>> Ben Austin writes for New York Times Magazine, Harpers, and a
host of other publications. In his riveting book, High Risers Cabrini
Green and the Fate of American Public Housing, Ben tells the story of
residents who struggle to make a home for their families as powerful
forces converged to accelerate the demise of the Cabrini Green public
housing complex in Chicago he exposes state of public housing amid
the changing forces of American cities and the shifts in federal public
policies and funding. Without further ado, please join me in
welcoming Ben Austin.
[ Applause ]
>> So I'm honored to speak here. I'll say, first of all, the
important work of this organization and really many of the
people here have influenced and informed my own work.
In 1956, Delores Wilson and her family moved in to a brand new public
housing high rise and Cabrini Green on Chicago's near north side.
They were assigned an apartment on the 14th floor and everything
smelled of fresh paint. Delores had never been that high in the sky
before. She stepped on to the ramp, the open air walkway outside her
apartment, and clutched the chest hyphening in terror. That was the
first day. But soon she was delighting in her Lordly view of Chicago's
rippled skyline. She sat out there and joined the breeze, her five
children playing alongside her. It was the projects, you'd say, by which
cement it was clean and safe and spectacular to behold. Before that,
the Wilsons had lived on the city's south side this what was called the
black belt. Sorry. In a one room basement apartment. It had a single
window, opening on to an alley, and a bathroom down a hallway that
they shared with another family. The children slept on a pull out couch
on one side of of the room, and Delores and her husband, Hubert, in a
bed along the opposite wall. With that arrangement, I'm not sure how
the last child ever got made, Delores told me with her wry humor. The
Wilsons had tried to find a better apartment in the private market.
They saw buildings with rotting wood and missing bricks and
apartments chopped up in to multiple kitchenette units, or landlords
simply turned them away, telling them that he this had too many
children. On the south side, Delores lived in constant dread that the
structure meant to house her family might actually be killing them, an
eviction could come at any time, maybe her children would catch
pneumonia or tuberculosis or eat the crumbling paint and plaster. Her
greatest fear is that the building would go up in flames. But Cabrini
Green, the walls were solid cinder block. It was fireproof, she'd say,
even the smoke couldn't get in there. It was like heaven. Delores
Wilson is one of the four Cabrini Green residents whose life I chronicle
in my book high risers. Another is the incredible Willy JR Flemming
though who is sitting over here.
[CHEERS & APPLAUSE ]
>> He was part of a panel yesterday. JR, a bootleg merchandise king at
Cabrini Green in the 1990s, specializing in knock off Bulls championship gear,
he went on to fight he went on to fight to save Cabrini Green as an
activist and, truthfully, after that battle was lost, to figure out other
solutions for low income housing elsewhere in Chicago. The history of
Cabrini Green and public housing's rise and fall or highrise public
housing's rise and fall is also the story of our always uneasy
relationship to poverty and to race. That story isn't just about Chicago.
It's about every city in America and it's really about America itself.
Consider when the country first started investing in public housing
380 years ago. Then, as now, the idea of government run housing was
attacked as socialist, anticapitalist, un American. It was seen as
clashing with an exalted sense of homeownership, with a national
ethos wrapped up in visions of the frontiers man, the log cabin and the
self made entrupenure. The short comes of the for profit real estate
market were evident then, and wreckage shortages of housing, an
eviction riots and homeless encampments and cities overrun with
blighted slums and yet, the legislation to create public housing was
opposed by real estate groups, property owners associations and
nearly enough politician toss derail the law. It seems telling that the
first public housing complexes were established alongside the
federally private home loan I'm sorry, alongside the federally insured
private home loan. This revolution motions and financed allowed
owners to put down as little as 10% of a home's cost and pay it off in
small increments over 30 years. Even today the federal government
devotes three times as much each year to subsidies to the speculative
real estate market than to the entire entire budget of the Department
of Housing and Urban Development. Delores Wilson went on to make
a home for herself at Cabrini Green. At her children's school, she
joined the PTA, first as treasurer and then as president. She attended
a local Lutheran church, serving on its board. There was a community
center, funded by the city's welfare council, and that's where she took
her kids to dance and music classes. She was part of a parents group
and a social club that met there. She volunteered with the local
Democratic organization, walking her high rise to get out out the vote.
This was Chicago under old man Daly's political machine. And when a
bundle of patronage jobs were being divvied up, she got one at the
city's water department. She worked there for 27 years. Her husband
got a job at Cabrini Green, not as a janitor, as Delores Wilson has
corrected me many times, but as a maintenance worker. Cabrini Green
was not without problems, even from the start, of course. It it was a
lower income working poor neighborhood in the throes of racial turn
yore. On just 70 acres, there were some 20,000 people, as many as
most towns or suburbs, but with almost none of their resources. Yet,
Delores and her neighbors formed committees to deal with juvenile
delinquency, vandilism and underresourced schools. She helped throw
a birthday party for her building each year. She lived in 1117 North
Cleveland, so the party took place every November 17th. Decades
later, when the roof of her high rise leaked, gang signs covered the
walls, apartments were boarded up and garbage collected on the
landings, she led the resident group that took over the buildings's
management duties. They collected rent, screened tenants, headed up
security, and oversaw multibillion dollar rehab. Cabrini Green's
location made it alumni in segregated Chicago. It's 23 towers and
it's 23 towers and 3,600 units were on the near north side, a few
blocks from the ritzy Gold Coast and Michigan Avenue's Magnificent
Mile. Near north, near everything, Delores would say. That proximity to
wealth and status also added to its infamy, making it the country's
most iconic housing project. Mayor Jane burn moved in to one of the
towers at Cabrini Green in 1981 as a political stunt because her luxury
condo was a couple of blocks away. Cabrini Green became the setting
of the TV sitcom Goode times, the movie Cooley high, dime novels,
documentaries, rap songs, and endless news stories. If you stubbed
your toe at Cabrini Green, it was in the news, Delores Wilson would
say. There was a recurring Saturday night live skit in the 1908s about
a teen age single mother. Her name was Cabrini Green Harlem Watts
Jackson. The public housing project had made it now to the Mount
Rushmore of scariest inner city places. It was the embodiment of
those fears, and the higher movie Candy man, a hook handed be a
ration keeps a layer of vacant Cabrini green apartments. In realty,
though, it's the public housing that is presented as the monsterus
threat. Delores Wilson tells a story about her brother, who worked at a
night club on the Gold Coast, a five minute walk east from her. He said
he wouldn't visit her because of all the terrible stuff he heard about her
home. One night after work, when he was leaving the club, some
drunk white guys jumped him and knocked out his teeth. You won't
visit me? I have my teeth. My family has their teeth. Delores was sure
to remind him whenever she had the chance. You're afraid to visit me
because of what you read in the paper. I'm not going to visit you from
what I see happening to you. It's just like her to put a comic spin on
things, but that nightmare image of public housing has a real cost.
Once hard colors every thought people have about a place, the only
responsible thing imaginable is to eliminate the threat no matter what.
Acting out of fear, spurred on by a moral panic, seeing only the worst
and nothing else, that leads to bad policy solutions. When I started
reporting for my book at the end of 2010, Delores Wilson's building
was slated for demolition. It was the last remaining tower at Cabrini
Green and the last public housing high rise not for seniors in all of
Chicago. They'd all been closed and shut down and demolished.
Cabrini Green had seen as immunable as mountains, as much a part
of the natural landscape of Chicago as the expanse of Lake Michigan.
Before Cabrini Green was before Cabrini Green was there, however,
the neighborhood was an infamous Italian slum that had also seemed
permanent it wasn't. Public housing was supposed to save people
there from the perils of the Italian ghettos housing conditions. And
now, the towers were being torn down to save families from the prison
of public housing. Today, as we just heard, we are in an affordable
housing crisis that seems as urgent as the one in the 1930s and
1940s. Right now, only one of every five families poor enough to
qualify for any sort of housing subsidy actually receives one. That
means, if you think about it, 80% of our poorest families get nothing
and are on their own. And this, at a time when rents in cities are
skyrocketing the economic gains for those at the bottom have been
slowest. Paying less than 30% of your income in rent is thought of as
the threshold before rent starts eating into other necessities such as
money for food and healthcare and education. Incredibly, a quarter of
all renters now pay at least half of their income in rent, and I think we
just heard that of low income renters it's 70%. The report that was just
cited from our host, the gap, as we heard, shows that there are only 35
available rental homes for every 100 extremely low income families.
Cities have inverted again. Inner city no longer is a pejorative but it's
actually the signifier of wealth. We're seeing more and more people
who can't afford the housing there pushed further from the economic
activity of city centers. We now have a greater number of poor people
in suburbs than in cities. In 1937, the year of the federal housing
authority was established, Franklin Roosevelt said the test of our
progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who
have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have too
little. But it is stunning how we've moved away from from that idea. An
aversion to social safety net programs has rooted every more deeply
in the mainstream. Our current HUD secretary Ben Carson has called
poverty a state of mind. It's still true, as it has always been, that
housing saves lives, as well as money in averting other as well as
money in averting other instability costs if we have the foresight to
see it. Without a decent home, without an affordable and decent
home, none of the other issues of poverty can be dealt with
effectively. No one is arguing for a return to Cabrini Green style super
block public housing. But we must address the need for low income
housing more openly, compassionately and smartly, without the fear
or the stigma. When her high rise was demolished, Delores Wilson
applied to get into a mixed income building at Cabrini Green. This
replacement housing blends deeply subsidized families with market
rate and working class tenants, as almost all of you know. This was
touted as the remedy for the ills of concentrated poverty that defined
public housing. By design, however, the mixed income had far fewer
units than the buildings they replaced, and only an unassuming
number of public housing families, usually about a third the total. The
buildings, therefore, even at their best, are able to meet only a tiny
percentage of the demand. Anyway, Delores Wilson didn't get one. She
was turned away. Most of her neighbors moved with Section 8
vouchers into the private market. They ended up largely in
neighborhoods on Chicago's south side and west side that were also
predominantly black and poor. The concentrated poverty and isolation
of high lies public housing didn't go away with the demolitions. It's just
less visible now, and the problem is no longer literally owned by the
state. Delores Wilson had zero interest in a Section 8. After a half
century at Cabrini Green, she didn't want anything to do with landlords
or the possibility of multiple moves. She was relocated to a rehab mid
rise public housing development on the south side. Her new unit is
much smaller than her Cabrini Green apartment. The elevator is in my
bedroom. I can sit in my living room and cook in the kitchen at the
same time, she likes to joke. But her midrise, the building has stayed
in good shape, a security guard checks IDs at the front door, the
elevators work, the stairwells are clean, the walls free of graffiti. What
she misses most about Cabrini Green Green is her community. At 89,
as of this past weekend, shes takes the bus Sundays to attend her
church at Cabrini Green. One of her daughters moved with her to the
south side. Her great grandson attended the elementary school next
door. But that school was closed in 2013. One of 50 public schools
citywide that were shuttered that year, all at the same time. Delores's
daughter had had enough and she joined the exodus out of Chicago,
moving to a suburb of Atlanta. Since 2000, African the African
American population of Chicago has fallen by an amazing 250,000
people. Chicago is also the only major city to lose population last year.
And it's not in the city center. Delores Wilson knows she's one of the
lucky ones, though. The Chicago Housing Authority opened up a
lottery merely to get on to the waiting list for either a public housing
unit or a voucher a couple of years ago. The CHA, as we know, is an
agency known for dysfunction, offering housing equated with danger
and he did lap tags and yet 280,000 families entered their names on to this
lottery. In all of Chicago, there are only slightly more than a million
households, so one in four of them entered the lottery for a CHA
home. In my many talks with Delores Wilson, I've often asked in many
different ways why they stayed at Cabrini Green. I have to admit, and
this is the truth, that it was something that I had trouble
comprehending. She and her husband both worked. She paid more in
rent as a percentage of her income and later as a percentage of her
pension than almost all of her neighbors. I've come to understand that
she never internalized the idea that poverty itself is a personal moral
failing. She saw poverty as an injustice. And she saw it as something
that collectively we are supposed to correct. She didn't escape the
trauma of public housing either. Around the time she retired from the
city's water department, one of her sons, Michael, who was then an
adult, was outside at Cabrini Green on his way to a Chicago Avenue
sandwich shop. His girlfriend's ex boyfriend started harassing her.
And Michael got in to a fight with the man. Delores would say, with a
mix of pride and sorrow, that her son was galiant. While the two of
them fought, a guy with the ex boyfriend pulled out a gun and shot
Michael in the back at close range with a hollow point bullet. Michael
died instantly. It seemed utterly unfair to Delores Wilson. She
dedicated much of her life to the community, Jack Kemp the
quarterback turned Congressman turned HUD secretary had herself
named resident of the year. Yet she didn't leave Cabrini Green even
then. Something she said three days after Michael's funeral stuck with
me. She was asked if there was anything she wanted to convey to
outsiders about her home. Tell them that there's more love over here
than terrorizing. Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> You can just call on people.
>> Yeah. Any questions. I'd be happy to talk. Yes. Hi.
>> Here comes the mic.
>> I can repeat the question too.
>> How has mixed use, mixed income developments replacing public housing worked?
>> Yeah. So, I mean, to it's a great question. The thing I said here,
which I'd say, first of all, it's such a tiny percentage that I feel like, so in
Chicago, during the plan for transformation, when most of the high
rises were knocked down, it was touted as the centerpiece of the plan,
and it was really misleading. It's just, you know, it just can't handle the
demand. So it's just a tiny percentage by design. If you have smaller
buildings and you're only taking a third public housing, that's a really
small population. So I think, in Chicago now, there are about 2,800
families who are in mixed income units. So that's, you know, that's
good housing. But it's small. It's a small number. Inside the buildings,
there's been a mix of things. You could imagine we've heard probably
about some of the problems within the dynamics with families that
public housing families don't feel represented, sometimes condo
associations make rules that affect their lives, they don't have their
own associations any longer to represent them. But, I mean, probably,
like most people here, you know, the vast menu of low income
housing that we need, I wouldn't dismiss any of it. It's like let's add
more to the menu and work on preservation so we can think of
ramping up all of this stuff. But the short answer is that it has been a
mixed bag, but it is also, I feel like, a little misleading in its promise.
And especially in Chicago where there was so much talk about ending
concentrated poverty, you know, sort of this William Julius Wilson idea
took over of these concentration affects and everyone was embracing
and this was the great I will that we were going to do away with and
no matter what and, you know, people have probably heard about
Chicago for its violence of late, and we have concentrated poverty and
isolation all over the city. It's just not that it's not in public housing. It re created it.
>> Okay. Quick question for you about the current administration, the Chicago Housing Authority.
As moving to work agency, it has been documented and sitting on close to
$400 million in cash that could be utilized for vouchers,
I'm just curious what the reaction of folks on the ground that you
encountered in your research was torte to be quite frank,
the neglect of the need of the city by the CHA.
>> Yeah. So the I think it was about a year ago, two years ago,
the CHA of Chicago Housing Authority had what they called a rainy
day found that was something like $437 million that they hadn't spent
on housing. It's raining right now. You know, it was like raining. They
have paid that down. So they spent a lot of that, you know. They brag
about that, how much they've spent it down. Yeah, there was outrage.
But I also think, you know, one of the effects of getting rid of public
housing is that there's less, you know, there's less activism, you know,
JR could attest to this, there's less concentrated act. I have fighting for
these issues. I think about New York City right now and we're seeing
sort of the backlash to not having heat and, you know, DeGlossio can't
go anywhere without people screaming at him. That's what happens
when there's this huge population of public housing, there's still this
voice and political pressure. That's something else we lose. We don't
have Section 8 families who can mobilize together. So we lose that
collective voice as well. Yes.
>> What was the stamp of
>> Hang on.
>> He's going to give you a mic right there.
>> Oh, sorry. What was the extent of displacement of public housing
families in Chicago and were they guaranteed the right to return?
If so, how many were able to return?
>> Yeah. So those who were living in public housing at a
certain date in 1999 were given the chance to return, a right to return,
not necessarily to the same site as where they had lived before, but it
took a long time to build housing, you know, people were displaced in a
rush, there was a very there was thrush to knock down the homes.
There was also sort of a calculating of who was lease compliant and
who wasn't so many people were knocked off the rolls. By the time
things were worked out, many people had died or just got lost. You
know, and once the CHA started looking inside these buildings, there
were problems that existed in there that they hadn't even addressed.
People had such needs that didn't even have to do with housing. You
know, like in the same way, like our legal system, we had dumped
people with mental illness, drug addiction, depression, all sorts of
things that they needed multiple counselors, so there were problems
that they were ill equipped to deal with at first. Those families, you
know, so that was 1999, I mean, you know, it took some of those
families were lost, there's the CHA has a calculation of where they all
went. Many, they, thousands that they just lost track of. There was this
ad they ran in the local news papers that read something like a list of
names, if any of these 3,000 families, if you know anyone or you've
read this, can you please get in touch with us, you have a right to
return. But they had lost track of them. I also think that, you know, it
for the violence in Chicago, there has been a tendency to blame public
housing families, you know, this idea like they're ghetto, they brought
their ways with them. I'm from a neighborhood called south shore
which took on the most Section 8 vouchers, and there's constantly
blaming, you know, those families for all the troubles. Many studies
have shown that that's not the case. Even the idea that most people
move, say, back in, you know, 2000, 2001, 2002 and you would still
blame those problems on them. Really, what happened is families
moved to areas where they were already starved of resources, where
there was already these multiple problems, and certainly it
exacerbated them, fighting over the limited resources there were, but
if you look at, like, overlays of maps of where families moved, it is, it's
the same maps where the foreclosure crisis hit the most, where
schools were closed, and where depopulation has occurred. Yes. Hi.
>> Yesterday we heard Richard Rothstein speak.
>> Yeah.
>> On the color of money, and his first of all, I don't know if you've read the book.
>> Yep.
>> I'd like to know what your comments are on some of his policy solutions.
You seem to be talking about the importance of community.
His policy solutions on desegregation and I'm curious how you think that overlays with
>> Tell me more about specific ones.
>> So, for example, in the use of tax credits that these should be only
in areas of opportunity and not in areas of concentration of poverty.
>> Yeah.
>> For example. That we should be using those tools to
desegregate in those ways and I'm just wondering how that plays
into the importance of community that you've talked about.
>> Yeah. I mean, so I think it's certainly true that we've seen, you know, that's
Section 8 vouchers have re created some of the segregation they were
supposed to solve, you know, it is certainly true in Chicago and it's
certainly true in many places and just, you know, how a Section 8
voucher works, first of all, the amount of money and as prices have
gone up in opportunity areas, they just can't afford that. We actually
tried something in Chicago called super vouchers where they gave
residents even more money to afford, you know, better neighborhoods
with better schools and closer to opportunity and once it was
discovered there was such backlash, you know, this idea that poor
people would get these, you know, thousands of dollars rather than
hundreds of dollars, that the program was canceled immediately.
Yeah, the truth is that that costs more money, you know, to try to solve
in those ways. It feels like such a multiprong solution, meaning those
neighborhoods itself where people are moving need to be invested in.
One of the things I've been hearing a lot and I had a conversation with
Ram Emmanuel recently but I think it's true also about how we think
about, the economists think about the country and the world this way
that we take an average of things and we, on a whole, on an average,
you could say a city is doing really well, and with such, you know, you
know, economic difference right now, you know, if 10% of the
population is most of the wealth and if you take an average, the
bottom 90% doesn't care that the average is pretty high or higher than
it was 30 years ago. So, you know, this in Chicago, that's a perfect
example. Ram Emmanuel talks about the schools being better than
they were years ago but that's in certain areas and the vast, you know,
land of the city, especially on the far south side and the west side, are
just starving for resources. So it's also investing in those areas. But
also in the resources that if you're going to do it, a housing program, it
needs to come with all sorts of services and the investment to move
in to those opportunity areas. You can't just say that magically. It
costs more money to do it. Sorry. I'm sort of looking here and.
>> So I work a lot with the homeless, homeless vats, HUD VA Section 8 and
one thing I've come, because I do credit counsel egg, budget
counseling, employment counseling, case management, and the one
conclusion I've come to is there's a lot of people out there in low
income and that they don't know another way to live, that it's passed
on generations and generations and they've never lived a different way a
Nd they've accepted that unfortunately as their role in society, and do
you feel that you saw that when you had the boots on the ground?
Because trying to change their way of thinking, that it doesn't have to
be like this seems to be my battle because I always have repeat
clients which is the worst thing you can have when you're dealing with
poverty and housing crisis. So do you feel that we need to start from
the bottom and change their way of thinking before, you know, is that
the first step to getting out of this crisis?
>> I don't think it's the first step, no. Meaning that I mean, we're
we still wrestle with this idea of policy makers sitting in rooms and they try to
decide when they come up with a program whether it should be limited to a certain
number of people, whether it should have time limits, how do you
reproduce it for others, I mean, this is something that is, in all honesty,
we still don't know. Like we struggle with. You know, for the problem
that you're saying, like, you know, and certainly I think there's the
knock on dependency which we also see becomes stigmatized and
exaggerated is also true, and you know, in some ace Cases there's
some blending of that. But I think of like Delores Wilson who, you
know, was such a powerful contributor to this community but also
never thought about leaving. So do I think the first, you know, policy
solution is to, you know, to tell someone like this that there's
somewhere else to go like this is a step up? You know, as I said about
Chicago and, you know, we just heard this report, the gap, there is no
next step in terms of housing. Right? So, like, even to say, like, you
know, we want to sub is I dietdz you and, you know, teach you a way to
then you can be on your own but where do you go next? We there is no
low income housing. There's there is no supply. And so it's hard to
imagine that's the first step when there's not even a second step to
move to. So but I also think that that's an honest approach of, you
know, boots on the ground seeing that there are problems even with
our programs, like you know, one of the things one of the things that
the left has to wrestle with when we think about these programs, you
know, we have decades and decades of proof of doing this really
badly. And so if you're on the right and you have sort of this, you know,
knee jerk reaction to many of these social safety net programs, you
have a lot of evidence to point to, you know, when I talk about the CHA
and I'm kind of knocking it, that's also the liver of the housing units
that I hope would come. And the same thing when we talk about HUD,
like, that's not some manage cam other out there. That is actually
the mechanism we have in terms of government. And so we also have to
think about like, yeah, we want to do it more and bigger and better,
like, that's not a strong enough argument. So these are thijsz we are
still wrestling with. Yeah.
>> Hang on.
>> Oh, sorry.
>> Coming around. I can hold it.
>> My question actually goes off of what you just said. You said
nobody's advocating for the return of high rise housing, but
isn't didn't we set it up to fail? I mean, to your point, there was there
were hundreds of millions of dollars that we're sitting on so basically
they could have fixed the roof, they could have maintained it, they
could have provided services, what's your view on the question of
whether high rise housing could work if the proper resources were
provided? Do we necessarily need to dismiss it? Or have we just
basically set it up to fail so that we can say it doesn't work and we're
just going to go on to the next solution and say that doesn't work either?
>> Yeah. That's a great question. And certainly, like when we
think about all the arrows and the quiver, preservation is a huge one,
like we still have the supply, not just of a million public housing units,
which we have to preserve but, you know, sort of all sorts of other
opportunities. You know, so there are many ways that it was set up to
fail. In Chicago maybe most of all that, you know, all the men in white
neighborhoods after white revolt, they were like there's no public
housing going up in these neighborhoods and it really, it was already
an incredibly segregated city, even more so by public housing, you
know, the actual public housing formed the boundaries and concrete
in steel. I think I think there are the idea of, like, 23 concentrated
towers without thru streets, like we would just think architecturally we
could do something better, that's what I mean. I don't think there's the
idea that, like, a highrise that you could make that map. I mean so, we
have arguments in Chicago, you know when, it's useful for the city and
developers to say no 100% hub housing and low rise developments
that are in affluent neighborhoods are being closed, the one that is are
far away are still okay. So I think the argument for 100% public
housing is a different argument than saying what about, you know,
super block public housing. I think we can make a strong argument for
traditional public housing that has a 100% public housing families.
You can manage that. And I talked about where Delores Wilson lives
now. It works. But I think there are design elements that we just
wouldn't we wouldn't do again. We wouldn't think about not having
through streets and soft ways that it is cut off. That kind of modernist
thinking has been abandoned all over the place. Although the
opposite, this sort of new deal Jane Jacobs ideal has also been
embraced far too much as a solution like that, you
know, you don't have to go all that way. Great.
>> Thank you very much for your analysis and your scholar semi.
In the 1990s I was part of a group of people who did not live in
public housing who worked directly in solidarity under the
leadership in women under public housing, Hope 6,
so I want to open up kind of an uncomfortable issue of the
Democratic party. The Democratic party has been the fangs and the
jaw around austarity and Neo liberalism in public house something as
we want to organize for the human right of housing for all people, how
do we navigate the fact that the democratic party has been has
really fueled the ideology of poor people hatred and racism
scapegoating in the housing world? Thank you.
>> Yeah, I brought up Jack Kemp. When Jack Kemp was secretary of housing under the first
George Bush, he said he refused to be the secretary of demolition.
And then Henry Sinaros came under Clinton and he was like, I'm
secretary of demolition. And even in my interview with, speaking
when I spoke to Ram Emmanuel a couple of weeks a, go he started
talking about himself as a progressive, and I had the opportunity,
because of the setting, I was like, hold up, hold up, you know, I imagine
you, Ram Emmanuel as the way you just characterized him and I said
that to him, I said, I felt like when you guys came in to DC in the 90s
that these policies that we felt were important you sort of stripped
away. So I mean, I think there is this huge problem that there is no
democrat that doesn't think that he or she is a progressive and that
term is also empty in meaning because of that. You know, but that's
those are when I think about in here and I heard of how do we
convince people, like those are the people that need convincing. There
still have to be allies of sorts. But that's that's the battle. I mean, but
you're I think you're right in pinpointing that that's been sort of felt
like an adversarial relationship and certainly when we think of like, you
know, everything has to be a private public partnership, that's what I
hear from democrats all the time and leaders, and there's a reality to
that. When there's no, you know, money come in in the federal from
the federal government like you start to think creatively, but it's also
it's also not thinking imaginatively about the possibilities that are not
in front of you, about re creating the system. Hey. Go ahead.
>> What do you see as the role of the public housing authority today?
It has changed a lot, and the decentralization of affordable units is a
good thing, in some sense, but you mentioned how it makes it harder for
folks to organize and build communities. So how does a public
housing authority address that today?
>> Yeah, I mean, I think there, you know, I think of like the Chicago Housing Authority,
and, in a way, they're way more nimble than they ever were and
that's also because they don't, you know,
actually manage any of the properties and there's
a smaller number of units, but also, the idea of managing three times
as many Section 8 apartments, if that was really being done
effectively, you know, think how difficult that is to check on all those
landlords, you know, to check in on the residents. So I think that's a
place where we still haven't really figured out how to manage that system,
if that's what we're looking at, like, say, even in sort of pie in
the sky like a universal voucher program., you know, that kind of
managing would take a completely different work, sort of being
nimble, like, the things that housing authorities are doing are looking
for these public private partnerships and sort of making smaller
developments, you know, in Chicago it's like coplacing a new
development with a library or using some land and giving to a grocery
store in a food dessert and then using that to build housing elsewhere
and certainly the thing that they're doing most feels like rad, you know,
that's sort of the big push. I think I have time for one more question. I just saw a sign.
>> So one of the things that struck me when I was on the side of Cabrini Green last
summer was just how close it is to downtown and the area is completely gentrified.
It's large open ball fields and so my question is, you know,
there's the frustration among the former residents in not
getting units in that new housing that was built, but I'd be
interested to know what you've heard from former residents
about the displacement and, frankly, the substitution that an
entirely different group of people came in and benefitted from the
redevelopment in this land graph. What's do you have any views on that?
>> Yeah. I mean, so, you know, because of its location, the talk of
land grabbing had been going on for 40 years, it's like there was this
talk of waiting for it to happen, you know, like the suspicion that it was
going to happen. They're pissed. They're angry. They it was coming
and it did come, exactly what iting you to, that element, you can talk to
JR who was who was is a resident and fought passionately and called
out these issues. But exactly what you're saying it is, it is prime real
estate, some of the primest in the city, and like I said, it was anomaly
that public housing came there, and so the sense that it would be
cleared of it mostly doesn't feel like a surprise but it feels like a real
loss in many senses. Thank you so much for having me here. I really appreciate it.
[ Applause ]
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