Chicageo

Public housing across the United States is entering a new era.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development wants 100,000 substandard American public units destroyed before century’s end. The hope: to end the warehousing and isolation of the poorest poor, while creating mixed-income communities where role models abound and stereotypes explode.

With demolition, reconstruction and remodeling planned, residents are being given the option to move into the private sector through Section 8 housing assistance. Some have seen enough, lost too much, and they will leave. For others, this is home.

Here, reports from Chicago and Boyle Heights.

*

Why would anyone go to federal court to stay at 2245 W. Lake St.?

The building, slated for demolition, rears 14 stories high, with jagged shards and plywood sheets filling at least as many windows as do intact panes. Each brutal winter, the interior north-facing walls don a coat of ice. Spray-painted calling cards of the dreaded Black Disciples blanket the dim corridors and creaky elevators.

Gunshots echo most every night in this living ruin. Later still, bangs and thumps herald squatters and thieves tunneling through the walls in search of a vacant unit. Their purposes may include sleeping, looting, smoking crack or hiding from police.

Don’t misunderstand Valerie Cobb or Catherine Christopher. They know the shortcomings of their corner of the Henry Horner Homes. They have each lived in 2245 for more than 35 years, brought to this housing project as toddlers by their parents, rearing their own children through adolescence here.

Val and Kitty, as they fondly call each other, long for someplace peaceful, someplace shiny new, above all someplace private.

They can even see their dream homes rising around the corner, brick by brick, stair by stair, separate entrances to each. They have been promised spots in this development. In a faded red folder, Christopher keeps the certificate, No. 95-0145, that proves she is “guaranteed the right to replacement housing.”

Cobb, slight and kindly, and Christopher, broad and sunny, pass the construction site when they walk to Jimmy’s Food and Meat. They stop each time to take a look. “Oh, this would be nice, really nice,” Cobb says, grabbing onto a moment of bliss.

“Well,” she sighs, soon enough. “Pipe dream.”

The Chicago Housing Authority is ready to vacate 2245. Right now.

The replacement housing is not ready and won’t be for some time.

This presents a problem--a problem repeated all over Chicago, site of the nation’s largest cluster of public housing projects and crucible for a grand experiment conducted by the government, which hopes to redefine public housing as we know it.

*

In Chicago, where the federal government has taken over the local housing authority and talk of radical change began early, plans for an overhaul are advancing more rapidly than anywhere else. Already, buildings at three housing projects, including Horner, have come down.

The first signs of dislocation and confusion are setting in as well. Cash flow, slipped schedules and gang turf borders are all cropping up as concerns.

At the least, the transition is bound to be uncomfortable. The complicated logistics mean that scores of public housing families will be swept into a massive shell game, being moved from place to place, while high-rises are dynamited, mid-rises rehabbed, and waiting lists grow for subsidized private apartments.

At worst, Cobb and Christopher and others suspect, another agenda is coming into play. They like the theory behind the changes just fine. But they are starting to believe that they are being ousted, plain and simple, so their community--once the Near West Side, now re-christened West Haven--can be fully gentrified. Despite the CHA’s assurances, they wonder if they’ve been disinvited to the party.

And so, to court. The tenants are trying in effect to hold their building hostage. They don’t want to budge until they can go straight to their new units.

“If we go, they will outright take their time” with the new housing, charges Christopher. “You know there’s not going to be any more construction till spring, as it is.” The first snows will be falling soon.

“This area is a prime area,” agrees Mamie Bone, who presides over the Horner tenants’ council with a sturdy cane and an endless wardrobe of berets. Nearby is the United Center, home to basketball’s world champion Bulls and last summer’s Democratic National Convention. A new library, boys’ and girls’ club, and a park are recent additions. In the end, Bone predicts, “none of us is going to be there. I did believe them at one time. Not anymore.”

*

Horner is not the only CHA project engaged in legal skirmishing. Residents of ABLA (Addams-Brooks-Loomis-Abbott)--four adjoining complexes--are staving off the six-day notices to move they received last month because of city code violations dating from 1991. The council at Cabrini-Green, next to the tony neighborhood of Lincoln Park, has filed suit to challenge orders to move by Dec. 20 issued to residents of a 19-story building. None of the pledged new units is ready there either.

A bevy of politicians has leaped onto the issue; strategy meetings, news conferences and panel discussions are the order of the day.

“This is a very difficult time,” says Joseph Shuldiner, a top HUD official dispatched from Washington to head the CHA. He had previously managed housing agencies in Los Angeles and New York. “We all have to hang in there and live through the problems of the next few years.”

In his spacious office stands a giant farewell card from his colleagues in D.C. “Good luck, Joe,” it reads. “You’ll need it, I’m afraid,” someone has scribbled in the margin.

The coming winter provides Shuldiner’s explanation for why the residents of 2245 must hurry out. More than 100 families have already left, taking advantage of vouchers that subsidize private apartments or applying to small CHA buildings in market-rate neighborhoods.

With only 36 families remaining, “we can’t maintain the heat in a building we’re going to tear down next year,” Shuldiner says. The operating budget has been cut. CHA has $75 million less to work with this year than last.

The Habitat Co., which has fallen behind the timetable for building the new houses, was chosen by the federal court when Horner residents originally sued for better conditions and settled with the CHA. They started this in 1991.

The 50-page consent decree calls for 233 units to be demolished and 466 new homes to be finished by April--half for the unemployed, half for working families.

The 56 townhomes near Jimmy’s are the only ones begun. If those had been complete by now, there would be enough to bring in both working families and the poorest who qualified from 2245. “My belief is that this should have been accommodated,” Shuldiner says. “It’s not our fault,” he adds.

*

For now, the housing authority wants to install Cobb and Christopher in mid-rises farther east in the Horner complex.

Apart from the fact that they would be packing up decades’ worth of memories and belongings at the advent of the holiday season--and apart from the fact that the mid-rises are due to be renovated in 1998, so they might have to move yet again--the two are furious and frightened by the prospect.

They would be crossing Damen Avenue into the territory of another gang. The Stones there are sworn rivals of the Black Disciples who reign in 2245.

Christopher, 40, says no one in her family is affiliated. Her son, Tyrone, 19, is bespectacled and, in his mother’s words, “a little slow.” Lonindis, 22, has more severe disabilities.

Cobb vouches for her NeShante, 16, an honor student at a magnet school, and LaVondria, 14, a student at a school for pregnant girls.

Doesn’t matter. “We come from there,” Christopher says. “That’s all they’ll need to know.”

“I want to survive,” her friend adds bleakly.

This kind of talk infuriates Shuldiner. His voice pitches higher and his speech speeds up: “You have an absolute right to live on the block that you choose? I don’t think that’s guaranteed in any Constitution I’ve seen. We have to put them in a building with the gang of their choice? I think not.”

He’s heard it before. Residents of another high-rise at another project asked that demolition be delayed until all the occupants could move together. “I should plan to keep the Mickey Cobras intact,” he says disgustedly.

The scattering of violent gangs like the Black Disciples and the Mickey Cobras is actually a happy bonus of the demolitions, he notes. Eventually, “we’ll be able,” he says, “to control the [housing] developments.”

Put that argument aside, then. Cobb and Christopher marshal others: The elementary-age children--including Christopher’s grandson, Pierre Tyler, enrolled in a pre-kindergarten class--will have to switch from one of the best grammar schools in the city to another on academic probation. Lonindis’ day care will no longer be so handy. The doctor, the market--for people without cars, even short-distance shifts are no small deal.

These, after all, are the reasons they did not join the exodus to the suburbs, via voucher, or to the scattered-site public housing. And everything they hear from those who did reinforces their decision. “Yolanda is not too happy. She can tell her gas bills are going to be too high,” Cobb tells Mamie Bone, referring to a neighbor who moved to a scattered-site building.

Vanessa Palmer on the 13th floor thought she’d found a niche in suburban Cicero. But at the last minute, she was rejected by the manager there because of her history of rent delinquency. Now she doesn’t know where she’ll end up.

Palmer is a big woman, but her voice is small as she turns to Cobb and Christopher during yet another hearing in the federal building downtown. The three are sitting together in the front row of a 19th-story courtroom. The men in suits are droning on. “I’m scared,” she moans quietly.

Shuldiner understands. “They are under such pressure,” he says. “Welfare reform is coming. Their lives are changing. But we can’t keep them protected forever.”

*

Protected is how Christopher feels once she gets inside Apartment 310. She has lived here since her hopscotch years. Between the grandfather clock, the aquarium and the glass-topped coffee table are spread her mementos: a framed photo of Pierre’s mother, Myrthis, 24, who works for the county elections clerk. A 15-year collection of brass knickknacks. A picture of herself in 1975, lithe and smiling, on the way back from Jimmy’s. It was the Starlight then.

Remember learning Bible verses at the Chicago Gospel Youth Center? She and Cobb reminisce. Remember River View Amusement Park?

As Horner declined, they each thought at times of leaving. Cobb came home from long days on her feet at a department store warehouse and the elevator was out; she had to walk up 14 flights. Someone tapped into Christopher’s phone line--the wires were exposed--and more than doubled her bill.

But somehow, there was always a reason to stay.

The day before Halloween, U.S. District Judge James Zagel rules that 2245 must be emptied. The tenants have proposed consolidating everyone on the first four floors and sealing off the upper stories, but Zagel decides the plan is too impractical.

At the same time, Shuldiner is ruminating in his office. “They don’t trust us,” he says. “And they shouldn’t trust us. We have a history of building segregated housing, not maintaining it and breaking our word.

“When the first units come on over there and Horner people get in, that will help,” he says. “We have to take some abuse and hope we earn their trust.”

The deadline to move is Dec. 13.