Jamie Kalven, public housing activist Part 2 - By Jamie Kalven

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Entry 2

Posted Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2002, at 10:40 AM ET

Jamie Kalven is a writer and a human rights activist in Chicago public housing.

More photos from this diary.

A slide show of photos taken at the Stateway Gardens housing development.

I awoke at 5:30 a.m., without an alarm clock, to the sound of bird song. Most days I am up before dawn. This is my writing time: two hours of quiet and solitude before I immerse myself in the turbulence and clamor of Stateway Gardens.

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When the weather allows, I write on the balcony of our third-floor apartment. We live in Kenwood, an integrated, middle-class neighborhood at the edge of the black South Side. Our apartment is half a block from the house where I grew up. From the balcony, I look out on the tops of trees that shaded and dropped their leaves on me when I was a child. I am deeply a native of this place. It holds strata upon strata of memory and association through which I know myself. Every day I look with deepening puzzlement at sights I have seen all my life and wonder what it is like as their world is dismantled around them.

When I was younger, I traveled widely on several continents. I was drawn to wild places and was, for a time, a passionate mountaineer. A friend and I once drove a motorcycle, laden with climbing gear, from Paris to New Delhi. But I have become, as Polish poet Milosz somewhere describes himself, "a man of a few streets." Not provincial. Certainly not agoraphobic. But intensely local. The adventures these days are close at hand.

Kenwood has achieved a rare degree of comfortable, unself-conscious racial integration. It is a place to which mixed-race couples move in order to raise their children in a setting in harmony with their households. Yet the relationship of this neighborhood to the public housing development where I work, five minutes away by car, can only be described in the language of apartheid. Passing back and forth daily between these worlds, I permanently live in the state of heightened lucidity travelers experience when they return home after a long period abroad and see the strange in the familiar.

Today Stateway seemed a world in transition. When I arrived at the office, there were two moving vans outside the House of Pain. And at the center of the development a city crew had excavated a deep channel and was laying a new water main. I asked the foreman why they were doing the work. "For the future," he replied.

Cutting hair up under the buildingUp under the building, a barber cut the hair of customers who sat on a tree stump. A story circulated that the night before a gangbanger had tried to stick up a drug customer who had disarmed him and taken his gun. It was also rumored that the drug dealers who operate on one side of the building were going to pack up shop and relocate.

Around the clock, a never-ending parade of customers passes through the drug marketplace. Black and white, well-heeled and down-and-out, they step into the dark interior corridors off the lobby to be served by the young men laboring in the drug trade.

The office where I work is at the end of one of these corridors. A five-bedroom apartment that we have converted into office space, it houses several collaborating organizations: 32 Degrees (a public health initiative); the CARA Program (a job training organization with which we collaborate in an initiative directed at non-leaseholders); and the Stateway Civil Rights Project (a police accountability project in collaboration with the Mandel Legal Clinic of the University of Chicago Law School). Also, a lawyer from the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago and a social worker from the Family Institute of Northwestern University have office hours there in the course of the week.

Today two groups of students from Northwestern University made their way down that corridor. They came to talk with me as part of their (unusually adventurous) freshman orientation program. I enjoyed the encounters. The students were appealing—attentive, intelligent, full of questions.

We ended up talking about the way in which, as Albert Murray once put it, the social sciences can become a sort of folklore when social scientific categories are treated as essences. I recalled a phone call that WBEZ, the Chicago public radio station, received recently when it aired an interview I had done with a former Stateway drug dealer and addict named Fred Hale. A remarkable witness to his own experience, Fred took us inside the drug culture up under the building and compellingly described his own struggles to stay clean. The program was generally well received, but the station got one call from a man in Wilmette, a northern suburb, who was incensed that WBEZ was giving air time to a former drug dealer and heroin addict. What fascinated me about this call was that it came within the first five minutes of the first airing of the 25-minute program. Without listening to Fred, the caller knew enough about him—public housing resident, felon, heroin addict—to know that he didn't need to know more.

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After saying goodbye to the second group of Northwestern students on State Street, I encountered E, a 38-year-old man who used to be a lookout for the drug dealers in the building. "If you've got nowhere to go," he said bitterly, "come to the House of Pain." Two months ago he had emerged from prison clean and full of hopes for the future. Now he was in agony from a combination of being "dope sick" and ashamed that he had fallen back into heroin use. "I'm not going down with the building," he told me. "I'm not going to let that happen."

See a slide show of photos taken at the Stateway Gardens housing development.

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Entry 2

Posted Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2002, at 10:40 AM ET

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Jamie Kalven is a writer and a human rights activist in Chicago public housing.

COMMENTS

Notes From The Fray Editor IV:

Kalven's entries for Thursday and Friday helped explain why he feels tied to Stateway and how his own . Not many posts commented on the relationship between his work and his wife's rape, but Amanda Brooks started a good thread here. The posts below give Kalven a hard time, but are heartfelt and worth discussing. On another tack, Lisa and Anon-a-Mom had a frank discussion of welfare, work and parenting here.

Remarks From The Fray (Thursday's and Friday's Entries):

Kalven says the his role in the Stateway project is in getting the best deal for the tenants. The word deal suggests exchange, but what are the tenants bringing to the table besides a need. What do they have to offer that makes the deal worth while for those funding it. Given the history of housing projects, I would say those who are funding the project are getting a raw deal.

-- JWB
(To reply, click here.)

In Friday's entry, Kalven portrayed the changes at Stateway as "Orwellian," and the destruction of the community there as based in "fear" and "ignorance". This kind of language, while perhaps not entirely incorrect or inappropriate, is over-the-top and too cynical. It is interesting to me that this language occurs to Kalven as he is flying in a plane overlooking Chicago. Similarly in this passage, Kalven seems to be looking down on everyone who he imagines does not share his commitment to this community, because they do not share in his sense of despair at the changes it is going through. To be sure, there is plenty of fear and ignorance in how people think about issues related to public housing, and in how public officials can shuffle these residents around with little concern for whether they will be able to establish a stable life or will fall through the cracks unnoticed. But even with the mistakes that are being made along this process, there is a larger and more complex picture here, and Kalven is grossly unfair in boiling it down to a simple, callous destruction of a community. Stateway Gardens, finally, is coming down, and this fact can only be a good thing. Building this development was a terrible mistake, and the ensuing years have shown clearly enough that its continued existence was indefensible. It is terribly unfortunate that the demolition of the buildings also brings about the destruction of the community, but, also unfortunately, there just is no way to accomplish the one without causing the other. My position on these issues is based in indignation and shame at the circumstances that created Stateway, in sympathy for the residents who must uproot themselves and search for new housing and new sources of support, and in hope for a better future - but not in fear and ignorance. Also, I'm sure that, as Kalven speaks to residents there, he will find that (though this surely will not be a unanimous opinion) there will be quite a few who are happy to be leaving there, and pleased to see the buildings come down.

-- Steve R
(To reply, click here.)

Notes From The Fray Editor III:

David Eads's latest substantive post, primarily about the relationship between Stateway and the drug trade, is here. Although Jackie Askew's story was the focus of today's piece, there was little discussion of the relationship between art and suffering (that is, blues) or the strange ethnographic moment when Kalven and Justin Kaufman record her singing. Instead, Qui Tam inveighed against "culture of poverty" stereotyping, others (such as JSwift) looked for solutions to the problem of absent fathers and dependent mothers, and Mr. Senryu hoped Mario would be able to stay out an institution.

Notes From The Fray (Wednesday's Entry):

This week's Diary brought back memories of my childhood in Chicago. I spent a lot of time staying with various relatives, including my two grandmothers. One lived in "The Projects" and the other in Roseland (South 117th). (Obviously, the family was not middle class.)

Many readers have posted messages about the shiftless, criminal nature of the inhabitants of the Chicago projects and seedier suburbs. After spending a lifetime fighting to get an education and a professional career (and believe me, it's a fight when you're poor trash), I can now read posts in which impoverished people are written off as hopeless druggies, congenitally lazy, and career felons. Thanks so much for perpetuating a stereotype that will make it harder for others to leave The Projects and move on.

-- Qui Tam

(To reply, click here.)

A modest proposal: require all people, male and female, to be on birth control in order to collect welfare (a male "pill" will be on the market soon). Not sterilization, something reversible. If you have proven you can't support kids (by being on welfare), then you can't have kids. No birth control, no check. If you want kids, prove you can make a living.

-- J Swift

(To reply, click here.)

Jackie should NEVER have to put Mario in an institution! The disability rights movement is targeting large, impersonal institutions as obsolete. The right way to handle situations like the Askews' is through community care, that is, in-home caregivers. It's not only the right thing to do, studies show it costs a lot less than running institutions.

Even the Extreme Court recognizes this. In Olmstead v. L.C., 6 Injustices held that the Americans with Disabilities Act requires states to place people with severe disabilities, like Mario, in the least restrictive environment possible.

Trouble is, Jackie and Mario live in Illinois, which has one of the WORST records when it comes to implementing Olmstead. Indeed, private providers there are even now building new group homes!

-- Mr. Senryu

(To reply, click here.)

Notes From The Fray Editor II:

Although today's entry focused on Kalven's alternate worlds (home, work, academia), the Fray has been concerned with the possible successes of a "human-scale, mixed-income" approach to public housing in place of "high-rise poverty warehouses." While Reed and Levi Sandlin hold out the hope that dispersing poor people will help them break "the cycle of poverty," Lizzy and T-reason think otherwise. (To find a post that addressed the distinction between Kalven's home and work, I had to go back to yesterday and Steve's harsh post.)

Finally, one thing that The Fray is bringing to light is the uniqueness of Chicago's public housing—its scope and its problems. See Steve R's post here and Bridgeport Joe's here. Both are longish, but then, how else would you tell the story of public housing in Chicago? I'm asking …

Remarks From The Fray (Tuesday's Entry):

Moving on is sad, yes. But in the world of inner city redevelopment moving on, and in some cases out, of high-rise low-income housing units is the first step to reclaiming self, place, and identity. Human scaled mixed income redevelopment is the best way to provide an atmosphere where poverty is not the norm, crime is not the norm, and avenues for change seem ever apparent. My hope is that the CHA is doing a much better job now than when they decided Cabrini Green had to be razed--immediately. Eliminating the edifice does not solve the problem. Relocation these families to a more livable community with increased opportunities and a more pleasing environment is on the only answer. Moving out of what was "home" is sad, but my feeling is that with proper planning on the part of the CHA all families involved will be better off having escaped this "tower of despair".

-- Reed

(To reply, click here.)

As a professional property manager, I must conclude that the decision made by Chicago to demolish these tenements, build new revenue-producing, mixed-income-resident developments is laudable. It's not that the bad elements of old public housing concepts will be supplanted by these new projects, but now, the other elements will present themselves in greater concentrations: the good element will outnumber the bad element.

-- Levi Sandelin

(To reply, click here.)

So where does this leave the displaced people? Most are taking vouchers and moving to the Suburbs. They are renting from slum lords who are happy to have a steady income, or moving to housing projects there. These suburbs do not have the infrastructure to support people that do not own cars, so the people have no way to get to work. They can't work, they can't move up and out of the system. They still need money though...so they take up "professions" that you can do with out having to go out of the neighborhood. Suddenly, these suburbs that were once full of decent hard working class people are full of prostitution and drug dealing. Every department becomes stressed, with a massive increase in need for services, but no increase in taxes to support those needs. Everyone that can flees, buying...where else...but in the new affordable beautiful housing close to work, and close to the lake. Heck, you don't even need a car anymore! Just jump on the EL! While the suburbs die. Just go to Ford Heights, Blue Island, Harvey, and Maywood.

-- Lizzy

(To reply, click here.)

It's not public housing, it's the people!!! If you break up the projects and send the people to "Scattered Site Housing" to get them away from the high crime areas, you will find that you have exported the drugs and high crime to all of the suburbs AS THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT DID IN MY STATE.

Do you think that drug dealers, murderers, thieves, junkies, pimps, gang bangers, thugs etc. commute to the projects? NO!!! They are already there. That's where they live. And when you move them, they become your next door neighbors.

-- Voice of T-reason

(To reply, click here.)

Ah, the projects.

What romance lies there. The tres chic 'art naif' of the graffiti. The minimalism of the 'court centrale'. The passions of 'les aboriginales'.

How 'joyeux' they are. How much I love to have my office next to them. How I worry for them when I go home.

And how I wish they would realise the wonderfulness of the gritty essence of their lives compared to my transference and stay in their zoo. Sorry, project.

So I could visit. And empathise.

And so my partner could take 'les photos'.

Ah, the projects.

Without them I am nothing.

-- Steve

(To reply, click here.)

Notes From The Fray Editor I:

Any poster who wants to engage seriously with the issues raised by public housing, particularly in Chicago, should begin with the post by Kalven's colleague David Eads here (check his MBTU for subsequent posts). There are larger and smaller debates in this Fray. chrisj speaks to a big one, between public housing advocates and those who believe the situation is hopeless. only1percent addresses the issue of social engineering through architecture or activism or both. Miguel Castaneda makes the truism "money isn't everything" seem relevant again.

Remarks From The Fray (Monday's Entry):

Enough of this "I'm so poor and live in a dump" song and dance. I'm a police officer in a major metropolitan city, work in major goverment housing developments, and am sick and tired of hearing this same old line. True you're poor...but economics has absolutely nothing to do with keeping a clean house, food picked up, trash emptied, clothes cleaned and folded, kids in school, etc...Money doesn't give you pride in yourself and personal belongings.
Those who can do something about their economic situation should. Get an education/job skill, stay in school, join the military or just find a stable job. I did it, so can they. America is not so oppressive that one can't move up the socio-economic ladder (legally) if they want to. There is not a "great white man" controlling minorities and keeping them oppressed. I've just about had it, let 'em live like animals if that's what they want. Just don't try to make me feel sorry for them.

-- chrisj

(To reply, click here.)

I am profoundly skeptical about the CHA's moves to bring down the high rise housing. Although the new housing may be easier to maintain and police, and "mixed income" may introduce some positive effects, one only needs to spend time in the deep South, to see how well the "projects" problems of crime, drugs, ignorance, and illegitimacy thrive in environments where even the poorest live in detached homes or trailers, frequently in near proximity (geographically and socially) to working class and middle class folks.

The solutions are much more difficult, and will never come from the level of person-to-person poverty services, which are about helping the helpless, not about restoring social sanity.

-- only1percent

(To reply, click here.)

I am a Database programmer, and I volunteer at a youth center that serves many youth who are homeless or on public assistance. Many times I have heard from them that, I must have "the perfect life". Many times, with family, strangers, and politicians, I have heard how people on public assistance or who are homeless "must have miserable lives". Most of the youth that I know who must have "miserable" lives are among the most interesting, caring and complex people I have met, who manage to enjoy their lives quiet well (better sometimes than I).
It's easy for people used to having money to think that not having it must be awful, after all without money their lives wouldn't be the same. For those without the reverse is equally easy, but what is easiest of all is to lose sight of the fact that everyone faces struggle and hardship as well as triumphs and laughter.
Money is just one thing in this complex world.

-- Miguel Castaneda

(To reply, click here.)

(9/23)