HOUSING THAT MEANS FREEDOM

CHICAGO -- What I saw here on a recent summer weekend was a sight I
never imagined. I am not referring to two-year-old Millennium Park,
the stunning mixture of greenery and architecture that has been built
over the old railroad yards east of Michigan Avenue. I am talking
about another of Mayor Richard M. Daley's legacies, the mixed-income
townhouse and apartment developments south and west of the Loop that
have replaced those 16-story monuments to drugs, despair and
degradation that were the landmarks of Chicago's public housing for 50
years.

Those projects -- with notorious names such as Cabrini-Green and Ida
B. Wells -- constituted a wall of separation in the city, a barrier
that blocked the black ghetto from the Lake Michigan shoreline, where
affluent whites lived.

The windows of those gray concrete towers were often shattered by
gunfire, and the elevators reeked of urine and drugs. Women with
babies feared the gangs that "owned" the buildings.

Now, except for a handful of relics awaiting demolition, those emblems
of the misguided urban planning of the 1950s are gone. In their place
you have two-story apartment buildings, air-conditioned, brightly
painted, with units fully carpeted, modern kitchens, and washing
machines and dryers.

More remarkable, any given building will likely contain identical
units -- some public housing, some subsidized, affordable rentals, and
some market-rate rentals or owner-occupied. And you can't tell which
is which.

On a recent weekend, I visited three of the new neighborhoods with
Terry Peterson, the chief executive of the Chicago Housing Authority.
Peterson, a former alderman who is built like a linebacker and has a
linebacker mentality when it comes to bulldozing the bureaucracy, had
described the change to me when he was in Washington, testifying to
Congress. But I would not have believed it if I hadn't seen the new
homes and neighborhoods myself -- and talked with some of the people
whose lives have been remade by the change in their living conditions.

At Oakwood Shores, one of the new developments, residents Sandra Young
and Bernard Lloyd told me that they and other longtime public housing
residents had guided the developers on what they wanted in their new
buildings -- and they helped recruit other families. In Oakwood and in
several other developments, the residents themselves demanded drug
tests for all families.

Clean buildings are one thing, but what makes a neighborhood are the
amenities -- parks, schools, recreation facilities, police and fire
protection. All of them have been supplied by Daley as part of the
1999 agreement that gave him control of the housing agency, so
troubled in the past it had been taken over by the feds. Daley cut the
deal directly with Bill Clinton, who overrode the objections of
Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo.

Daley told me that his father, the longtime mayor, was opposed to the
high-rise construction from the start, but the design was imposed on
the city. Be that as it may, the son is justly proud of having created
a much more humane design. He and Peterson are convinced -- along with
many scholars of the culture of poverty -- that people learn by
example. Living among people who go to work every day and seek to
improve their families' lives rubs off on welfare recipients.

Already, 174 families that were living in subsidized or public housing
units have saved enough to make down payments to purchase their own
units. As of last month, the completed mixed-income projects included
almost 2,000 units of public housing, almost 1,500 market-rate and 725
affordable housing units. Occupancy rates for all three are at a peak,
and no wonder, when one sees the Montessori preschool the city has
opened in one neighborhood, the University of Chicago-run charter
school in another and the brand-new recreation center -- with an
indoor pool and an outdoor water park, a huge gym and day-care center
- -- in a third.

Daley and Peterson say that HUD has been cheering them on since George
W. Bush became president. But Bush has let the HOPE VI housing
program, which provided much of the outside capital for Daley's
initiative, lapse, and he has been trying to get rid of the Community
Development Block Grant program, which also has been vital to
Chicago's success.

One measure of that success is that the city's investment of $242
million in mixed-income housing has triggered more than $1 billion of
private and outside public financing.

For me, a more important measure came when Bernard Lloyd said that
people in the projects "used to feel completely cut off from the rest
of Chicago. Now you have the freedom to go where you want to go. I go
jogging on Promontory Point" -- a landmark on the Lake Michigan
waterfront. "I never even thought of doing that before."