Family Says a Glad Goodbye to Housing Project

The drab high-rises line up for nearly two miles like placards for poverty, cut off from most of the city by a busy freeway and a bad reputation.

They’re called Robert Taylor Homes, though home is hardly the word that comes to mind.

For Donna Ligon, the price was right: $57 a month for a three-bedroom apartment. The crack cocaine was plentiful. And scrutiny was easy to escape in a place where neighborhood watch usually meant keeping an eye out for cops.

“In my case, it was reefer, then drinkin’, then reefer and drinkin’. It grew with me,” Ligon said, telling of a downward spiral that eventually left her curled up in bed for days as her six children scrounged through cupboards for something to eat.

Some might chalk it up to another life lost amid the graffiti and gunfire of Chicago’s infamous projects.

But Ligon, even at her worst, held on to the image of her mother, who reared 10 children and struggled with drugs and alcohol but took pride in never having lived in the projects. She died in 1993, a year before her youngest daughter moved into a corner apartment in Robert Taylor Homes.

“If she was alive, she would’ve had a fit,” she said.

Donna Ligon knew she had to get out.

‘Homes’ That Symbolize Urban Blight

Robert Taylor Homes on Chicago’s South Side were heralded as a sparkling solution to urban blight when they were completed in 1963. The 28 buildings, with more than 4,300 apartments, were considered the world’s largest public housing project.

At first, the poor clamored to move in. But it took only a few years for Chicago to develop a national reputation for blighted, crime-ridden public housing projects. Some of the names became infamous: Cabrini-Green. Henry Horner Homes. Altgeld Gardens. Robert Taylor.

Open spaces, designed as buffers, instead became dangerous stretches of no man’s land where passersby sometimes came under fire from snipers. Stairwells became havens for drug dealers and addicts.

Ligon, now 34, didn’t move to Robert Taylor until she was 28, but her path toward the projects started much earlier. She got her first hit of marijuana, from her mother, at age 10. By 18 she was selling it.

About the same time she ran across Anthony Reynolds, her childhood sweetheart from their old South Side neighborhood. She was surprised to see a handsome young man instead of the boy she once thought looked like a wolf-man, “all fuzzy eyebrows and peaked hair.”

The two began dating and partying. Just after Ligon turned 21, she had their first child, Anthony Jr. In the next six years, they had five more children--Martell, Sheandra, Theo, Ellis and Monique. Two of the last three were born with cocaine in their bloodstreams.

For years the family lived like vagabonds, often staying with friends or family. Anthony managed to keep a steady job as a sous-chef despite his own drug abuse. Between drug binges, Ligon worked the counter at Harold’s Chicken Shack, among other jobs.

She Hit Rock Bottom in 1995

She moved her family into Robert Taylor Homes in 1994. The next year she hit rock bottom. She remembers the date clearly: Dec. 30, 1995.

“Donna, how did this happen?” she muttered to herself as she walked to a charity food pantry, snow crunching underfoot.

How had she sunk so low to trade her food stamps for drugs during the holidays? How were she and Anthony going to keep their children?

Hours later, she woke up in the bed of a stranger. She had agreed to have sex for money, only to be paid with more drugs. She remembers leaning against a bookcase, strung out and in tears.

“I had resorted to selling myself --me,” Ligon said, tapping her chest.

The next day--New Year’s Eve, 1995--she sought drug rehabilitation for a second time.

“I thank God for that day. That was the beginning of a new world, a new life,” she said. “That was the day I was born.”

Ligon stopped using drugs. Reynolds soon followed suit. A year later, more than a decade after their first child was born, they were married.

They started saving a little money, bought a few nice things--a VCR, a TV, a stereo--and dreamed of escaping from Robert Taylor Homes.

“We didn’t come from roots of bad behavior. We grew up in houses,” said Reynolds, whose mother still lives in the house where he grew up. “We always had a home to come to. That’s how it should be.”

Their break came last January, when a blizzard dumped nearly 22 inches of snow on Chicago and the heat went out at Robert Taylor. A late-night knock at the door warned Ligon and Reynolds of freezing pipes and water dripping down the walls of their building, which had received little repair because it was slated for demolition.

The Chicago Housing Authority put them up at a Days Inn near the Lincoln Park Zoo. They were grateful, but when Ligon went back to check on the apartment, she found looters had taken almost everything they owned.

Out of misfortune arose an opportunity. Housing officials were giving displaced families Section 8 housing certificates. “As rare as gold,” Ligon said. That meant they were able to look for private housing, with their monthly rent paid by the federal government.

Two months later, they signed a one-year lease on a Section 8 apartment slightly larger than their three-bedroom cinder-block and linoleum unit in Robert Taylor.

Sheandra, 11, the older of the family’s two girls, smiled as she described the day in March when the family moved into the second-floor unit of a remodeled brick duplex, two miles southwest of their former home.

“At first, Monique thought just the front part was ours,” Sheandra said, tapping her bare foot on the living room’s shiny wood floor. “Then she said, ‘There’s more to it?’

“And I said, ‘Yeah, we got a big ole house.’ ”

Though it’s better than the projects, there are harsh realities lurking near the family’s new home on a tree-lined street of small houses and two-flats like theirs. A few blocks away, abandoned buildings outnumber the mom-and-pop liquor stores, storefront churches and a motel that advertises “nap” rates.

Closer to home, Ligon has witnessed drug deals in the shadows of the walkway next to their building.

“My kids know all about drugs. They lived with it for years. But it might clear it from their mind if they don’t see it so much,” Ligon said. “I just tell them the way it is. Straightforward. I don’t know how else to be.”

On a steamy summer day, Ligon sat in an easy chair in the living room, wiping sweat from her brow with a paper towel. Tired after a late night of playing cards with her girlfriends--something she knew her husband didn’t like--she was feeling guilty.

“Anthony wants me to get a job. But I don’t want to do it. I’m lazy,” she said. “But I do need to get a job, for Anthony.”

Ligon never finished high school and, at that time, hadn’t worked in more than two years. But Illinois officials were sending her reminders that she must look for a job soon or be cut off entirely from welfare.

It feels good to be in her new place, she said, but some days it feels heavy. They have more possessions, but more responsibilities.

They bought a used red-and-black Bronco when they moved into the apartment. Reynolds had always had his old junker to get to work, but nothing like this.

“The thought of having a car never even crossed my mind,” she said. “And having a driver’s license? Forget it.”

Now she has both.

In her kitchen, the sales tag still dangles from the dishwasher’s top rack. She’s never had a dishwasher before, and she’s not about to use this one.

“I’m scared something will go wrong with it, and I don’t need another bill,” she said. “If something happens to it, who’s going to pay for it?”

Sometimes Ligon waxes nostalgic about her life in Robert Taylor Homes. There she was “Auntie Donna,” the cool mother, the life of the party.

“It was a family thing, even with the gangbangers,” she said. “Now it’s broken up.”

The city’s public housing agency is getting rid of its decaying high-rises. Several, including some Robert Taylor buildings, have been torn down or boarded up in favor of mixed-income low-rises scattered throughout the city.

Officials are admitting that housing poor people in apartments stacked one atop another didn’t work.

Ligon got a vivid reminder of life in the projects when she returned to visit friends and play cards in August. She had to walk up a dozen flights of stairs, choking on the smell of urine, because the elevators didn’t work. She saw people shooting up drugs and suddenly wished she hadn’t made the visit.

“That made me say, ‘I never want to go back there,’ ” she said.

She doesn’t blame Robert Taylor for her problems. But she knows she can do better.

Getting an apartment was the first step. The next is a job, something she got a taste of in late September when she temporarily worked selling beer, pretzels and nachos at Chicago’s Wrigley Field.

“I found a job I loved--everything about it. The people, seeing new things,” said Ligon. She hopes to find another job, maybe working concessions at Chicago Bulls games.

Her mother would approve, Ligon knows: “She’d say, ‘I am so proud of you, Donna.’ I can hear her saying that.”