COLUMN ONE : New Life for Notorious High-Rises? : Forceful housing chief says he can resurrect Chicago’s Cabrini-Green project. Vincent Lane must win over many doubters, including wary tenants.

The Cabrini-Green projects tower over the northern edge of downtown like a high-rise graveyard, a monument to the futility of three decades of public housing policy and the hopelessness of all who live there.

Vincent Lane, the man who runs these skyline eyesores of mottled cinder-block and security fencing, comes here often on a mission that many Cabrini tenants regard as a fool’s errand.

Lane, the chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority, imagines garden apartments where they see exhausted dormitories, some sealed with plywood. He sees ceiling fans and wrought-iron gates where residents endure crippled elevators that force them to commute up to 19 flights of stairs inside their own homes. He sees courtyards filled with children at play where they spy huddled gang members, pistols bulging under their shirttails.

A real-estate millionaire who administers Chicago’s 155 high-rise projects, Lane intends to resurrect Cabrini, a symbol of “all that’s bad in public housing,” to prove that the nation’s largest and most infamous system of public housing can be redeemed.

“You can raise families in high-rises,” he preaches to wealthy architects at wine-and-cheese receptions and to rows of murmuring Cabrini residents jammed inside drafty commons meeting rooms.

Lane puts his faith in “income mixing”--the experimental replacing of many low-income project residents with working- and middle-class families. Lured by low rents and the higher safety and maintenance standards, the new tenants are expected to provide a human safety net for their poor neighbors, acting as role models and helping them find jobs.

A natural-born salesman in Italian-tailored suits, Lane has spent the last year trying to sell the dream that Cabrini, a 70-acre cement moonscape bordered by freeway ramps and railroad spurs, might someday become a functioning, livable community.

Cabrini’s progress is being closely watched by federal housing officials who are turning away from 30 years of government control that once shunted only the hard-core poor into projects. Those regulations, social policy planners now concede, helped create uncontrollable city-states of the underclass.

Despite $50 million in federal seed money, Lane’s $350-million project is still in its infancy, months away from breaking ground. Before tenants can be moved and buildings razed, Lane must secure financial commitments from developers and business leaders, loans and legislative support from politicians and government-mandated approvals from Cabrini’s tenants.

A blunt, genial Mississippi native, Lane, 51, commutes between Washington and Chicago to nudge his dream along. Even in its earliest stages, the Cabrini plan is generating excitement among housing planners as one of the most ambitious efforts to transform high-rise projects since their creation in the 1950s. If it succeeds, Cabrini could become a model for change in massive projects throughout America.

“It’s a concept that’s long overdue and really brings us back to what public housing was supposed to do in the first place,” said Margery Austin Turner, a housing analyst with the Urban Institute in Washington. “These big high-rise projects not only segregate the poor from the rest of the world, they also have a destabilizing influence on the neighborhoods around them.”

More than 30 city housing agencies recently embraced income mixing in applications for grants to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development--though only Lane’s bases the future of an entire complex on it.

Los Angeles, which has no high-rise projects, is concentrating on reducing the sprawl of its Pico-Aliso projects just east of downtown. Unlike poorer projects like Jordan Downs and Nickerson Gardens, Pico-Aliso already mixes poor and working families, a HUD official said.

Income mixing was common once in the nation’s projects, before stringent federal rent rules made it economically ruinous for working families to remain there. Lane recalls growing up in the 1950s near Wentworth Gardens, a South Side Chicago project, amid “green lawns and working families with both parents living at home.”

That world is gone, but Lane insists “we can fine-tune it to fit a new era.”

His fledgling Cabrini project--which would tear down seven high-rises--would be the first phase of a metamorphosis that could run into the billions and last a decade or more. Lane hopes to keep whittling the number of Cabrini’s 91 buildings, erect market-rate apartments and shrink the ranks of its 7,000 poor tenants to only 25% of the project’s population.

Those left out would be resettled--”willingly,” Lane insists--in subsidized rental units and new government homes built elsewhere in Chicago and its suburbs.

Cabrini’s population is now overwhelmingly poor and without resources. More than 70% of its households pay less than $100 a month in rent. At least 63% are female and 43% are school-age children. All but 2% are African American. And 90% are on public assistance--well below Chicago Housing Authority requirements that a family of four make no more than $23,450 a year.

It is Cabrini’s own poor who are most suspicious of Lane’s intentions, and not without reason. They fear a land grab. Many are convinced that Cabrini--less than a mile from high-rent lake-shore condos and stores catering to the affluent--is coveted by developers.

They worry that they will be displaced into perhaps worse housing at higher rents. And they bridle at the prospect of having to leave apartments where some families have lived for three generations.

“We’ve been getting the shaft for years and we want to be damn sure we’re not going to get it again,” said Josephine Trotter, who has lived at Cabrini 15 years and is on the project’s Resident Advisory Council, the tenants’ negotiating group.

Some residents have their own nickname for Lane, perhaps Chicago’s most recognized African American official other than U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun. They call him “Daddy Lane”--both a tribute to his no-nonsense ability to get things done and a taunt at what some perceive as his highhanded methods of dealing with their problems.

Lane has run Chicago’s housing since 1988 as an appointee of the mayor and City Council. He juggles his post--at a salary of $1 a year--with private interests in subsidized housing units scattered outside Chicago through the Midwest and East. He is well aware that Cabrini’s poor are his toughest sales job.

“Most of the people who live there know they didn’t create (Cabrini’s) lousy environment,” he said. “The System put them there and now they’re afraid the System wants their land again. They’re afraid the System will tear everything down and move them out to Argo or Kankakee, where there are no jobs or transportation and they’ll have to survive in environments where at best they’re ignored and at worst they’re hated.

“We just have to be patient and convince them that won’t happen,” he said.

Lane became one of the nation’s most visible housing directors when he tamed the rampant administrative chaos that almost led HUD to seize control of Chicago’s housing system in 1987.

He was hailed by former Republican HUD Secretary Jack Kemp for the crime sweeps he repeatedly ordered in Chicago projects. His name was bandied about as Kemp’s replacement until President Clinton chose former San Antonio Mayor Henry G. Cisneros. In April, Clinton hoisted Lane’s profile even higher by ordering federal officials to find legal underpinnings to back his warrantless weapons searches in the Robert Taylor Homes, a 28-block stretch of high-rises lining the Dan Ryan Expressway on the city’s South Side.

Crime control will be essential at Cabrini, Lane says, because “I won’t be able to persuade working families to move in unless they feel safe.”

The murder of 7-year-old Dantrell Davis, killed in 1992 by a sniper’s bullet in a Cabrini courtyard, helped focus Lane on Cabrini. The raids he tried earlier this year in the Taylor homes--halted by a federal court judge--were first used last year in Cabrini after the youth’s death.

Cabrini was not always a place of dread. It was started in 1942, replacing blocks of slum housing. The first high-rises came in 1958.

Through the 1960s, Cabrini and the rest of the nation’s high-rise projects metastasized like rogue cancer cells. Federal directives that continued into the Bush years forced employed project tenants to pay higher rents than their jobless counterparts, eventually driving most into cheaper, privately owned apartments and homes.

“A lot of social activists thought they were doing good by finding more housing for the poor. What they didn’t see was the long-term impact of segregating them from the rest of society,” said Mary Ann Ross, executive director of the Council of Large Public Housing Authorities.

In the 1980s, nonprofit and state-financed developers in Massachusetts and a few other states began going against that tide, experimenting with income mixes to attract both poor and working tenants to new housing sites.

“They realized it didn’t make sense to fill their development with only the poor,” said Michael Stegman, HUD’s assistant secretary for policy development, who studied those efforts as an urban policy professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Stegman said HUD’s new administrators plan to make income mixing a high priority in all new developments. “We’re doing all we can now to encourage mixing,” he said. “This is the future.”

James Rosenbaum, a professor at Northwestern University’s Center for Urban Affairs, believes poor residents will benefit from living among higher-income residents.

For 10 years, Rosenbaum monitored Chicago’s Gautreaux Program, a federal court-mandated effort that assisted 5,000 poor families in finding integrated housing. Although Gautreaux’s poor moved into more affluent areas--the reverse of the process Lane seeks at Cabrini--the results, Rosenbaum says, may well be identical.

At least 46% of those who had no jobs when they lived in public housing and tenement units found work after moving to the suburbs, Rosenbaum found. That number compared to 30% who moved to other city housing. And those who moved to the suburbs also won better pay and benefits.

“You’re not going to turn Cabrini-Green into a suburban paradise overnight,” Rosenbaum said. “But I think the kind of mixed-income environment Lane is talking about--working-class families becoming role models for the poor--can grow at Cabrini. He’s already made that point at Lake Parc.”

Once known as the Olander Homes, Lake Parc Place is the mannered title Lane gave to twin red-brick towers that loom over Lake Michigan on the South Side. Until the 1980s, they could have been any dispirited city high-rise.

Hall lights were routinely smashed. The stairs smelled of urine. The buildings were patrolled by members of the El Rukns, the most notorious narcotics gang in Illinois until federal prosecutions shut them down in the late 1980s.

Closing the buildings in 1986, Lane used a $14-million HUD grant to erect a black wrought-iron fence and install wading pools and shrub-trimmed play areas. He spent $60,000 per apartment on pastel-colored paints, oak cabinets and mini-blinds, among other refurbishments. Then he welcomed back tenants with a rigid screening policy, weeding out troublemakers and addicts.

Half of Lake Parc’s 282 units were earmarked for working families--a ratio that the buildings have maintained since they opened in August, 1991. When social worker Steve Mason, 27, went searching two years ago for a new home with his wife and two children, he assumed Lake Parc was “just a nice apartment building.”

When he found out it was public housing, he moved in anyway. Life was not idyllic, Mason said, but “no worse than any other private apartment house. Here, you can tell someone to cut the noise or pick up the trash and you don’t get a middle finger or a gun in your face.”

Mason has even found his ideals rubbing off on his poorer neighbors. “I’ve asked kids to pick up their candy wrappers in the elevators and they do it, no questions asked,” Mason said.

The poor, too, have found benefits. Georgia Caldwell, an original Olander Park tenant, was transfixed by the sound of early morning showers. “When I first got here it took me awhile to figure out what that was,” she said. “All these people were getting ready for work. I never used to hear that sound.”

Now Caldwell, too, showers early. Once a welfare mother with two daughters, she has found work as a Lake Parc guard.

Despite these tributes, Lane’s plans to expand the experiment by building 564 new low-rise housing units nearby have been stalled by financial and regulatory problems--chief among them HUD’s reluctance to allow Lane to divert $118 million in federal renovation funds for use in new construction.

It is not only housing bureaucrats Lane needs to court these days. He must still win over Cabrini residents suspicious about his plans to transform their buildings. Lane and his Housing Authority aides return repeatedly to Cabrini, enduring scoldings, taking temperatures, dickering with tenant leaders, trying to keep the project on course.

Chicago Housing Authority staffers have herded Cabrini residents into buses and put them up at suburban hotels for weekend bull sessions. They have set up committees to iron out the worrisome details of who will stay and who will go. They have even taken a handful of leaders to Washington, squiring them around to meet federal officials and housing experts.

Even with those perquisites, the negotiations have stalled at times over semantics, teetering on the smoldering resentment of Cabrini tenants embittered by Lane’s blunt insistence that they are part of Cabrini’s problems.

During one acid exchange, residents demanded that Lane stop using the word poor to describe them. Recalls Lane: “I said: ‘Look. We can spend all our time trying to come up with nice-sounding phrases, but when the average incomes at Cabrini are $2,400 a year, I don’t know any other way to describe you but poor.’ ”

Josephine Trotter, who at one point approached a Legal Aid lawyer to see if a lawsuit might slow the Cabrini steamroller, said that lately “we’re starting to compromise. When he (Lane) wants to, he can be very accommodating.”

Despite that recent progress, all Lane has for certain these days is his $50-million federal grant--and even that did not come easy.

Last August, he was stunned when HUD declined to give the Cabrini project any funding under a $300-million housing grant program known as Hope VI. Three months later, after Lane’s fevered lobbying revived the award, it nearly died again when two Chicago-area House members, Bobby L. Rush and Cardiss Collins, demanded their own review.

“Vince likes to think he is the U.S. Housing Department, and there are days when he may not be wrong,” said one federal official. “But there are a lot of mouths to feed in this process--a lot of people who want to play a part--and sometimes he forgets that.”

Most of the time, though, Lane plays the process like a virtuoso violinist. His nights are booked with speeches to Chicago’s power-brokers and business groups. Armed with brochure-style slides of his resurrection of Lake Parc Place, Lane tells rapt audiences that Cabrini will be next.

“I’m not here to win a popularity contest,” Lane said. “I’m here to try to make poor peoples’ lives better. If you really want to do that, you can’t keep everybody happy all the time. No matter how hard you try.”