Chicago's Cabrini Green Projects, Mixed Income Housing, Luxury Lofts and an Urban Garden

Chicago - April 4, 2006 - liz

Some General First Impressions

My reactions to Chicago are varied. I love it but don’t feel very comfortable… I never thought that it would be like this at all. It seems so huge and spread out. It sprawls outward in a way that reminds me of L.A., but with a less density of people. Chicago feels like the definition of urban. Lots of things going on, constant stimulation, millions of people walking around.

Things seem tense among different groups of people. I feel a lot of hostility that I haven’t really felt while being in other cities, just from strangers walking down the street. I don't know if this hostility that I am perceiving is directed toward me or if it just exists in general. Or maybe it doesn't even exist. Maybe a lot of it has to do with ethnicity. Chicago seems very segregated compared to most of the other places that we've been. There are different sections of town that are occupied by specific groups of people and that other groups of people don't go into very often. In some ways this is good because it allows different cultures of people to keep their cultures alive - You definitely couldn't say that Chicago is a city of assimilation. And it's interesting, going to different parts of the city and being completely surprised each time because they are so different from each other. I keep comparing Chicago to New York City, and that seems to be the most apt comparison, at least from what I have experienced personally in both places.

I wonder why it seems like Chicago gets ignored compared to big cities on either the west or east coasts. Maybe it has to do with being in the middle of the country.

Today we got up early. I was tired like I have been everyday, in a way where I feel like I’d be content to just keep sleeping all day. But I got up, drank coffee, took a shower and then we left the house for the day, by around 9:30 am. We walked over to the Washington St. Blue Line stop and took the train to Division, where we got off and started walking, what ended up to be a pretty far walk to the Chicago City Farm.

Chicago City Farm. (more urban agriculture)



We met this person Greg, last night at the Mess Hall screening, who works for them. He told us to stop by and he’d show us around and give us a little tour. I have to admit that after going to the LA South Central Urban Farm, my expectations were really high. We ended up walking all the way to downtown practically, before running right into the farm, which was actually quite small (at least when I mentally compared it to the South Central Urban Farm).

The Urban Farm with downtown in the distance.

There were about five people there planting turnip seeds. One of the women came over and was talking to us a little bit about the project and the resource center and other stuff. Apparently, this guy named Ken Dunn started the city farm about 30 years ago and it started out as a philosophy dissertation project, where he paid some guys to collect recyclable cans. That small experiment turned into a huge project, called the Resource Center. People from all over the city can come get all kinds of excess materials that are dropped off, for incredibly cheap. You can get a gallon of paint for 25 cents. They basically do what they can to reduce needless consumption and waste.

The City Farm is one project of the Resource Center. They have a plot of land that the city lets them use for free and they grow organic vegetables on it. Local chefs for gourmet restaurants around Chicago buy most of the produce. They also have a little vegetable stand so that people from the neighborhood can buy fresh organic produce. It seemed like a really cool project that the people working on were really excited about. The only thing about the City Farm is that the land they use is owned by the city and the city retains the right to take that land away from them at any point - So it's not a very secure or stable situation.

Public Housing, Cabrini Green Projects, Luxury Lofts?

A good example of a Cabrini Green Projects building (now vacant)

Another interesting thing about the whole experience was that we ended up walking by these huge, drab old hi-rise project buildings that the city is in the process of having demolished.

Cabrini Green Building that has been vacated... maybe.

A close up of an old Cabrini Green building.

It is part of the city of Chicago's "Plan for Transformation." It is the largest demolition of public housing in U.S. history. Some of them have already been torn down, some of them still have people living in them, some of them are kind of half and half. These projects were the infamous Cabrini Green Projects, which were really well-known for the horrible conditions were during the 80s and 90s. There city was very neglectful of maintaining the housing at all and conditions deteriorated more and more, as the economy of the city became more depressed. At one point the projects were home to 15,000 people in Chicago. Although living conditions were pretty dismal (horrible violence, deteriorating buildings, burst pipes, rat infestations, etc.) people still built their lives and communities here. Therefore, the fact that the city is destroying them all is not exactly great news to all of the people that used to live there. Where are they going? We heard from a lot of people that the city decided to move all of these people out and doesn't exactly have a good plan for where to put all of the people now. I'm assuming that most of them won't be able to live so close to downtown anymore- and I wonder if public housing will ever match the level that it was while these places still existed.

Apparently a big part of the "Plan for Transformation" is to advocate for mixed income housing. People of all different income levels living together. In Chicago, one of the first developments to replace Cabrini Green was North Town Village. It only has 261 units but a certain amount of them are reserved for people elligible for public housing. I'm not sure how many.

While we were standing in the farm looking out at the city skyline, we just started looking around and did a 360. We realized that we could see all of the following at different intersections:

The farm and Courtney with downtown in the distance,

the Cabrini Green Projects,

recently cleared lots,

a developer’s sign advertising soon to be townhouses starting in the $200’s,

and an older placeless-looking strip mall (Starbuck’s, Blockbuster, Radioshack, etc.).

It just seemed like we were able to view this whole cycle of the way that places and people are affected by policy, architecture, popular trends in identity formation, etc. It just all kind of crystallized together at that moment and seemed to make sense.

Especially when considering many of the other things that we have been noticing in different cities, with the trend toward pseudo-new urbanism, which seems to be mostly about encouraging consumerism and making people with money comfortable, at the expense of most other things.

This seems to be something that keeps coming up all over the country in every city that we end up in --- and it also seems like something that people aren’t exactly cognizant about (the fact that it seems to be happening all over the place in a similar fashion). They seem to think that it is isolated to their own city or experience, when it is actually something that is happening all over--- the takeover of the inner city, the "downtowns," by more privileged groups of people than have chosen to live there in decades. The inner city has only started to regain population in the last 15 years, whereas previously it had been losing population for decades.

Why did it become cool for white, economically privileged people to move back in to the city in these commodified versions of authenticity that so many of these newly constructed "lofts" and "live/work" spaces seem to offer? i.e. manufactured authenticity and charm and history. Artificial historic context.

Because people feel like they don’t know who they are and they are trying to get that back by buying a commodified version of authentic identity? And the people who really do have historical, place and community-based (i.e. not just manufactured) ties to the downtowns get shoved out and dispersed, and the communities are displaced and the places destroyed.

I mean who wants to live in the suburbs? It makes sense that people aren't happy with the places that they have been given to live in and that they would want something different. It's just too bad that this desire for something less fabricated is being met by a hyper-fabricated form of architecture and living- And that less powerful groups of people are being pushed out - denied space, and disappeared.

A bit about the place and people we stayed with
In Chicago, we stayed with Shawnecee, Drew and Nick. They live in a neighborhood of Chicago called Logan Square. Shawnecee goes to film/video school at Columbia College and helped set up a screening of the documentary there. She works at the Columbia Documentary Center and so we got to check that out. It seems like a great place. I wish I had been able to do something like that at school. Our dvd is now in their library archive.

We got to Chicago late in the day on Sunday and went straight to the Chicago Vegetarian Diner. The food was pretty good (I got a vegan philly steak) but we were all really rushed because we realized all of a sudden that Stirling was going to have barely any time to get to the airport for his flight that was leaving at 9:50 p.m. Luckily he realized that his flight was leaving from Midway, not O’Hare as he had originally thought, and then we rushed to the airport on the orange line of the El. There was a huge lighting, thunder and hailstorm while we were on the train and it got delayed a few times. The minutes kept ticking by and I got more and more nervous that he was going to miss the flight, especially since he was going to be flying on standby. Miraculously we made it to the airport at about 8:50 pm. We went to the Frontier counter and the woman working said that it wasn’t too late. I said bye at the security check-in line and was waiting to get change for a $20 bill so that I could take the train back into the city when Stirling came back down the escalator. The pilot decided not to let as many people on the plane as usual because of a weight imbalance and the bad weather.

So Stirling came back to the house in Logan Square and ended up leaving again at 4 in the morning to catch the 6am flight so he could back to school in Boulder on time for his first class on Monday.

Our first day in Chicago, Monday, Courtney and I walked from Logan Square to the rapidly gentrifying Wicker Park part of town. There was the usual mix of cool old buildings, independent cafes, record shops, bookstores, restaurants, soon to be condos, etc. It was a cool part of town and we put up a bunch of fliers around there. It was interesting and different and tons of pedestrian traffic, but also definitely felt like it was in a process of changing to cater to a wealthier group of people.

Picture of condos sign

We searched in vain for an interesting-looking place to get a drink. We ended up at a crappy overpriced place where this was the cheapest beer on the menu.



After that, we headed over to the Mess Hall, where we showed the movie that night.

We had to take the red line really far north. The Mess Hall was a great place to show the documentary, because one of their main focuses is on the importance of place. A woman Salem helped to set everything up for us and she was great. People brought some really good food too-- fancy olives, hummus, cheeses, crackers, beer... Every event at the Mess Hall is completely free - no cash ever gets exchanged in the space. They don't have to pay for rent because the landlord of the space gives it to them for free.

While we were there they had an exhibit up of architectural sketches by middle school students about their ideas of what to do about Chicago's public housing crisis. They drew designs of buildings that they would like to see erected. Another cool thing is that we found out about this newspaper that a lot of the people from Mess Hall work on, called AREA - it's a mix of radical geography, art, and activism.

While the documentary played we went to the shore of Lake Michigan.



The next day we had a screening at Columbia College, hosted by the Documentary Department. After that, we went and hung out at the memorial statue for the martyrs of the Haymarket Riots. The statue was put up by the city.