only half of the apartments were designated as public housing; the rest were rented at slightly subsidized rates to working-class and middle-class families. When the two fifteen-story buildings reopened, in 1991, all 282 apartments were filled, with public housing recipients and better-off renters living next to each other on every floor. The rehab resulted in a net loss of more than 550 units of public housing. But Lake Parc Place was now livable, Lane explained. You had people of varying incomes who wanted to live there. “High-rises weren’t the problem at Cabrini-Green,” he said. “Rich people all around them lived in high-rise apartment buildings. The problem was the high concentration of poverty.”

Lane was a visionary. He could see where public housing policy in the country was headed. Only a couple of years earlier, Jack Kemp, the head of HUD under George H. W. Bush, said he refused to be remembered as the “secretary of demolition.” Kemp had founded the federal HOPE initiative not to tear down high-rises but to hand over responsibility for the properties to the people who lived there. HOPE stood originally for Homeownership and Opportunity for People Everywhere. But over the next decades, HUD would award cities tens of billions of dollars in HOPE VI grants to knock down their public housing high-rises and replace them with mixed-income developments like Lake Parc Place. Demolition became something that local and federal politicians embraced proudly.

While public housing was “never more than half alive,” as Catherine Bauer called it, the aversion to entitlement programs would come to root ever more deeply in the American mainstream. After winning a majority of seats in Congress in 1994, Republicans said they planned to scrap the entire Department of Housing and Urban Development. President Clinton, touting his cuts to the welfare system and proclaiming that “the era of big government is over,” preemptively reorganized HUD. He promised to “infuse market discipline” into public housing. A new

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