Taylor residents would be resettled in other housing projects-a frightening prospect for many, since that would mean crossing gang boundaries. At another meeting the agency said that some families would receive a housing voucher to help cover their rent in the private market. At yet another meeting it was declared that large families would be split up: aunts and uncles and grandparents who weren’t on the lease would have to fend for themselves.
With so much confusion in the air, tenants came to rely on rumors. There was talk of a political conspiracy whereby powerful white politicians wanted to tear down Robert Taylor in order to spread its citizens around the city and dilute the black vote. There was even a rumor about me: word was going around that I worked for the CIA, gathering secret information to help expedite the demolition. I assumed that this theory arose out of my attempt to procurea Department of Justice grant for the Boys & Girls Club, but I couldn’t say for sure.
Many tenants still clung to the idea that the demolition wouldn’t happen at all, or at least not for a long time. But I couldn’t find a single tenant who, regardless of his or her belief about the timing of the demolition, believed that the CHA would do a good job of relocation. Some people told me they were willing to bribe their building presidents for preferential treatment. Others were angry at the government for taking away their homes and wanted to stage protests to halt the demolition.
There was also a deep skepticism among tenants that their own elected leaders would work hard on their behalf. Ms. Bailey and other building presidents were being besieged by constituents desperate for advice.
One day I sat in Ms. Bailey’s office as she waited for a senior CHA official to show up for a briefing. Several other tenant leaders were also waiting, in the outer room. Ms. Bailey made no effort to hide the fact that she, along with most of the other tenant leaders, had already agreed to support the demolition rather than try to save the buildings. “The CHA made things perfectly clear to us,” she explained. “These buildings are coming down.” She spoke to me as if I were a five-year-old, with no understanding whatsoever of city politics. “Of course, you got a few people who think they can stop this, but I keep telling them, ‘Look out for your own family, and get out while you can.’ I’m looking out for myself.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“That means I got one shot to get what I can from the CHA for me and for my people. The CHA don’t have no money, Sudhir! They made that clear to us. And you know they just want to get us out of here, so I’m going to get something out of this.”
“Like what?”
“Well, I already told them I need a five-bedroom house in South Shore,” she said with a rich laugh. Then she told me the building presidents’ personal requests. “Ms. Daniels wants the CHA to give her son’s construction company a contract to help tear down the buildings. Ms. Wilson made a list of appliances she wants in her new apartment. Ms. Denny will be starting a new business, and the CHA needs to hire her to help relocate families.”
“And you think the CHA will actually agree to these demands?”
Ms. Bailey just sat and stared at me. Apparently my naivete was showing once more.
I tried again. “You already got them to agree, didn’t you?”
Again she was silent.
“Is that what this meeting is about?” I motioned toward the outer room where the other building presidents were waiting. “Is that why this guy from the CHA is coming?”
“Well, no,” she said. “We already had that conversation. Today is about the families. Let me tell you how this process is going to go. I know it’s early, but they’re already tearing down the projects on the West Side, so there ain’t no mystery anymore.” The Henry Horner projects on the West Side were being razed to make way for a new sports arena, the United Center, which would host the Chicago Bulls, the Chicago Blackhawks, and, eventually, the 1996 Democratic National Convention. “We’ll make our list, and they’ll take care of our people.”
“Your list?”
“I already told you the CHA has no money, Sudhir! What part of this don’t you understand?” She grew very animated and then suddenly quieted down. “They can’t help everyone. And you know what? They’ll mess up like they messed up in the past. Not everyone is going to be taken care of.”
Ms. Bailey said that she would likely be able to help only about one-fourth of the families move out safely. Her bigger job, she said, was to make sure that the remaining three-fourths grasped this reality. The CHA, she said, “plans to use most of their money to demolish the buildings, not help people move out.”
So Ms. Bailey and the other building presidents made lists of the families who they felt should have priority in obtaining rent vouchers, assistance in finding a new apartment, or free furniture and appliances. This list, it turned out, didn’t necessarily comprise the neediest families-but, rather, the building presidents’ personal friends or tenants who had paid them small bribes.
I asked Ms. Bailey how much she was getting.
“Sudhir, I’ll be honest with you,” she said, smiling. “We’ll be taken care of. But don’t forget to put in your little book that the CHA also gets their share. We’re all washing each other’s hands around here.”
It wasn’t very pleasant to watch this entire scenario play out in two parallel worlds. In the media all you heard were politicians’ promises to help CHA tenants forge a better life. On the ground, meanwhile, the lowest-ranking members of society got pushed even lower, thanks to a stingy and neglectful city agency and the constant hustling of the few people in a position to help. In the coming months, the place began to take on the feel of a refugee camp, with every person desperate to secure her own welfare, quite possibly at the expense of a neighbor.
Not everyone, however, was so selfish or fatalistic. For some tenants demolition represented a chance to start fresh with a better apartment in a safer neighborhood. It was particularly inspiring to watch such tenants work together toward this goal while their elected leaders mainly looked out for themselves.
One such optimist was Dorothy Battie, a forty-five-year-old mother of six who had spent nearly her entire life in the projects. Dorothy lived in a building a few blocks away from J.T. She was a heavyset woman, deeply religious, who always had a positive demeanor despite having suffered through everything the projects had to offer. Her father and several nieces and nephews had been killed in various gang shootings. Dorothy had fought through her own drug addiction, then helped other addicts enter rehab. Some of her children were now in college, and one was a leader in a Black Kings gang.
Dorothy had never been an elected tenant leader, but she was a self-appointed godmother to countless families. She helped squatters find shelter, fed tenants who couldn’t afford to eat, and provided day care for many children, some related by blood and others not. Spurred on now by the demolition, she began to act as a sort of relocation counselor for several families who were determined to live near one another in a new neighborhood. They thought that sticking together was their best, and maybe only, chance for survival. These families became informally known as “the Stay-Together Gang,” and their undisputed ringleader was Dorothy.
I caught up with her one day in her living room as she was looking over a list of the families she most wanted to help.
“Let’s see,” she said, “I got Cherry, three kids. Candy, two kids. Marna, a son and a daughter. Princess, three kids. Carrie, two young girls. And there’s probably a few more.” All these young women were friends who shared baby-sitting, cars, and cooking. Now their mission, with Dorothy’s help, was to find a place to live where they could keep their network intact.
“See, here’s the problem,” Dorothy explained. “I know what it’s like out there in the private market. You end up in some apartment, with no one around, no one to help you. And you’re scared. At least if a few people can move with each other, stay together, they can help each other. Lot of people out there don’t like us because we come from the projects. They may not answer the door if we knock for help. So I want to make sure people don’t get stuck in the cold.”
It was important, she said, to start with the most stable family in the network. That was Cherry, who worked thirty hours a week as a fast-food cashier and also went to night school. Dorothy’s plan called for Cherry to find an apartment in a good neighborhood and then bring the other families over.
While this plan seemed pretty straightforward, Dorothy told me that success was hardly guaranteed. “Things never go as planned,” she said bluntly, “because we’re dealing with poor people.”
Dorothy’s first obstacle was Ms. Reemes, a powerful tenant in her building, who was not elected to any office but had great influence with the CHA and police. Like Ms. Bailey, Ms. Reemes expected families to pay her a fee, anywhere from fifty to two hundred dollars, for smoothing the relocation process. Every family that Dorothy helped meant one less potential bribe for Ms. Reemes. Although the building hadn’t even been singled out yet for
