chicago people: tell me what's going on with the cabrini-green redevelopment

http://www.televisionheaven.co.uk/fosters.jpg

Cabrini Green was never the only, largest, or 'worst' housing project of it's kind in Chicago. I think it's the best known, though, due to Good Times, Curtis Mayfield, and a few other showbiz connections.

There's plenty of evidence that splitting project residents out into more affluent neighborhoods does loads of positive things, only it's hard to imagine that that's the primary concern here; mostly it's just the reversal of white flight, sending people out of the in-demand city center and into the suburban hinterlands, where any problems they have will be separated by enough sprawl that it can never seem like a particular bad spot.

The really interesting spot, I think, is the far west loop area, which is basically just ghetto with condos spotted throughout. People buying there seem to be gambling fairly heavily on a major change in the neighborhood, and the city seems to be pushing and accommodating any redevelopment it can.

and it is weird that some buildings seem to be semi-abandoned, others have been torn down, and some seem to have been vacated years ago but haven't been demolished. the whole place feels really spooky right now and i can't imagine it's a better place to live than it was 10 years ago.

sure; the positive things are obvious, but what if the influx leads to a new generation of white flight among reactionary "there goes the neighborhood" types, and on the other end of things, what if the new residents' government assistance is one day no longer there and they find themselves faced with a huge rent increase for the privilege of staying in their affluent neighborhood? it's easy to say "uh... why can't they move somewhere else like the rest of us?" but then most of us aren't kicked around from place to place like unwanted foster children.

the condos on halsted just west of cabrini were finished 5 years or so ago. the whole foods and crate n' barrell and other big box stores were there before '98, probably.

And yeah, nabisco was talking about it upthread but basically its shunting people to the inner ring suburbs and outer city limits. Basically thats what happens to cities that can't grow (like Chicago). And thats why places like Evanston are building condos and urban outfitters, white + upper-mid class people are moving away from evanston towards the outer suburbs for cheaper housing or into the city (to, you know, live in the city) and its making a sort of mexico city effect, where the "inner city" is no longer inside the city but surrounding it. One of the many downsides to this (or so I've been made to understand) is - the advantages of public infrastructure (public transport, city services) are lost to poor city residents when they no longer live *in* the city but ostensibly *outside* of it.

There was a series of pieces in the Tribune, I think last summer, about the effects the destruction of cabrini green had on the residents and the communities; basically, the one quote that really stuck with me was when the reporter interviewed a man who was a former Cabrini Green resident who had never lived in a nicer place, since he had been relocated to mixed-income housing, yet he had never felt so alone. The series looked at how relocation had torn up communties, thrown the elaborate gang alignments out of wack etc. It was an insightful piece.

All this said, high-density high rise public housing is fucking hell and maybe I'm wrong but it seems like whatever (major) imperfections in the new system this has to be a change for the better.

i thot that was your point!

Which is why this tends to have the biggest benefit for working family units: if you're still surrounded by the people that matter, and especially if you're going into this with your childrens' interests foremost in your mind, there's the possibility of just putting your heads down and having a go at making things work better for your family. If that fails, though, there's a serious in-the-closet / under-the-rug thing going on. Dense urban poverty and crime is a visible blight that makes people upset and makes the city look bad. But outside the city, it's just an ambient sprawl of domestic violence here, a robbery there, a drug addiction and jacked-up family living out of sight in some pre-fab "condo" nobody would ever notice. I mean, PR-wise, this is a good part of why crime and poverty get associated with black people -- it's so very very easy to ignore all the suburban and rural white people doing the exact same things, further apart from one another, in basements instead of on the street, and I do fear that plenty of the folks relocated out of Chicago city projects will wind up in situations pretty much like that.

haha stuff like this is what i'm going to grad school for!

Which is another point, probably - is this the reason cabrini is the first to go? Its north side locale, proximity to the loop. Its like literally walking distance from navy pier.

that's how i understand it. all those "we just paid a million dollars for this penthouse apartment and we can see gunfire from the cabrini rooftops" stories.

cha has been dismantling pjs all over the city, cabrini was not "the first," it all started around the same time.

that happened to me! minus the kids, obv.

Cabrini is probably high-profile mostly because of its proximity to the Clark & Division "entertainment" district.

To Chicagoans, it's also known as the place where Mayor Byrne moved in.

the thing about the west side, it's more amenable to development than the south side or the poorer spots on the north side because it's been so depopulated over the last 40 years.

Yeah, that's the kind of development I can get behind. I believe I said this way back on ilx : so-called "gentrification" was originally about converting old warehouses and industrial properties. South Loop is a good example of this.

i think chicago has been operating on an "anything is better than high-rise high-density housing projects" concept for a while. for better and for worse.

Can anyone really come up with a defense of the Robert Taylor Homes?

Many of the "inner ring" suburbs are actually working-class or lower-middle-class people who have been priced out of neighborhoods in the south side. I think there are some pretty wretched "inner ring" towns southwest of Chicago, but not all of them are like that.

When I was growing up, I saw quite a bit of white poverty across the border in Indiana (where a lot of McMansions are going up now, interestingly). I guess that's where many of the poor whites ended up.

See, but I had no idea where Cabrini-Green actually was until I moved here, and I'd been hearing about it for most of my life, thanks to cases like the 1992 Dantrell Davis murder. I naively assumed that, because it was a housing project, it was on the South Side.

(By the way, 7 wives is one of the best restaurants in chicago.)

The only picture I can find is a sketch.

http://www.artic.edu/aic/libraries/caohp/goldberghill.jpg

I love those oval windows. And the nice, mellow scale of it.

for three weeks! i wonder what happened to make her run screaming from there, considering she had bodyguards and cops there to protect her.

... are a post-bauhaus monstrosity.

(I really didn't like the food at 7 Wives although I really did like the table and chair decor. What do you normally get there? I am willing to try again on the assumption that I made a poor menu choice or went there on an off day.)

Yeah, my understanding is that it is one of the more successful projects, planning wise. I think there are a number of senior citizens in there.

Goldberg is one of my favorite Chicago architects.

Why don't you post under your own name first? Or at least borrow someone else's next time you wanna be a spineless and indirectly hostile to me?

abstract
USA Today story

you may also find this interesting, about an infamous project here in stl.

Many. In fact, the two cylindrical buildings are reserved for seniors, while the larger semi-circular buildings are for families. (Read all about it in the new issue of Metropolis.)

60's modernism can be tough to appreciate, I know. But it's not the fanciful Jetson's stuff that offends me most. It's the windowless walls of concrete.

Library!

If not, $5 USD used at Powell's.

http://www.notbored.org/cameras-not-effective.html

http://www.phinnweb.org/links/artists/pic/bugglesiamacamera.jpg

http://youtube.com/watch?v=bQYJVWS6hK0

the last robert taylor building came down this past jan.