Midpoint in Chicago's housing overhaul

From the upper floors of Stateway Gardens, the view is inspiring.

To the north, the Sears Tower rises up from a postcard-perfect Chicago skyline. Comiskey Park, home of the White Sox, is barely a baseball's throw away, and Lake Michigan peaks through to the east.

It's a view most Chicagoans could only dream of - but from a place they would be afraid to enter.

Soon, it won't exist. Six of the eight high-rises that once made up Stateway Gardens - a public-housing development firmly associated in many people's minds with gangs, drugs, and poverty - have already been torn down, leaving hardly a trace of their existence. Another will be officially emptied and boarded up this week, readying for demolition. The last may linger for a few years yet, as new town houses, three-flats, and mid-rises are built around its ankles.

Stateway's are just several among the dozens of public-housing sites facing the wrecking ball in Chicago. It's all part of the most ambitious public-housing redevelopment in the nation, a $1.5 billion, 10-year plan that's now at its halfway point - and whose results will affect housing policy in other cities for decades.

The vision is a grand one: new mixed-income neighborhoods replacing old high-rises. Homeowners living in town houses alongside public-housing and affordable-housing tenants. A plethora of shops and diversions in now deserted areas. In the process, every resident will be relocated at least once, to transitional public housing or to the private market.

"This is not just about building new units," emphasizes Kim Johnson, a spokeswoman for the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA). "It's about improving life for public-housing residents by allowing them to be a part of the city in a way they haven't been for 30 years."

But critics fault the means with which the plan has been carried out so far: the relocation of thousands of families as though they were pawns, the seeming eagerness with which the wrecking ball has been swung before alternatives have been built, and the net loss of thousands of public-housing units. They also question exactly to whom the vision will apply.

Some residents are pretty sure it won't be them. "Now they're saying you've gotta have good credit" to live in the mixed-income community that will be built at Stateway, says Lloyd "Pete" Haywood, in a discouraged voice. "I don't."

Mr. Haywood, like many of the residents here, has lived in Stateway all his life. He now works regularly for various local contractors, currently helping rehab old apartments in the last of the high-rises that will remain standing.

In the past few years, he's moved twice. Today, he'll be moving a third time, out of the condemned 10-story building and into the one next door.

"The places I used to play, the people I met - they're all gone," he says, as he sweeps behind the radiator and squashes a stray roach in one freshly painted apartment.

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