May 29, 2013
By BEN AUSTEN
On a 100-degree day last summer, on Chicago’s southernmost edge, Willie Fleming, who goes by J. R. (“It stands for Just Righteousness”), crept up to an abandoned ranch house shrouded in overgrown weeds. The overwhelmingly poor and black neighborhood sits beside a 150-acre, 1,500-unit public-housing complex and is about as far — literally and figuratively — from the Loop as you can get and still be in Chicago. Nearly a quarter of the homes in the area had been empty for at least two years. Usually when J. R. scouts for properties to break into and take over, he looks for ones with unmown grass, a sign of vacancy and disregard. But this was excessive. “I don’t come back here without my air gun,” he said, backing away. A young couple next door had set up lawn chairs on the sidewalk. An infant in only a diaper tottered around them. “That’s the dead-dog cemetery,” the man announced, motioning to the ranch house.
J. R. told the couple about the Anti-Eviction Campaign, the group he founded in 2009 with Toussaint Losier, a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Chicago and a fellow housing activist. At 40, J. R. possesses the softening bulk of a former running back — he was all-state as a high-school sophomore. A skunklike streak of white runs up the center of his ringleted black dreadlocks. In the past year, he said, the Anti-Eviction Campaign freed up 20 abandoned properties, fixing up the buildings and moving “home-less people into the people-less homes.”
As hard as the foreclosure crisis hit Chicago, its force has been felt with an unevenness that can seem fiendishly unjust. The U.S. Postal Service, which tracks these numbers, reported that 62,000 properties in Chicago were vacant at the end of last year, with two-thirds of them clustered as if to form a sinkhole in just a few black neighborhoods on the South and West Sides. Currently about 40 percent of all homeowners in these communities owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth, and countywide 80,000 foreclosures are wending their way through circuit court. Last spring, a nine-month study conducted by the National Fair Housing Alliance revealed what everyone in these neighborhoods already knew: After forcing out families in foreclosure, banks failed to properly market, maintain and secure the vacated homes. Thieves subsequently entered many of the properties and stripped them of copper and anything else that could be trafficked. J. R. couldn’t reconcile the idea that homes were being allowed to turn into wrecks with the fact that the city had a shortage of 120,000 units of affordable housing and some 100,000 people sleeping in shelters or on the street each year. Chicago didn’t have just a housing crisis, he offered, it had a moral crisis.
The Anti-Eviction Campaign always canvassed a neighborhood before acting, J. R. explained to the young parents. He asked if they would support a takeover of either of the empty houses that sandwiched theirs or of any of the abandoned homes on their block. A family that moved in, he said, most likely wouldn’t pay rent or a mortgage, but wasn’t that preferable to a vacant property further deteriorating, becoming a haven for gangbangers or drug users?
“Hell, yeah,” the woman said, without hesitation, from her lawn chair.
“That’s what we need, uh-huh, exactly,” the man added.
Over the last few years, J. R. has been inside more than a hundred abandoned properties, each one a variation on the same theme of despair. He has stumbled upon drugs and whatever paraphernalia people needed to use or make them, along with the gathered sheets and worn-down mattresses of so-called trick houses. He has seen the carcasses of dogs and cats and rats and possums and raccoons. And yet J. R. proves surprisingly upbeat when talking about the efforts of the Anti-Eviction Campaign. At a Y.M.C.A. in Bronzeville, on the South Side, as people crowded into the basement for a screening of “Inside Job” — the 2010 documentary that essentially detailed the depressing back story of their own foreclosure plight — J .R. told them that he had seen the film 19 times and hoped to see it 150 more. It inspired him. “The government failed us. The market failed us. Harvard, Yale and the University of Chicago failed us. Our government — the government — doesn’t belong to us. Forget them; they forgot us. We need to solve our problems ourselves.”
It’s not that the City of Chicago and its public and private partners don’t care about the areas gutted by foreclosures; it’s just that as investments, the numbers on these blocks simply don’t add up, and no amount of good intentions is going to change that any time soon. Since 2009, the city has funneled $168 million from the federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program into the purchase of 862 vacant foreclosures, fixing up 804 of them, at an average cost of $110,000. It sank $350,000 into the repairs of one home, but even at the asking price of $105,000, no buyers could be found. So far only 91 of the units have sold. Although the real estate market has rebounded elsewhere in Chicago, with construction starts and prices both on the rise, many of the blocks surrounding these renovated homes are still studded with unsellable hulls. Of all the properties the city wanted to purchase under the program, it found it could get title on only about 10 percent of the buildings. To dodge fees, banks often weren’t registering their foreclosures, or they didn’t complete the foreclosure process to avoid the tax burden and responsibility of the unmovable real estate. Thousands of other bad mortgages were bundled in private securitization trusts, frequently with the trusts technically owning the loans and the evicted homeowners owning the property.
Cook County now plans to form what will become the nation’s largest land bank, an entity that will acquire thousands of vacant residences, demolishing some, turning others into much-needed rentals and holding onto others until they can be released, strategically, back into the market. By clearing titles and back taxes, the land bank hopes to attract the most responsible of the investor groups that are currently gobbling up distressed housing in neighborhoods with far better prospects. The best of these firms use sophisticated algorithms to determine when to purchase a property, factoring in, among many things, the surrounding vacancy rates, the prevalence of crime and the quality of the schools. In the Chicago neighborhoods inundated with foreclosures, the homes don’t come anywhere close to meeting the minimum threshold for the investors to buy.
“We’re not like Detroit, cordoning off sections of the city,” Benet Haller, Chicago’s principal adviser for planning and design, told me. “But we are like London or Jakarta, with a hyperdense core — a zone of affluence — and something else beyond.” What the housing crisis has revealed, in stark relief, is a Chicago that already looks increasingly like this vision of a ring city, with the moneyed elite residing within the glow of that jewel-like core and the largely ethnic poor and working-class relegated to the peripheries, thebanlieues.
In the decades after World War II, as factories and mills closed and the economy that shaped the whole sprawling city until then collapsed, the “inner city” of Chicago became the place you fled, at least if you were white and had money. Between 1950 and 1990, the population of Chicago declined by 837,000 people. But in the past two decades, the city began to add residents again. No longer hog butcher or toolmaker, Chicago emerged from its long decline as a self-proclaimed “global city” — a tourist destination for the world, a player with derivatives and trade shows, a city of big transportation hubs. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of residents in the city’s central area increased by 48,000 (more than any other city center in the country), and even with tens of thousands of new condos added there before the housing crash, vacancy rates for high-end apartments currently stand near a 10-year low. Richard M. Daley, who during his 22 years as mayor did much to foster the downtown renaissance, even moved from Bridgeport, the family’s old sod on the South Side, to a new upscale development overlooking Millennium Park, which he built. The current mayor, Rahm Emanuel, has already induced 15 corporations to relocate their headquarters to Chicago. “The city is no longer a place to get on a plane and go to the coasts,” Emanuel said in May, “but a place to stay and call home.”
None of this is revelatory. It’s a thumbnail history that any Chicagoan could tell you, and it’s similar to the trajectory of any number of American cities. The conundrum that exists in Chicago, though, is what happens to the “something else beyond” now that the center is prospering. For the people trying to make their lives in the areas that J. R. and his fellow activists are trying to save, the question is not at all a theoretical one. The way many of them see it, they’re being sacrificed so that the city can be reborn.
In these outlying communities, as well, the residents with the means to leave often have, compounding the problems of concentrated poverty. From 2000 to 2010, while affluent whites were migrating back to downtown, Chicago’s African-American population fell by 181,000, an astounding 17 percent drop. Many of them decamped for the south and west suburbs as well as the relative safety and higher living standards of the actual South. The foreclosure crisis then blew through and removed a lot of the remaining homeowners and wealth. It was hard for people on the South Side and the West Side not to see evidence of an engineered shrinkage, a strategy to starve derelict communities of resources, thus bringing about their further depopulation and return to nature. Over the past decade and half, Chicago razed all 82 of its troubled housing project high-rises, the biggest civic redesign since urban renewal placed the massive tower-and-garden developments there in the first place. The towers had become warehouses for the most disadvantaged, symbols of urban decay and the failures of government to reverse this slide. Getting rid of the projects meant that areas near the expanding zone of affluence were cleared of blight. They were also cleared of many of their former inhabitants.
Chicago no longer has the money for big urban renewal projects. Earlier this year, Emanuel did announce an initiative that will couple public and private investment to try to revive several communities that possess — or are at least on the edge of — some existing economic development. In Pullman, on the far South Side, for instance, a Walmart is expected to anchor a 180-acre mixed-use facility. The mayor described how these pockets of activity could become larger, link up and eventually form corridors that lead from, say, the South Loop, through Bronzeville and Hyde Park. But most city plans appear to be focused on land use and stabilization, not development. The city is escalating a program that allowed homeowners to acquire adjoining vacant lots, leaving them with expansive grassy estates. It is promoting urban agriculture and looking to turn empty rail lines and other industrial sites into recreation trails and natural drainage systems. At the same time, the city spent $14 million last year to knock down 736 vacant buildings, including 270 abandoned homes that the Police Department identified as shelters for gangs and other criminal activity.
And then there’s Emanuel’s plan to close 50 schools, almost all of them in the same black and Latino neighborhoods battered by the foreclosures and a recent spike in homicides. The closures weren’t a matter of downsizing, Emanuel has said in the face of intense protests and criticism, but of trading up academically; he has pledged $155 million for upgrades at the “welcoming schools.” Others were worried more about the long-term consequences of these actions. “It’s a slow death once you take the schools out of these communities,” Brad Hunt, an urban historian and co-author of the recent book “Planning Chicago,” told me. “No one is talking shrinkage, even though that’s what we’re doing. In Chicago, that’s not the image we have of our city.”
Before turning to activism full time, J. R. still shared a name with his father, everyone calling him Junior. It seemed too small to him. He said his father was a C.I.A. operative, as well as a gunrunner and drug kingpin at the Cabrini-Green housing complex. His mother, Marlene McIntosh, was a former Black Panther and community organizer who moved the family around a lot. J. R. stayed on the South Side, in the Robert Taylor Homes — once the world’s largest housing project before the city tore it down — and at Cabrini-Green, the Hilliard Homes, the Henry Horner Homes, an apartment on the West Side, another place out in Waukegan and also in the south suburb of Dolton, just outside the Chicago city limits. He left the suburbs before his senior year of high school, moving in with a sister back at Cabrini-Green.
He had his first child there that summer. (The first of 10, a number that city officials, I’ve found, like to mention with a derisive raising of an eyebrow.) Cabrini-Green was then a 23-tower, 3,600-unit island of black abject poverty amid a steadily encroaching sea of white affluence. Located just blocks from the ritzy Gold Coast, the North Side development offered an unusual mix of isolation and access, and many residents were deeply attached to their home, tragic as it was. The towers clutched around J. R.’s high-rise were each controlled by a different gang, and the blacktop between them was known as the killing fields. On days when rumors spread of a retaliatory sniping, mothers would rush to the schools to collect their children, the teachers left standing before emptied classrooms. But J. R. could also point to the field where he played softball and the path along the river where he walked with girlfriends. He had family in nearly every building of the 70-acre project. Cabrini was his home, his identity, and tearing it down felt like taking an eraser to his past.
J. R. racked up arrests for selling drugs and for fighting with the police. He assaulted an assistant principal at his high school, but he said that was to escape a worse fate from the posse of Spanish Cobras waiting for him outside. When he was 19 years old, he started working for the ward’s Young Democrats, a group led in part by Jesse White, a longtime gym teacher at a Cabrini elementary school who went on to become a state representative and is now the Illinois secretary of state. J. R. also operated a recording studio out of a vacant unit in his high-rise, bringing together musicians from the different gangs to record a kind of “We Are the World” of public housing. He still remembered a few lyrics to one song: It’s such a shame, we living in vain./They took our neighborhood, they don’t want us to change./This where my mother grew up. This where my family grew up./Thank the Lord, he sent us to save the Greens through us.
Another Cabrini resident, a man named Joe Peery, helped J. R. land his first job, at U.P.S. Peery was also one of the people running the Chicago-Gary chapter of the National Union of the Homeless. The organization was started in Philadelphia in 1983, when homelessness was shifting from addicts on skid row to displaced families everywhere, and grew to 20 branches nationwide and a membership of 15,000 people. Whereas President Franklin Roosevelt had responded to a similarly dire housing crisis by creating the National Housing Agency, Ronald Reagan reacted by slashing the social safety net, telling stories of a Chicago “welfare queen” who drove a Cadillac and ripped off the government for upward of $150,000. The National Union of the Homeless, with the slogan “You only get what you are organized to take,” pressured cities to create shelters and to give homeless people access to public showers and the right to vote. Peery remembered a homeless man freezing to death in a cardboard box just 100 feet from one of the Cabrini towers — a building filled with vacant units, central heat pumping ceaselessly into each of them. On May 1, 1990, the homeless union began an eight-city coordinated takeover of vacant government-owned housing, a prototype for the takeovers of bank-owned homes today. J. R. said of going off to work with Peery: “He’d talk to all us young guys about our inalienable rights. We’d say: ‘That sounds communist, Joe. That’s socialist, Joe.’ But it was the truth. We started listening to Joe. ‘Mr. Parker was homeless, and now he got a place to stay. Who did that? Joe and them? Wow.’ We saw what was possible.”
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Source: The New York Times
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