More on Socialist Housing

better days — 1966, before LBJ unleashed his War on Poverty on the country’s blacks

Burning Madoff’s comment regarding the 8-30g developers’ vision for Greenwich vs reality: “Reminds me of beautiful sketches of housing projects with Green/s in the name” reminded me to look again at Chicago’s Cabrini-Green, one of the worst housing projects in America, and how the politicians “solved” the problem:

Cabrini-Green: A History of Broken Promises

The residents of Cabrini-Green had reason to be skeptical.

For years, their calls for help had gone largely unheeded. The conditions in their publicly subsidized high-rise apartments had only grown worse over time, and they had the political misfortune to be Black and living in one of the most segregated cities in the nation.

So when former Mayor Richard M. Daley — under increasing pressure to stop the national headlines portraying their community as the model for the failures of public housing — sent prominent Black politicians and city officials to their community to front his billion-dollar transformation plan, residents turned out by the hundreds.

They gathered on a winter morning in 1997 inside a high school auditorium. Many brought their children. At the time, Cabrini-Green had been neglected for years by their landlord — the Chicago Housing Authority. Once a sparkling beacon of hope for poor families, it had been allowed to deteriorate into a complex riddled with boarded up units, broken elevators and a litany of unmet maintenance needs.

Now, Daley and his lieutenants promised an altogether new direction for the prime real estate on the city’s Near North Side: Tear it down and start over.

The promises reverberated over the public address system into an arena filled with doubters: Everyone who wanted to return to the rejuvenated area could do so; they would get their fair share of the billion-dollar economic pie; hundreds of coveted construction jobs would be theirs.

Fast-forward nearly a quarter century and the dilapidated high-rises are gone, replaced with a well groomed, freshly landscaped new neighborhood that includes an Apple store, a swanky river walk lined with boats and more than 3,500 mixed-income apartments — most of which the original Cabrini-Green tenants could never afford.

The total price tag to taxpayers has now more than doubled to $2 billion on a plan — more than a decade behind schedule — that has transformed a Black neighborhood to a predominantly white one. By the time it’s done, taxpayers will have spent more than a half-million dollars for each of the more than 3,500 Cabrini-Green families the city kicked out.

A yearlong Better Government Association examination of public records and dozens of interviews reveals decades of broken promises, unmet deadlines and a long record of neglect continuing even today.

Of the 2,500 construction jobs Daley promised to Cabrini-Green residents, the BGA found only 40 who actually got one. Of the nearly 4,000 homes already built or underway, only 48 are being built by a construction company owned by a former Cabrini-Green resident — the only Black-owned builder on the project, the BGA found.

And of the thousands of families who were promised they could return, more than 80% never did — some were disqualified, relocated or simply overwhelmed with bureaucracy. Many died waiting. Even today, 85 families who used to live in Cabrini-Green are still on decades-old waiting lists to move back.

City officials and the CHA ignored residents’ demands, repeatedly reneged on promises, and tossed up so many barriers for many that their return became nearly impossible. Black-owned businesses that sprung up in the wake of the city’s promises struggled to survive with only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions that went to mostly white developers — many with the kind of political connections well known to hold sway at City Hall, the BGA found.

You can read the history of Cabrini-Green here, from its start in 1937 to its final demise in 1999. The author blames the whole mess on racism, of course but that’s to be expected.

And you don’t have to go all the way to Chicago to see the triumph of good intentions. In 1994, The LA Times reported on Bridgeport’s own Father Panik Village; the story is indistinguishable from Cabrini-Green's.