Engaging Displacement: On My Summer at Cabrini-Green

Written by Emma Kippley-Ogman

Feature

This past summer I worked to prevent a government’s forced displacement of marginalized citizens from valuable and contested land. My t-shirt wasn’t anti-disengagement orange but was thrift-shop purple. The slogan we chanted was not “Jews do not displace Jews” but “Housing is a human right.” We did not light tires on fire or blockade ourselves inside buildings, but presented the Chicago Housing Authority with a bright pink potty award for its negligence. And we marched with a youth drum corps to the U.S. Attorney’s office downtown to demand an investigation of corruption in the city agency-turned-slumlord.

As a rabbinical student intern with Chicago’s Jewish Council on Urban Affairs (JCUA), devoted to working for social justice, and the Coalition to Protect Public Housing (CPPH), a JCUA community partner that organizes public housing residents to advocate for their housing rights, I saw firsthand what it means to live in this country in inadequate and unstable housing. The residents of Chicago's Cabrini-Green housing project demonstrate how a community perceived as powerless can hold its own in the face of intimidation and threatened dispersion.

From Slums to High Rises

Fifty years ago, public housing was proposed as a solution for housing America’s urban poor. According to the plan, residents would pay one-third of their income in rent and the city would own and maintain the buildings, supported by the federal government. In Chicago and elsewhere, high-rises and row houses sprouted atop the slums that preceded them, and offered residents better living conditions, while also perpetuating racial segregation of neighborhoods. Chicago developments such as the Robert Taylor high-rises (1962) and Cabrini-Green (constructed between 1947-1962) opened with fanfare.

Inadequate maintenance and chronic gang activities combined to leave the physical structures in poor conditions and many residents exhausted from trying to keep children safe.

Since 1999, although more than 50,000 families are on a (now closed) waiting list for public housing units and a 1998 Federal Housing and Urban Development study showed a 150,000 unit deficit in affordable housing for the region, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) has progressively dismantled the city’s public housing developments under its so-called “Plan for Transformation.” The CHA plans a net loss of 13,000 units, and to date has demolished more than 14,000. They have built fewer than 1000 new residences.

Although the CHA has promised to build, the construction budget is at risk and building demolitions continue. While some residents have found private homes, many have been forced to move many times, to new housing that is often worse than the homes they’d been forced to leave. Far too many evicted residents remain homeless and find themselves living on the streets.

Organizing and Educating from Within

On leaving home in Minnesota, an uncle told me that he had once lived in public housing. So as I got off the El for the first time at Chicago Avenue, I wondered whether I’d meet people like my own family or the reputed violence and decay of Cabrini. Surprised by the Starbucks, posh art galleries, and well-dressed masses heading for work, I continued west towards a storage facility and a store that offered check cashing and payday loans. Turning north, I suddenly found myself in another world, one with semi-permeable borders, where children pitch quarters on the sidewalk and everyone greets one another warmly on the street, where decaying buildings with open corridors are neglected by the city but gardens are planted on aging basketball courts, and row house steps are carefully swept every day.

I entered the bustling office of The Coalition to Protect Public Housing (CPPH), which shares space, ideas, and people with the Resident Management Corporation (RMC) of the Cabrini rowhouses. The air is ripe with political commentary, the banter of teenage summer workers, the requests of residents and Russian ladies from down the street, and the laughter of employees’ children and grandchildren soaking up the air conditioning on their way home from camp.

Carol Steele, CPPH’s President and founder and a longtime resident of Cabrini, has a gentle, authoritative presence that anchors the whole operation. She envisions saving the physical and communal structures of Cabrini while teaching residents to know and stand up for their rights. A group of younger organizers are the direct link between the Coalition and the community: Deidre, who lived in Cabrini herself before being displaced, Junior, a current resident and consummate news junkie, and Jamie, who has worked in the community for more than a year.

The organizers of the Coalition pride themselves on listening to the often-ignored voices what the residents of Cabrini want. Their approach to organizing starts with educating people about their right to adequate housing, as stated in the U.S.-ratified United Nations Declaration of Universal Human Rights as well as in the stated commitment of the Chicago Housing Authority to maintain decent, safe, and sanitary housing while implementing its “Plan for Transformation.”

The interns and permanent employees spent the summer working in 534 Division, a sixteen-story concrete building rumored to be closing sometime in the summer or fall. Even with less than half the apartments still occupied, the building remained full of life—children skipping rope outside and playing in the corridors, adults gathered in chairs, reading or chatting, someone always hauling groceries up the stairs on days the elevator failed to move.

The efforts of residents and custodians to keep the buildings' public areas clean cannot make up for the abounding signs of poor maintenance: holes in the walls and ceilings, missing light fixtures in the elevator and stairways, dangerously protruding metal grates, which were once installed to prevent children from falling out of the open hallways, chipped concrete, graffiti, and peeling paint. Apartments, though, were carefully decorated and arranged, working against the entropy of bursting pipes and broken kitchen appliances that often go unfixed for months or years.

When we started door knocking in June with a survey, many residents said they would like to leave the building because of poor maintenance and violence in the neighborhood. Most said that if these two factors changed they would want to stay in their community.

Images and Texts

Two days a week, I would leave Cabrini to study text with fellow rabbinical students. In tractate Peah 8:8-9 of the Mishna, the foundational rabbinic legal text of the second century, it says that a poor person does not have to sell her house to be able to have enough money to live but should instead accept money from the community.

Housing, though, is conspicuously absent from several rabbinic lists of basic necessities that must be filled if lacking. The rabbinic assumption—and therefore the basis for responsibilities around giving to the poor and hungry—seems to be that housing is a given. Our texts do not speak directly to the situation of protracted homelessness or a constant fear of losing one’s home. The ethical world of present-day Chicago presents a stark contrast: many residents of Cabrini experience such a fear daily and struggle even for information about their housing for the upcoming months.

Over the course of the summer, coalition organizers brought together a diverse cast of residents to discuss the conditions of their homes and potential strategies for effecting change. Even a woman who at first said, “I pay no rent—there’s no way they would listen to me” began to voice her concerns. Fed up with their situation, a group of tenants wrote a letter to the CHA expressing their exasperation at years of neglect and inviting the agency’s CEO and the news media to tour the building to draw attention to their plight.

With the news conference scheduled for a Tuesday morning, the CHA sent maintenance crews over the weekend to paint the exterior of the building’s first story, clean the hallways and scrub the stairways that had received no such attention in years. Early Tuesday morning, police officers swept through the building making unexplained visible arrests, and representatives of the CHA knocked on doors asking to speak with leaseholders.

The group of concerned residents who had been so eager to let the world know their situation was intimidated upon confrontation with bureaucratic authority. Nevertheless, several residents spoke out and presented a pink plastic potty to the CHA before offering an inside view of the neglect they've experienced at the hands of the agency. Embarrassed by the public display of disintegration, the CHA soldered and scrubbed and promised future repairs.

In the course of one morning, the power dynamics of Chicago’s housing crisis played themselves out in 534 Division: residents experienced both the intimidation of authorities who hold access to their basic needs and the power of their collective public speech to bring attention and action from these authorities.

Without any input from residents, the CHA has decided to close the building and has begun to offer residents clearer information about a process of moving out to other public housing or the private market. There is no permanent plan for these residents in place beyond the temporary security of a one-year housing voucher. The families of 534 Division, many of whom have expressed interest in temporary Section 8 housing, are tired of fighting for their basic needs. Many hope they will find something better somewhere else. They know, however, that they will find no replacement for their community.

Displacement Across the World

On my last day at Cabrini this summer, Junior, always briefed on the latest news, turned to me and said, “Emma, what’s with this genocide in Palestine?” I racked my brain, Genocide… Palestine… “You know, how they’re pulling all those people up out of their homes?” That Thursday fell during the week of Israel’s implementation of its disengagement plan for Gaza. Oh, that.

I explained to Junior the parties involved in the pullout, that the settlers will be compensated and reestablished in new communities and that the process would hopefully make space for more stable borders and a Palestinian state. He said he understood, and shared the hope that there could be less anger and violence in the region, and then asked, “But how long have those people been in their homes?”

I replied, “Some of them more than twenty years.”

“Then there’s still something wrong with it,” he said in a left-meets-right political full circle.

Until Junior asked me about the evacuation of Gaza settlers I had thought of Israel's disengagement process in simply political terms. The pullout, to my mind, would be a necessary and overdue step in Israel’s making space for Palestinian self-determination and protecting the lives of young Israeli soldiers too often killed defending isolated, extremist settlements, both in Gaza and the West Bank. I was surprised that Ariel Sharon had proposed it and amazed that he would follow through. Junior’s question and a summer spent meeting people who were facing the imminent loss of their homes inspired in me empathy for the displaced settlers and their emotions—from anger and protest to resignation and cooperation.

Watching news coverage of the disengagement proceed with dignity and respect for settlers whose aims are at odds with the Israeli majority presented an even more extreme contrast to the lives of those in Cabrini. So although the emotional experiences of displacement may be shared, as Junior suggested, the political specificity is entirely different. The valuable land of this Chicago neighborhood is being snatched up by wealthy white developers while its primarily poor African-American citizens are dispersed.

And unlike the former Gaza settlers, Cabrini residents are not being compensated by their government with new private homes, ample funds, and opportunities to preserve their community. The evicted residents of Cabrini suffer a fate much worse, and in a context that is starkly different than that of the former Jewish settlers of the Gaza Strip, but the two groups were briefly united, and not just to Junior's mind, by their common experiences of forced relocation.

This summer has been a valuable lesson in the nature of the human beings I’ll serve as a rabbi, about the ways that we disgrace one another, and about our potential for resilience, courage and dignity. My consciousness of Jewish cycles of oppression and redemption juxtaposed with the present realities of Cabrini brought Exodus 23:9 to its full relevance: “You shall not oppress the stranger for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.” As I left Cabrini-Green at the end of the summer, I knew that, united by a common commitment to social justice, my path and those of the residents I worked with would cross again.

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.