Demolition of Dangerous, Decaying Public Housing Begins

CHICAGO — Ruthie Smith waited a decade for a vacancy in public housing. Soon after she moved into her ninth-floor apartment, she had a new goal--to get out.

In three years in the Henry Horner Homes, she has endured roaches, broken elevators, gangs and a stifling reality: It wasn’t safe outside, but it wasn’t safe inside either. One night, a bullet from random gunfire pierced her living room window.

“We have lived in the twilight zone, and the Lord has just watched over us,” Smith said as she packed her belongings for a move to a rent-subsidized apartment 30 minutes and a world away from the wire-enclosed balconies, garbage-strewn stairwells and crumbling concrete.

“It’s been like living in a prison,” she said.

Ruthie Smith made her break in January, joining thousands of public housing residents across the nation who are relocating as the federal government undertakes its most ambitious plan ever to demolish parts of America’s most dangerous, decaying projects.

In more than a dozen cities, including Chicago; Philadelphia; Louisville, Ky.; Atlanta; New Orleans; and Newark, N.J., graffiti-scarred towers and dilapidated brick barracks--some of them vacant buildings used as crack dens and sniper nests--are finally falling victim to the wrecker’s ball.

“We know what we have does not work,” said Kevin Marchman, acting assistant secretary for public and Indian housing for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. “The verdict is in and it is unanimous. It doesn’t make any sense to put any more tax dollars into these warrens of hopelessness.”

This tear-it-down solution is part politics, part pragmatism. Federal dollars are shrinking, the reins of power have shifted on Capitol Hill--some Republicans have even talked of abolishing HUD--and there’s a growing consensus it’s better to raze and rebuild than to renovate such symbols of urban despair.

In Baltimore, for instance, officials were spending nearly $1 million a year just for elevator repairs at the recently demolished Lafayette Courts. They also discovered it generally cost as much to rehab an aging building as it did to start over.

“They were money pits,” said Zack Germroth, a Baltimore housing authority spokesman. “It made no sense to repair them from a sociological, physical or maintenance standpoint.”

And pouring in millions of dollars for new pipes or sturdier walls doesn’t solve social problems endemic to public housing, such as teen pregnancy, drugs or gangs.

“We’re not going to be able to spend our way out of the problem, even if it were possible,” said Michael Schill, director of New York University Law School’s Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy.

Demolition does eliminate eyesores, but housing experts say it’s premature to declare it the answer.

“The phrase I hear is, ‘It’s the last best hope,’ ” said Lawrence Vale, an associate professor of planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s clear it’s the last hope. Whether it’s the best remains to be seen.”

But, he said, it’s also clear HUD sensed an urgent need to act now.

“The level of political support for public housing has reached a new low point,” Vale said. “The hope is that the broader image . . . could be improved by demolishing the most prominent examples of its failures.”

Most public housing, especially in small towns, is a success, but it’s the fraction of big-city failures that are far more visible. Several of those buildings are slated to fall. For example:

* In Chicago, branded as home to America’s worst public housing, bulldozers tore into the first chunk of Cabrini Green last summer. The project has been the site of horrific crimes, including the 1992 sniper murder of a 7-year-old, killed in a one-minute walk to his school. A few more buildings will be razed this year, as will parts of Horner, near the United Center, site of the summer’s Democratic National Convention.

* In Baltimore, it took just 21 seconds last summer to implode the high-rises at Lafayette Courts, where brazen drug dealers had commandeered buildings and extorted residents. The troubled Lexington Terrace project is set to fall this spring.

* In Newark, N.J., six of eight high-rises in the Columbus Homes project fell in the last two years; the remainder will follow this spring.

* In Louisville, Ky., the Cotter and Lang Homes, grim, barracks-style houses built in the 1950s, will be razed in April or May.

A bit of history too will fall in Atlanta. The Techwood Homes, dedicated with pride 60 years ago by Franklin D. Roosevelt as the nation’s first federally funded public housing, are being reduced to a pile of red bricks.

A major catalyst for the demolition is the repealing of HUD’s 1-to-1 rule that had required one new public housing unit to be built for each one torn down. Before that, cities couldn’t tear down blighted buildings even if they were vacant because there wasn’t land or money for new construction.

Those obstacles have been removed.

In 1995 alone, HUD demolished 7,700 units and this year the agency estimates an additional 10,000 will fall.

“They are coming down in record numbers,” Marchman said. “All these developments have been symbols of failed social policy for some time. We understood what the problem was. We understood where the community was. We said this can’t exist.”

But they did exist long after it became obvious that warehousing thousands of unemployed single mothers and small children in poorly built, poorly maintained tenements was a sure-fire recipe for disaster.

No one knows that better than the residents, people like Chicago’s Ruthie Smith.

“They shouldn’t pile people up like that,” said Smith, a 47-year-old grandmother of five whose Horner apartment is slated for demolition. “It’s trouble. There are too many people with nothing to do. The parents can’t control the young teenagers. They can’t tell them nothing.”

Many experts say these problems are partly due to local political leaders who carved out islands of poverty decades ago to separate them from, and appease, white middle-class communities. And the federal government went along.

“Municipalities have used public housing to segregate by race,” said Schill, the New York professor. “But public housing not only kept you locked into place physically, it kept you locked in place economically.”

Less than a third of public housing residents work, a sharp drop from about 50% in 1970.

“I would call them the highest rates of unemployment per acre in America,” said Vale, the Massachusetts expert now writing a book about public housing.

As a result, public housing, originally designed as a way station, has become home for successive generations of families.

Sharon Hester spent 11 of her 26 years at Horner before recently moving with her 6-year-old son to a rent-subsidized apartment.

“Public housing is not something you want to get used to,” said Hester, whose former home will be torn down. “It should be for a short period of time, so you can do better. Some people get accustomed to it. They don’t try to get out. But I know there is a better way of living.”

And Schill said there’s an increasing recognition it’s not the government, but the private sector, through subsidies or rent vouchers, that is best equipped to provide it.

Still, Vale worries about the next stage--after demolition.

“It’s going to be very satisfying for housing authorities and mayors of cities to be able to say, ‘We’ve got these things out of our portfolio,’ ” he said, but the bigger challenge will be to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Joseph Schuldiner agrees. He’s the Chicago Housing Authority director who came to the city when HUD took over the embattled agency last year.

“The measure of success is not the demolition,” he said. “It’s the reconstruction.

“If you live in the projects, it’s like you are a different community. The projects are a world unto themselves. We need to end that kind of insulation . . . that tended to be isolation.”

Most cities have ambitious plans to do just that by building townhouses, single-family homes and apartments that will mix moderate-income families with poorer people, expanding social services and making it impossible to distinguish between public and private housing.

In cities, such as Chicago where tens of thousands of public housing residents still live in squalid high-rises, it will be a long process.

Some have decided not to wait, but to find new homes using subsidies.

Tracy Evans, a mother of three who lived 21 of her 26 years at Horner before demolition plans forced her out, recently chose an apartment far from her old residence.

“People have the wrong image about people in public housing. Not everybody in the projects is nasty. You do have decent, clean people. They just can’t afford a home. Now we’re getting a chance to live like other people.

“This is a blessing.”