High-Risers

Ben Austen

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780062235084
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Norteamérica

Joining the ranks of Evicted, The Warmth of Other Sons, and classic works of literary non-fiction by Alex Kotlowitz and J. Anthony Lukas, High-Risers braids personal narratives, city politics, and national history to tell the timely and epic story of Chicago's Cabrini-Green, America's most iconic public housing project.

Built in the 1940s atop an infamous Italian slum, Cabrini-Green grew to twenty-three towers and a population of 20, 000—all of it packed onto just seventy acres a few blocks from Chicago's ritzy Gold Coast. Cabrini-Green became synonymous with crime, squalor, and the failure of government. For the many who lived there, it was also a much-needed resource—it was home. By 2011, every high-rise had been razed, the island of black poverty engulfed by the white affluence around it, the families dispersed.

In this novelistic and eye-opening narrative, Ben Austen tells the story of America's public housing experiment and the changing fortunes of American cities. It is an account told movingly though the lives of residents who struggled to make a home for their families as powerful forces converged to accelerate the housing complex's demise. Beautifully written, rich in detail, and full of moving portraits, High-Risers is a sweeping exploration of race, class, popular culture, and politics in modern America that brilliantly considers what went wrong in our nation's effort to provide affordable housing to the poor—and what we can learn from those mistakes.

PART ONE

A HOME OVER JORDAN

1

Portrait of a Chicago Slum

TUCKED INTO THE elbow where the river tacks north, just beyond the Loop and a mile from Lake Michigan, it is as historic a neighborhood as there is in Chicago. In 2016, it was named one of the city’s best places to live. A couple of generations earlier, and more than a century after the banks of the Near North Side were settled, surveyors from the Chicago Housing Authority walked its narrow streets, confirming with every step their belief that it was a slum beyond salvation. The field team from the CHA dodged trucks and trash heaps, careful lest they plunge into the open trenches dug for coal in front of the dwellings. The year was 1950, the quickening after the war, in the nation’s “second city,” yet everything looked to be of the benighted past. Almost all the buildings dated to the previous century. Many of them were cheap frame constructions slapped up after the Great Fire of 1871, temporary emergency shelters turned permanent. In their notebooks, the surveyors tallied the area’s deprivations: nearly half of the 2,325 homes were without a bath or shower, many had no private toilet, and all but a few relied on coal stoves for heat. Over the previous decade, the population in the twenty-five square blocks had swelled to 3,600 families, increasing by 50 percent, yet only a single new residential building had been added. Flimsy partitions carved up the apartments into multiple units. “Excuse the appearance of this place,” a housewife apologized as she welcomed the researchers into her subdivided home. “But we hardly have room to put ourselves someplace and there just ain’t room for anything else.” Despite the conditions, rents had jumped by 70 percent. Landlords overcharged for their firetraps.

The following year, the CHA issued its report, Cabrini Extension Area: Portrait of a Chicago Slum, which depicted in lurid detail the neighborhood the agency hoped to replace. “Houses, black with age and weathered with soot, lean precariously, and their uneven roof lines form crazy-quilt patterns against the sky. Chimneys tilt, eaves sag, rags stick out from broken windows, and doors without knobs stand open. There are few backyards. There can’t be, when most of the lots contain two houses.” Even the cover page sought to convey the ghetto in high squalor: a trompe l’oeil effect made the paper look burned and crumpled, as if found in one of the grubby alleys; the title was lettered in thick-markered graffiti script, with a drawing of a cockroach scuttling past the second “i” in “Cabrini.”

The employees of the Chicago Housing Authority in 1950 weren’t paper-pushing functionaries; they were self-proclaimed liberal do-gooders, many of them coming to the agency from social work. Their portrait of the Near North Side was meant to offend: they believed the slums of Chicago were killing people. House fires, infant mortality, pneumonia, tuberculosis, all occurred there at many times the rate found in the rest of the city. Poor housing conditions, the CHA noted, were contributing as well to high incidences of divorce, juvenile delinquency, and crime. The staff saw its work as a rescue mission: they needed to rid the city of blight. “Houses work magic,” their boss at the agency, Elizabeth Wood, would say. “Give these people decent housing and the better forces inside them have a chance to work. Ninety-nine percent will respond.”

Wood was an unlikely government official in the Chicago of the Democratic machine. She’d previously taught poetry at Vassar College and published a novel about an unhappily married woman who imparts her frustrations onto her children (“A psychological study of merciless persecution,” a reviewer wrote). She moved to Chicago to work for a welfare agency but found the job ineffectual; she wanted to do more than scribble notes as desperate clients detailed their wants. When the CHA was formed in 1937, she took over as its executive director. Private enterprise had failed to provide the agency’s minimal requirement of a “decent, safe and sanitary” home for all. The Near North Side district was just one of the woeful examples that the CHA brandished as proof. Wood feared not that the city’s new public housing projects might be too large, coming to define an area as low-rent, but that they wouldn’t be large enough to counteract the ravages of poverty and disrepair around them. “If it is not bold,” she said, “the result will be a series of small projects, islands in a wilderness of slums beaten down by smoke, noise and fumes.”

One of the islands Wood and her team hoped to expand was next to the Near North Side slum. In 1942, the CHA opened the Frances Cabrini Homes, 586 dwellings in barracks-style two- and three-story buildings. Federal rules established that public housing be built to minimum standards, using materials and designs unmistakably inferior to those found in market-rate housing. The Cabrini rowhouses were simple and unadorned, arranged in parallel columns like lines of parked tractor trailers. But in the neglected river district, they stood out as an oasis of order and modernity. “Like a challenge to the existing decay,” the CHA declared. Each of the Cabrini Homes featured a gas stove, an electric refrigerator, a private bath, and its own heat controls. The buildings were made of “fireproof brick.” And the development was laid out so that parents could watch from their apartments as children played in communal courtyards. “When you come upon one of Chicago’s public housing developments, it is like stepping into a different world,” the CHA rhapsodized in an early brochure. “Everywhere you see green—green of lawns, green of shrubbery, green of trees. Pleasant, vine-covered buildings stand in harmonious groups, with plenty of space left for sun and air and children’s play. Everywhere you see gardens, and overhead stretches a sky that somehow looks bluer and sunnier than it did in the slums.”

The Near North Side was largely Italian for much of the first half of the twentieth century. But a small black settlement formed there as well. The federal government restricted overseas immigration after the First World War, and so the factories along the river had vacancies they needed to fill. Most people also made great efforts to live far from the area’s polluted worksites and ramshackle homes. Thus, African Americans were able to move in.

That was an anomaly in segregated Chicago. As African Americans turned their backs on the South, their population in Chicago more than doubled between 1910 and 1920, from 44,000 to 109,000, and then more than doubled again over the next decade and again over the next twenty years, reaching half a million by 1950. Up until the 1940s, almost all of these newcomers moved to the South Side, in what was called the “Black Belt,” a broadening strip of land that extended south from the downtown business district.

The Europeans who made a home along the Chicago River’s North Fork were free to test the private market elsewhere, even if affordable options were scarce. During the forties, the vacancy rate in the city fell to less than 1 percent, a total of eight thousand available units for the entirety of Chicago. But African Americans were forced to contend with a wholly separate real estate system. White neighborhoods established racial covenants, bylaws that barred homeowners from selling to African Americans. At one point, 85 percent of Chicago was covered under these restrictions. Even after the US Supreme Court outlawed the practice, in 1948, enforcement and legal recourse were negligible, and neighborhoods found less subtle means, such as assaults and firebombings, at least as effective. The federal government deemed existing black neighborhoods too risky for insured mortgages, coloring these areas red on its maps. “Redlining” meant African Americans could rarely purchase property in their own communities, except through predatory rent-to-own contract sales, in which buyers made inflated monthly payments but amassed no equity in the property. If or when they were evicted before the final payment, for any number of infractions, they lost the home, the down payment, and all the preceding monthly installments. After escaping the caprices of the Jim Crow South, drawn to Chicago by visions of a “promised land,” African Americans found themselves at the mercy of a speculative housing system in the North unjust and unpredictable in its own rights.

Landlords in black neighborhoods enjoyed both overwhelming demand for their properties and a captive market. They not only charged high rents for their run-down dwellings, but also divided existing apartments into numerous “kitchenette” units. The practice, while common throughout overcrowded Chicago, was epidemic in the Black Belt. Within the same square footage, the number of occupants—and the amount of revenue—increased exponentially. Cut a six-family walk-up in half to house twelve families, into separate one-room apartments to make many more. There was no economic incentive for landlords to fix up their South Side properties; redlining meant that banks wouldn’t loan them money for the work anyway.

With too many families crammed into airless wood-frame dwellings, forced to use alternative heating and cooking methods, with exposed wires and extension cords snaking in every direction from improvised walls and transoms to plug into the one or two overloaded circuits, fires were rampant. And because the kitchenettes were divided by nailed-up doorways and partitions that were themselves flammable, and because they lacked windows and safe exits, the fires too often proved deadly. “The kitchenette is our prison, our death sentence without a trial, the new form of mob violence that assaults not only the lone individual, but all of us in its ceaseless attacks,” Richard Wright, who came to Chicago in 1927 from Mississippi by way of Memphis, lamented in his 12 Million Black Voices. “The kitchenette is the funnel through which our pulverized lives flow to ruin and death on the city pavement, at a profit.”

In the years following the Second World War, some twenty-three square miles of Chicago was said to be blighted, a tenth of the entire city; a quarter million homes, one-fourth of Chicago’s total, were considered substandard. Chicagoans of all backgrounds were in need of the assistance of government-run public housing. But in the black slums of the South Side the need was greatest. “Due to his disadvantageous position in the present housing market, the Negro is the chief victim of excessive rents,” the Cabrini Extension Area report concluded.

DOLORES WILSON

ONE OF WRIGHT’S twelve million, a woman in her twenties who felt condemned to her South Side tenement, was a lifelong Chicagoan named Dolores Wilson. At the start of the 1950s, she and her husband, Hubert, were parents to five children, ages eight to one. “Five snotty-nosed kids running around,” Dolores liked to say with feigned annoyance. The Wilsons had a one-room basement apartment on the 6000 block of South Prairie Avenue, beside the grinding rattle of the El train and the trolley on Sixty-First Street. The children slept on one side of the room, on a pullout couch, and she and Hubert in a bed along the opposite wall. “With that arrangement,” Dolores would say, “I’m not sure how the last child ever got made.” The shower was propped up in the kitchen. The one window opened onto an alley. To use the toilet, they had to walk out their door and down the hallway, then past the laundry room to the bathroom the Wilsons shared with a family renting the back side of the partitioned basement.

She never felt safe in that building. One night while Hubert was at work, a man tried to break in through the window. “Oh, Lord,” Dolores cried while watching the guy struggle to shimmy his way inside, the children asleep not six feet away. She managed to take out a little pistol Hubert had left her and call the police, the phone trembling in one hand and the gun in the other. An officer who answered said she could go ahead and shoot the burglar but only after he set foot in the apartment. Luckily, the man noticed her and took off.

Dolores wasn’t one to complain—or rather, she had a way of doing it drolly, a genial-sounding protest, continuing all the while to make the best of a situation. She bought material from a five-and-dime and cut a red canopy for the mirror and the apartment’s sole window; she found red dishes and a red-checkered tablecloth to match, decorating the apartment the way she liked it. “It doesn’t matter where you are,” she liked to say. “It’s after you put your fingerprint on it. Then it’s your home.” Dolores Wilson had such a pleasant-seeming brightness about her, her voice soft and high like a confection, that she’d laugh out of frustration or spite and then feel the need to explain that it wasn’t intended to be a funny laugh. She called most people “Dear,” though not infrequently she meant it wryly. “I try to get along with everybody, even the ones I don’t get along with.”

She was careful to say, “Thank you, Father, for a roof over our heads.” Everyone, at least, needed that. But it could feel like too much to cope with when the cold cut through the walls, or the structure meant to house your family might be killing them. The Chicago Defender, the city’s leading black newspaper, kept count of the casualties from South Side house fires. “Negro children and women are dying like rats in fires in dilapidated homes unfit for human habitation, homes that are in reality firetraps which should have been condemned long ago by responsible officials,” the paper wrote in one of many reports. Dolores often heard the sirens of the fire trucks. She knew that if her tenement went up in flames, they likely wouldn’t make it out of the basement alive.

The Wilsons had moved a few times within the confines of their neighborhood, but the other apartments were no better. Options for them were limited. Landlords told her she had too many children, or that children older than toddlers caused trouble. Dolores and Hubert paid $10 to a real estate agent who promised to provide them with a special list of quality apartments. Dolores traveled to each apartment the agent gave her, finding herself in front of yet another South Side firetrap. She’d double-check that the address matched what she’d written down in her carefully looping script. The six-flats before her listed to one side, with rotting wood or missing bricks. Inside, the floors drooped, the walls buckled, and the ceilings leaked. The plaster and paint crumbled about could poison her children. “Uh-uh,” she’d say, backing away, as the smells of greens and other food cooking from a dozen kitchenettes assailed her. “It made me want to go in there and fix a plate, but I didn’t want to move in,” she’d say. “If their food is loud, you know all the noise they’re going to make.” Ten dollars was a fortune to them, but after several of these trips Dolores had to accept that they’d been had.

Born Dolores Zanders, in 1929, at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital, she grew up on that same block of 6000 South Prairie. Her mother’s mother was an adventurer, a woman of means, who gave birth to each of her four children in a different state. Dolores’s mother was originally from eastern Ohio, coal country, and she moved with her family to Chicago. Dolores’s father followed a brother up north from Georgia. Her parents met in high school, and they settled into the apartment on Prairie as the block’s last remaining Jewish family was set to depart. Dolores was one of their five children, and they lived well there. Dolores’s mother worked as an assistant precinct captain for the local Democratic machine boss. Her father had a job as a presser and a tailor, even during the Depression years. He kept his pants pleated, his shoes polished to a high shine, and a satin-banded hat cocked jauntily to one side. Dolores could hardly remember a time she saw him in work clothes. “He stayed immaculate, so sharp,” she’d say. If she or her sisters noticed a piece of lint on his suit jacket, they knew to pick it off him.

Dolores met Hubert when she was fourteen, soon after graduating from Betsy Ross Elementary. Her family usually went to a Baptist church across the street from their apartment, but occasionally they traveled four blocks west to the Uplifting of Humanity, a sanctified church led by her aunt Rhea. Hubert was left-handed and sang in the choir, the dumm, dumm, dumm of his bass drawing Dolores’s gaze to him. When Hubert built up the nerve to phone and ask Dolores on a date, her parents said no. Dolores had almond-shaped eyes and a waggish intelligence, so he tried again. Her mother consented to an outing, but she calculated exactly how long it would take the two of them to travel by train to a movie theater downtown, to see the coming attractions, a cartoon, and a double feature, and then return home. “No monkeying around,” she ordered. “Go see that movie, get on the El, and come back.” If they returned from a date just a couple of minutes late, Hubert wouldn’t walk Dolores upstairs, choosing to be unmannerly rather than face her parents. Once when Hubert bought Dolores a sweater, her father made her give it back. He had a ban on gifts—a boy would expect sex in return. “You better not be having any sex,” her mother added. “But if you are, make sure to use a rubber.” Her parents made it clear that there was no greater moral failing than getting pregnant, forbidding Dolores from even socializing with girls believed to be fast. When Dolores’s sister became pregnant, their father forced her into an unhappy marriage.

Fearing her getting too serious, Dolores’s parents didn’t allow her to go steady with any one guy. Throughout high school she dated not only Hubert but also George, Clifford, Otis, Frank, and Bo. It was a short stroll from her apartment past South Parkway, which would later be renamed Martin Luther King Drive, and over to the expanse of Washington Park. She’d sit on the benches with her different boyfriends or walk with them around the lagoon, or watch the games in the fields. Dolores loved her some Frank Jenkins, but she figured she loved Hubert more. Hubert looked older than the rest of them, even though he was the same age. And he could make Dolores laugh, the way he told outlandish stories, his wit matching hers. People would say that the two of them together, with their banter, could have a comedy act on the radio. Hubert quit high school his junior year to help with his family’s expenses. He was the type who’d do any sort of job, as long as it was legal. He shoveled coal into people’s basements, cut ice from the lake, delivered refrigerators, laid tile.

Dolores didn’t realize how well off her family was until she and Hubert started swapping tales about the Depression. More than 40 percent of all workingmen in Chicago were unemployed during those years, and the city had a shortage of 150,000 affordable homes, with the demand increasing and nothing new being built. A Hooverville formed downtown, on the outskirts of Grant Park, hundreds of jerry-built structures made of cardboard, scrap, and tar paper. “Building construction may be at a standstill elsewhere, but down here everything is booming,” an out-of-work miner and railroad brakeman who’d been elected “mayor” of the shantytown told the press. On the South Side, Dolores had her clothes dry-cleaned at her father’s shop, and when her father was drafted into the navy her mother found work at a factory making aircraft. Hubert, on the other hand, had been eating neck bones cooked every kind of way—fried, boiled, broiled, barbecued. His family had an apartment, a meager one, but they subsisted on the government charity boxes with NOT TO BE SOLD stamped on them.

It was no surprise to Dolores that her father didn’t think Hubert good enough for her. Always the dandy, her dad would stand in the wide window of their apartment, one shined shoe propped up on the sill, and at the sight of Hubert say, “Here comes Pete the Tramp,” referring to the old comic strip. He’d turn it into a kind of mocking song, as Hubert ambled up the block in his work clothes, a shovel hefted over his shoulder, a cigar stub tucked into the corner of his mouth, a dusting of coal on his hands and face.

When Dolores was eighteen, in 1947, and enrolled at Woodrow Wilson Junior College, Hubert picked her up after classes. One day when they reached Prairie Avenue he wouldn’t get out of the car. He stared silently into his la...