CITE 4000 AND ROBERT TAYLOR
By Alexander Polikoff
It's fall, 2005. The rioting in France's massive public housing projects is international front-page news. A Chicago reader can't help but mark the similarities to his own city's experience.
Pictured under the blaring headlines, Cite 4000, so named for its 4,000 apartments, was built in 1963 about two miles from the center of Paris as a group of concrete monoliths, some 15 stories tall. Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes, a cluster of 28 concrete structures 16 stories high, opened in 1962 with 4,400 new apartments. Both Cite 4000 and Robert Taylor were designed to replace tenement slums during nationwide housing shortages and postwar economic prosperity. Both were inspired by the vision of the modernist architect Le Corbusier -- apartment towers reaching toward the urban sky, surrounded by seas of green space. Both were intended to, and for a short time did, improve tenants' lives at affordable rents.
Both then suffered strikingly similar fates. Low-skill jobs began to disappear. Tenants became nearly 100 percent impoverished and minority -- Arab and black immigrants in Cite 4000, African Americans in Taylor. The projects fell into disrepair. Working elevators became a rarity, trash littered lobbies and grounds, stairwells began to reek of urine. Drugs came, and with them gangs and violence. Killings, of children as well as adults, became routine. Both Cite 4000 and Taylor grew so dangerous that police rarely ventured within. Life inside turned hellish.
France and America each debated rehabilitation and demolition. Demolition finally won. Since 2000 all but two of Taylor's buildings have come down and the rest are slated to follow soon. The demolition of Cite 4000 began in the mid-eighties but proceeded more slowly, too slowly as it turned out. When the accidental deaths of two minority teens hiding from police triggered the latest riots, 2,800 of the original 4,000 units still remained.
What are we to make of these nearly identical experiences in two different cultures? Is the core problem architecture, racism, joblessness? Let's take them one at a time.
Suppose the buildings had been low-rise, maybe even townhouses or single-family homes? It is impossible to believe that the Taylor and Cite 4000 stories would have had happy endings if the 4,400 impoverished black American families in Taylor, and the 4,000 impoverished Arab and black families in Cite 4000 had been housed in low-rise dwellings. High-rise buildings may have made matters worse, but massive low-rise enclaves of impoverished families are still ghettos. Witness the nearly 2,000 units in Chicago's Altgeld-Murray project. Architecture does not cause stunted lives.
Racism? How would the stories have turned out had Taylor and Cite 4000 housed 4,400 and 4,000 impoverished, jobless white Chicagoans and Parisiens? One can't be sure because it's so
hard to imagine such a scenario. In America most poor whites live in non-poor neighborhoods. In urban society (places like Appalachia are different) we don't have thousands of impoverished white families living by themselves, isolated physically, socially, and economically from better-off citizens. Neither do the French. Had the Taylor and Cite 4000 residents been white one feels certain that ameliorative steps would have been taken early on -- more job retraining as the low-skill jobs began to disappear, more intensive social services, better physical upkeep. Law enforcement would have been less heavy-handed. One cannot help but believe that the racial composition of Taylor and Cite 4000, and the racial attitudes of the larger society, played a major role in the stories.
Joblessness? There can be little question that if each black Taylor family and each Arab and black Cite 4000 family had included a breadwinner with a decent-paying job, their stories would have played out differently. One is reminded of William Julius Wilson's observations about black ghettos in America before low-skill jobs began disappearing. As late as the l950s, and in some places even into the 1960s, most adults in America's black ghettos were working. The mores of a working community predominated. Overcrowded racial ghettos though they were, the communities functioned acceptably in many ways. Indeed, for a brief period in their earliest days, that was the vision, and to some extent the fact, of both Cite 4000 and Taylor.
One may conclude that joblessness as well as racism lies at the heart of the matter. Joblessness leads to poverty, and poverty, when racially concentrated in large enclaves, leads to conditions such as those at Cite 4000 and Taylor.
So, what is to be done? Since experience tells us that all-black communities in which most families have decent-paying jobs can be functional, maybe the remedy for massive public housing projects is simply to provide good jobs to all their residents. Unfortunately, this is much easier said than done. When Taylor and Cite 4000 opened over 40 years ago, well-paying low-skill manufacturing jobs were still available, and far-sighted governments could -- in theory -- have arranged jobs as well as housing.
But they can do so no longer, even in theory, and this for two related reasons. First, after generations of living in places like Cite 4000 and Taylor, too many residents lack the skills and education required for today's well-paying jobs, not to mention other employment barriers such as substance abuse, poor physical and mental health, felony convictions, employer discrimination, and so on. Without intensive, long-term social, educational, and vocational services, very many residents are simply unemployable.
Second, even apart from the unemployability problem, the unhappy fact is that too many jobs no longer pay enough to enable those who hold them -- except for the highly educated -- to escape poverty. We are losing to globalization and technology -- for millions we have already lost -- our ability to "make work pay" for those without post-secondary education. Many breadwinners work two, three and four jobs, yet still find their families on the edge of poverty. In short, it would profit us little if we undertook the Herculean, multi-generational task of rendering Cite
4000 and Taylor residents employable, only to find that the jobs available to them would still not free them from poverty.
Before we despair of a solution, however, let's take a closer look at the problem. Granted that we are not likely to eradicate minority prejudice in our lifetimes. Granted, too, that in that time frame there is no prospect of making work pay for those lacking post-secondary education, and therefore of qualifying Cite 4000 and Taylor residents for and "assigning" them decent-paying jobs that would lift them and their families out of poverty. But if the problem is concentrated, racialized, urban poverty, maybe we can address the concentratied part of the poverty problem.
This indeed is what is being tried right now at Taylor (and elsewhere in America). What is rising from Taylor's rubble is a mixed-income community -- roughly a third each of affluent or middle, working-class, and poor families. The concentrated poverty of Taylor is disappearing and being replaced by a community that isn't exclusively poor but does include poor families.
There are of course challenges. First, won't the whole place remain entirely black? Second, why will affluent or middle-class, even working-class, families voluntarily move into a community with former Taylor residents? Third, how do the poor families who move back in (only one-third the number of former residents) get decent-paying jobs? Fourth, where do all the displaced families go and what happens to them?
Taking the four questions in order, yes, the replacement mixed-income community may be entirely black. But as we have already seen, all-black communities in which most adults have decent jobs "work." (In some places in this country, where mixed-income replacement communities are well located, as is Chicago's notorious Cabrini-Green, for example, racial integration is actually creeping in.)
The answer to the second question is that non-poor families will move into replacement communities to get good housing values if there is an assurance that poor families will not take over. The usual plan is a third, a third and a third, managed to assure that the proportions are maintained. If quality new housing at good prices carries that assurance, experience is beginning to show that, at least in places where housing is dear, the non-poor will come.
The answer to the next question is that, indeed, the poor families who move back may not get decent-paying jobs, although efforts are being made to select the most likely candidates, and to provide job training and other assistance to maximize their chances. (At some locations, having a job is actually a requirement for readmission.) But even in the worst case -- in which the poor families who move back remain jobless -- two-thirds of their neighbors will be working. The mores of a working community, not of an idle one, are likely to dominate. The children of the poor will grow up in a functioning community, one not beset by drugs and violence, and they are likely to have better life chances than their parents.
Finally, what happens to all the displaced families? The answer is that they move, with
counseling assistance and housing vouchers to subsidize their rents (just as it was subsidized in the public housing project they were forced to leave) into the private housing market. The most motivated are enabled to move into well-functioning, non-poor communities far from the ghetto. The less motivated, and those who for various understandable reasons are unable to move far from their present neighborhoods (for example, grandmother is doing essential babysitting), may move into communities that are not desirable -- high poverty and racially segregated in the worst cases -- but likely to have lower poverty rates than the communities left behind. And since the housing vouchers are "portable," when the lease expires a second move can be made to an even lower poverty neighborhood.
It isn't easy. Finding decent housing in good neighborhoods is hard. Providing the required counseling and other assistance to moving families is also hard. Adjusting to a strange neighborhood across a cultural divide can be traumatic. But compare these difficult steps with what appear to be the impossible ones of arranging decent paying work for all Cite 4000 and Taylor residents, or of ending the prejudice now directed at them. Moreover, we do have some experience showing that the difficult is not impossible. In the 1980s and '90s Chicago's Gautreaux Program enabled some 8,000 black and poor inner-city families to move to better neighborhoods, and studies have found that life circumstances improved significantly for many of them, for some dramatically.
We are beginning to understand that the concentration of racialized poverty is the straw that breaks an urban community's back. If in the near term we cannot end racism or provide decent jobs for those lacking post-secondary education, at least we can disperse our concentrated, racialized urban poverty and render it less lethal to both its residents and to the larger society. Breaking up Cite 4000 and similar large French public housing projects, as we are today breaking up Robert Taylor and other large American public housing projects, is not a roadmap to Shangri La. But, for now at least, it may be the best route out of the blind alley we entered some forty years ago.
Alexander Polikoff, of Business and Professional People for the Public Interest (BPI), is the long-time lead counsel in Chicago's Gautreaux public housing desegregation lawsuit.