It’s taken 26 years of courtroom and political battles, but Dorothy Gautreaux’ dream is slowly starting to come true.
Back in 1966, when the Urban League and a group of black west-side activists initiated their protests against the CHA and HUD, Polikoff was a lawyer for a private law firm and the city was at the tail end of an influx of southern blacks. The CHA and HUD had responded to the mass immigration by building new low- income housing in poor and already overcrowded black communities.
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Most of this new housing consisted of high-rise projects, opposed in the early 50s by civil rights activists and public interest liberals such as former CHA executive director Elizabeth Wood. The liberals argued that concentrating large numbers of poor families in poorly built high rises would only breed more poverty and crime. Better, they said, to build low-rise units throughout the entire city and suburbs. That way you break up the concentration of poor people–thus giving many low-income residents access to better schools, parks, and libraries in other parts of the city and improving the quality of life in the inner city as well.
In 1980 Jane Byrne, then mayor, agreed to build the units. But she backed away from her pledge in the face of heated protest. Next Harold Washington vowed to build the units, and by the mid-1980s the CHA had acquired almost 100 buildings that it intended to rehab. But the task proved tougher than Washington or his housing chiefs thought: few of the buildings were developed, and most of them eventually became dilapidated beyond repair.
“The HUD handbook we have to deal with is eight or ten inches thick,” says Hickman. “It’s a maze. They have a highly regimented series of regulations that we are obligated to go by, few of which fit the real world. Their cost guidelines for new construction are unrealistically low. It took us six extra months to get them to lift those caps.”
So far Habitat has stayed clear of those southwest- and northwest-side neighborhoods that so fiercely resisted scattered-site units in the past. Instead, they’ve concentrated their efforts on integrated and predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods on the north and near west sides, where the demand for new housing is strong. The program mandates that residents pay no more than 30 percent of their income in rent; the average rent is $180 a month.
“I think we have to look at this program as a model for the future,” says Polikoff. “The big issue will be what to do about the many high-rise buildings that were built in the 50s and 60s. A lot of them are wearing out with the years. We’re going to face a critical decision: do we rebuild them or do we replace them with low-rise units? As a society we are programmed to re-build, not replace. I think that would be disastrous in this case. I’d like to see us build on the success of the scattered-site program and make the high rises things of the past.”
