CHICAGO -- What if they tore down one of the nation's worst public-housing projects and people didn't want to leave? Here, at the Robert Taylor Homes, it isn't a hypothetical question.

For Erica Monique Hewitt, the Robert Taylor project is the only place she has ever lived, not to mention the place her mother lived most of her life, and the place her grandmother lived when Ms. Hewitt was growing up. She can shout out the window to contact most of the important people in her life. And when she works away from home, she can count on them to watch her four children.
 

The massive Taylor development is steadily disappearing.

She runs a tiny grocery store from her second-floor apartment, catering to the needs of residents too frightened of crime to go outside. She also works on and off as a janitor in some of Robert Taylor's crumbling buildings. Ms. Hewitt's fiance, who lives in the same apartment, earns money as a DJ at neighborhood parties. Until recently, they paid only $12 a month in rent, or about 30% of their declared income.

"I hate to leave here," says Ms. Hewitt, who is 23 years old. "I'm comfortable."

Comfortable, even though for months she has listened to a wrecking ball taking bites out of the building behind hers. Through her window, she can see moving trucks backing up to her building, which is known only by its address: 4444 South State. Her building is next, yet she hesitates to go. In the project, she says, "you can play your radio loud and have a party and sell stuff. Some of that you can't do in the suburbs."

Irredeemable Failure

All over the country, some of the nation's biggest and most poverty-stricken public-housing projects are coming down. Finally, the inner-city high rise has been declared an irredeemable failure. As federal and municipal agencies demolish more than 100,000 units of public housing nationwide -- roughly 10% of the entire public-housing stock -- it hopes to remove people from vertical slums and place them in racially and economically mixed neighborhoods. But that goal has been complicated by the reluctance of many project residents to leave.
 

Erica Monique Hewitt is still mulling whether to leave.

Few outsiders will mourn the demise of the public-housing high rise. Most of the structures were built beginning half a century ago, when a wave of black Southerners migrated to Northern cities, and shanty-filled slums spread from one urban neighborhood to the next. High-rise public housing was seen, at least in part, as a progressive response that put some of the nation's poorest people into modern, relatively well-constructed apartments. In some cities, including Chicago, high-rise projects also came to be viewed as a tool of prejudice, as they maintained racial segregation.

Over the decades, these dense neighborhoods of poverty bred greater poverty -- as well as crime that spilled over into wealthier parts of cities. Unemployment and a sense of alienation from mainstream society grew more pronounced until public-housing life became like life nowhere else.

After the failure of countless modest reform efforts, federal and municipal officials decided in the early 1990s on a more dramatic response. Projects are now being demolished in 76 cities. In some places, including Baltimore, Oakland and Atlanta, public housing is being replaced with mixed-income developments, where some former project occupants have been invited to live in subsidized apartments. In New York and other cities that haven't allowed their public housing to deteriorate as badly, there aren't plans for large-scale demolition.

Then there are projects, such as Robert Taylor, where conditions are so grave that housing officials have decided to demolish first and figure out later what to do with the residents and real estate. As government at every level pulls out of the public-housing business, federal and local agencies are asking private groups to find new homes for former occupants. Chicago officials have largely surrendered the task to a patchwork team of community-development organizations. For the past several years, these nonprofit groups have been trying to teach public-housing lease holders how to search for apartments on the private market, handle their bills, and get along in communities vastly different from their own.

The process hasn't been smooth. So far, most of the people forced to leave Robert Taylor apartments have moved to other units within the complex. They exist like refugees, a step ahead of the demolition crews.

The first national study of this wave of public-housing dislocation shows that residents departing the projects and moving into federally subsidized private apartments have settled in less-poor neighborhoods. But that finding reflects that there are no neighborhoods poorer than high-rise public-housing projects, according to scholars completing the soon-to-be-released study by the Urban Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington, D.C. And the authors acknowledge that the study accounts for only a small percentage of public-housing residents: those who were among the first -- and best prepared -- to get out.

If Ms. Hewitt and her neighbors can't be transplanted to areas of noticeably greater economic opportunity, then the poverty long associated with public housing will only be relocated, not reduced.

By early fall, more than half of the windows of Ms. Hewitt's building are boarded up, and all but a few floors have been evacuated. A vacant building stands between 4444 South State and 4525 South Federal, and residents fear that when it is knocked down, rival gangs controlling the remaining two buildings will have a clear shot at each other.

Some days, Ms. Hewitt sounds desperate to find a house in the suburbs, as far away as she can get from Taylor. Other days, she says, she probably will move to a building just across the courtyard. As November's cold weather sets in, she isn't certain whether 4444 South State will withstand another winter. Neither is she certain she can withstand another winter in 4444 South State.

The Pull of a Former Home

It is 3:30 p.m., quitting time for Princess Coleman, after an eight-hour shift as a clerk at the Greyhound bus station. The slender young woman pulls the fake-fur lining of her hood closer to her face and walks toward her car. "By the end of the day, I'm stressed out," she says.

But the end of the day is a long way off. She is headed to her mother's house to pick up her two children. Then, she has to get them home and fed, check her six-year-old daughter's homework, bathe both girls, and put them to bed -- all by 8 p.m., so they can get up at 5 a.m. to start again. "I could ask my mama to keep [the girls] overnight, but this is my responsibility," Ms. Coleman, who is 23 years old, reminds herself.
 

Princess Coleman has a new commute since she and her daughters relocated to the suburb of Blue Island.

Back in August, she made her daily routine far more challenging by leaving Taylor and moving with her daughters to an apartment in the southwest suburb of Blue Island, 20 miles from downtown. She had to acquire a car, her first, a $10,000 used Jeep Cherokee she is paying for in monthly installments.

Although she left the project, her life continues to revolve around the place. That adds extra miles of travel on top of her new, longer commute to work. Most of her friends still live at Taylor. Her six-year-old, Carmella, still attends kindergarten at the public school across the street from the development. Her four-year-old, Shamella, still spends most days with her grandmother, who recently moved out of Taylor to an apartment a few blocks away.

Even on weekends, when Ms. Coleman wants to treat the children to a movie or a meal at a fast-food restaurant, she piles them into the Jeep and takes them back to the old neighborhood. As for Blue Island, she says, "All we do is sleep there."

While countless Taylor residents express a desire to move to the suburbs, few have done so. Local studies by scholars in Chicago indicate that most high-rise residents are ending up in neighborhoods nearly as poor and just as racially homogeneous as those they left behind. Counselors with nonprofit groups working with transplanted project residents in Chicago estimate that less than 1% of their clients opt for the suburbs. Most people forced to leave Taylor settle into apartments as close as possible to the project.

And many of those who have moved a considerable distance, such as Ms. Coleman, have difficulty adapting, according to interviews with numerous residents and their nonprofit counselors. Some former project residents have fallen behind on rent bills because they are accustomed to getting monthly reminders from the Chicago Housing Authority. Others have feuded with new neighbors, often because the level of noise tolerated by residents of Robert Taylor, where walls are made of cinderblock, is greater than in many private buildings.

For landlords, too, the process has required adjustment. "I didn't know what to expect from someone coming from that environment," says Thaddeus Long, who owns several rental buildings near Taylor. He says he has tried to avoid project families with teenage boys, for fear of crime, but concedes that most of his concerns have been unjustified. "I thought the buildings would suffer damage," he says. "I was probably stereotyping."

As Ms. Coleman's Jeep crawls along the Dan Ryan Expressway on a chilly fall afternoon, Robert Taylor comes into view on her left, the 16-story structures looming like a long row of massive tombstones. Even now, with eight buildings already demolished, it is a stunning sight: dingy brick towers extending for two miles, a crumbling monument to failure.

"It's unbelievable to see those buildings are really coming down," Ms. Coleman says, snacking on a strawberry Laffy Taffy. "I was used to those buildings."

She parks her car and dashes up the stairs to her mother's apartment, searches for Shamella's shoes, wedges them on the little girl, and carries her down to the car. Carmella follows close behind. One of Ms. Coleman's friends, a woman nicknamed Moochie, who declines to give her formal name, has spent the previous night with Ms. Coleman's mother. Moochie says she has had trouble finding a place of her own since her building in Taylor was torn down. Tonight, she and her son accompany Ms. Coleman to Blue Island and sleep on the floor.

Back in the Jeep, hip-hop music blasts from the stereo speakers. Traffic is still heavy, and there isn't enough Laffy Taffy to go around. It is 4:30 p.m. If she still lived in Taylor, Ms. Coleman, who used to take the bus to and from work, would already be home.

When the demolition of the project began about two years ago, she says, she knew right away she wanted out. She was 18 years old when she got her own apartment in the project, at 4410 South State, a block away from her mother's old building, and she hated the place. The heat quit on the coldest days, water often leaked from the ceiling, and the elevators were unreliable -- conditions the Chicago Housing Authority says contributed to the decision to destroy her building and the others.

Gang wars in the project were so frequent and so violent that Ms. Coleman avoided all but the most essential trips outside. Her children were allowed to play on the enclosed breezeway running along the face of the building, but not in the playground. Still, Taylor was home. Family, friends and the father of her children all lived there. Jobs and shopping were a short bus ride away. Health clinics, schools, libraries and social-service agencies clustered around the giant project, where 11,000 people lived before the demolition began.

When Ms. Coleman began looking for a place of her own earlier this year, she says, landlords were reluctant to take a young woman with children. In Chicago's tight and high-priced real-estate market, landlords could afford to be selective. It seemed the only decent apartments she could find were in the suburbs, far from everything she had known. But her government voucher for subsidized housing had a four-month expiration date, and she was determined to use it.

By 5:15 p.m., Ms. Coleman is almost home -- that is, until she becomes lost. Hunched over and squinting through the windshield, she can't pick out her block from the others in tree-lined, working-class Blue Island. Finally, she spots a familiar street sign and turns toward home in a neighborhood of three-story apartment buildings and modest single-family houses.

Some former project residents complain about racial hostility in white suburban neighborhoods. Ms. Coleman says she hasn't encountered any. Then again, in her rushed comings and goings, she says she hasn't met a single one of her neighbors. She also has never been to the playground at the end of the block, or to a local supermarket or restaurant. She assumes there are schools in Blue Island, but she hasn't seen one. Even if she had, she says, she wouldn't feel comfortable with her children 20 miles away while she worked.

She turns on the kitchen light and takes out a frozen pizza for Moochie and the children. She makes nothing for herself. Money had been tight since the move. Her monthly rent, while still subsidized, has gone up to $152, from $126 at Taylor.

Ms. Coleman says she dreams of finding an apartment back in the city, maybe near Robert Taylor. "I can't really say if I'm going to stay here," she says after putting the children to sleep. The silence, she says, looking out her window at a dark wooded area, still makes her nervous.

The End of Guarantees

On a damp, gray morning in September, a troop of activists rally in front of the half-wrecked Robert Taylor Homes, shouting that the demolition should stop until replacement housing is built. "Show us the housing!" they chant.

The protesters, most of them self-described communists, number no more than 10. With banners and bullhorns, they encourage project residents to join their cry. Only one resident, Barbara Moore, does so. "People say we're afraid of change," she says, resting on a cane and looking out from behind bifocals. "It's not that we're afraid of change. It's that we don't know what the change is going to be. Can they guarantee us that [government subsidies for private apartments] will be there for 20 or 25 years?"

The federal government is guaranteeing no such thing. It is the very notion that public housing is a permanent entitlement that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and local housing authorities are trying to end.

Federal officials compare this wave of change, which has bipartisan support in Washington, to that which swept the national welfare system beginning in the mid-1990s. Project residents must take more responsibility for their lives, says Elinor Bacon, the Clinton administration official who directs HUD's public-housing demolition-and-renovation program. When the housing reforms are completed, she adds, projects that are now home to 1.3 million needy families will be better -- and smaller.

Idealistic planners 50 years ago intended public housing as temporary shelter, a place where the poor would begin saving for their own homes. But many occupants failed to thrive in the projects. Local housing authorities didn't screen applicants adequately, allowing in people with criminal records, families too large for their apartments, and boyfriends whose names never appeared on leases. Family income levels fell over time, and a spirit of lawlessness took hold in many projects, including Robert Taylor.

Less than 2% of Chicago's population lives in the police district containing Taylor, but 6.5% of homicides and almost 8% of aggravated assaults take place there. The neighborhood is among the poorest in the nation, with 96% unemployment and a median income of about $8,500 a year.

So, Taylor became a target of the federal demolition program, known as Hope VI, which has consumed more than $4 billion since 1992 to do away with some projects and renovate others. HUD plans to replace a total of 60,000 of the 100,000 units being taken down nationally. Some residents are being offered federal rent subsidies for use in the private-housing market. With the vouchers -- known as Section 8 certificates -- each resident pays about 30% of declared income toward rent, and the government pays the rest, the same proportion that typically applies to project rents.

Across town from Taylor, on the North Side, the infamous Cabrini-Green project is gradually being replaced by snappy townhouses, some of which sell for more than $500,000 each. Current and former Cabrini occupants filed suit in federal court, arguing that the city and private developers had an obligation to build affordable housing. A settlement this year led to some concessions by the defendants. But advocates for the poor still complain that not enough low-income housing is being rebuilt on the North Side -- and predict that the same thing will happen with Taylor on the South Side.

Reason to Celebrate

Telitha Wright's move from Taylor to an apartment in Chicago's South Shore area has been such a success that she decided to celebrate. She invited 20 friends and relatives from the project to see her new house and join her for a Thanksgiving feast.
 

Telitha Wright's friends were impressed when she moved out of the partially demolished Robert Taylor Homes and into a spacious apartment in Chicago's South Shore neighborhood.

Her guests gathered around a long table in her dining room for turkey wings with dressing, chitterlings, ham, candied yams, macaroni and cheese, cranberries and sweet potato pie. Several people commented on the large size of her apartment, says Ms. Wright. They quizzed her about how she found such a wonderful place. It wasn't easy, she told them.

Ms. Wright, 26 years old, is the mother of two boys and a girl. She is a short woman with delicate features and a leopard tattooed on her right forearm. She grew up in a private apartment but moved to Taylor five years ago, after the birth of her first child. She never liked the place, and when the chance came to get out, she jumped at it.

The Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities, one of several nonprofit organizations under contract to help relocate public-housing residents in Chicago, showed her about 15 apartments. They coached her on how to make a good impression on landlords. Still, she says, most of the landlords rejected her.

Ms. Wright suspects they didn't want a young woman with a large family, or they didn't want Taylor families. She may have been right. Landlords are wary of project residents. George Frazier, who owns properties in Ms. Wright's neighborhood, says that generally speaking, a 20-year-old mother from Taylor with three children "doesn't look too good." But he says he has been pleasantly surprised by ex-project tenants, whom he recently began accepting, after thoroughly screening them. He even visits prospective renters in their public-housing apartments. "If you see graffiti in their apartment, you know you don't want that person," he says.

Ms. Wright has a solid employment history and a sunny disposition. Her mother lives nearby and looks after her children while Ms. Wright works as a fast-food restaurant manager. When she finally found a landlord willing to meet her she had little trouble making her case. The landlord, who failed to return phone calls seeking comment, set down strict conditions about limiting noise and late-night visitors. The rules were fine with Ms. Wright.

She has lived in her three-bedroom apartment since September. "We have a YMCA" nearby, she says. "There's a school on the next block. There's a day-care center, a grocery store, a Walgreens." At Taylor, "nobody would come to your house. Here, you can get a newspaper delivered to your house. You can get water delivered."

Last summer, she suffered complications after a miscarriage and hasn't returned to her restaurant job since. Even so, with public aid, food stamps and help from her boyfriend, she has no trouble paying the $174 monthly rent.

She viewed Thanksgiving as an opportunity to motivate those left behind. But some of her friends complained that the only decent apartments were in the suburbs, a distant place some had never seen.

"It gets too dark out there," one Thanksgiving guest, Tammy Brown, says later in an interview. "We've got streets. They've got all that grass. It's too quiet for me. That's how people get killed. It's so quiet nobody even knows. In the city, when people get killed, you know."

Ms. Wright says she reminded Ms. Brown that if she's patient, she can find a nice place in the city.

As the afternoon sky turned dark on Thanksgiving Day, some of her guests sat on the building's porch, playing Yahtzee and cards. Someone turned up the radio, and a few people danced the Electric Slide.

"They all can't wait to move," Ms. Wright says. "That's all they talked about."

Culture Clash

But many of those remaining at Robert Taylor have been left behind for a reason. Sometimes, it is because no landlord will take them, sometimes because they have adapted so thoroughly to the culture of Robert Taylor that they can't imagine life anywhere else.

In 4444 South State, where Ms. Hewitt lives, her next-door neighbor, Vernon Samuels, lies in bed, tucked under her covers, turning one way to watch through yellow lace curtains the demolition of the high rise just south of her own, then turning the other way to watch TV. She has large dark eyes and, sometimes, an unlit cigarette between her fingers. She is 69 years old and has lived in the building for 29 years.

Ms. Samuels says she lives alone in her three-bedroom apartment, but on most days the place is bustling with friends, relatives and neighborhood children who need looking after. She says she has been scanning the classified ads for an apartment but can't find anything. "If I had a choice, sure, I'd stay here," she says. "I'm moving because I have to."

Ms. Samuels has been receiving counseling about moving from Family Dynamics, a local nonprofit group. She has been taught about housekeeping, getting along with new neighbors, and paying bills. Her counselor has driven her around to look at apartments. But Ms. Samuels says she hasn't seen anything she liked.

The counselors at Family Dynamics informally rank their Robert Taylor clients in three categories, each equal in number. A-level residents have jobs and high school degrees and don't need much hand holding to find apartments. B-level residents have sketchy work histories and varied levels of education. They tend to miss their appointments to look at apartments, but they will move if they have enough help. The C group struggles with crime and drugs and shows no interest in moving. Ms. Samuels, at least partly because of her poor health, is considered a B.

When longtime public-housing occupants move to privately owned apartments, their counselors say, they are often befuddled. Accustomed to the free heat provided by the housing authority, many former residents open their windows and blast the heat simultaneously in their new apartments -- until the first utility bill arrives. Some, having never had anything but linoleum on their floors, attempt to mop their carpets. Children accustomed to bouncing balls off the sturdy cinderblock walls in Robert Taylor have damaged the walls in their new apartments.

"I've had to counsel them on the qualities of drywall," says Vernon Hansen, a counselor at Family Dynamics.

And those are the simple issues. Some of the single women living in Taylor believe landlords might view them more favorably if their boyfriends or fiances co-signed their leases. But if the men who did so earn steady incomes, some of those families would lose their federal subsidies.

Taylor residents have grown accustomed to a communal environment where, even with crime on the street, front doors stay open all day. Within the enclosed breezeways, children run free and neighbors sit and gossip for hours on end. In their new homes, whether in the city or the suburb, some former public-housing occupants have grown depressed by a sense of isolation, residents and counselors say. The shortage of convenient public transportation only heightens these sensations.

An important and ironic factor compelling residents to cling to their collapsing apartments is their lack of trust in the very authority that oversees those apartments. The public-housing system that has sustained them for generations has time after time broken promises, residents say. They aren't inclined to start trusting that system now.

Shahshak Levi, 44 years old, who has lived in Robert Taylor most of his life, sounds a common theme when he says he suspects the government is making a land grab, now that downtown real-estate prices are sky-high. "We need to get the people out of the way, so we can rebuild without them," Mr. Levi says, summing up his view of the government's motive.

Chicago housing officials say they haven't yet determined what will go up on the Taylor land. But private housing experts, and even some housing-authority officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, agree that Taylor probably will be replaced with more commercial development than residential.

On one recent day, Mr. Levi sits in an office at Robert Taylor, looking through an album of photos kept by his friend and neighbor, George Johnson, who has documented the demise of the project. He flips past pictures of moving trucks, exposed wiring and children playing with live rats. "Some of them were pets," Mr. Johnson says, matter-of-factly.

The fall has turned nearly to winter. The building behind 4444 South State has been reduced to rubble. And just as residents feared, bullets from 4525 South Federal have been flying. The Black Disciples now have a clear shot at the Gangster Disciples.

Monique Hewitt has packed up her grocery store. There aren't enough residents left in 4444 South State to sustain it.

She invited friends and family to her apartment for Thanksgiving. The sense of security and warmth the gathering provided makes her want to stay in Taylor at least another season. She tells her fiance she would probably move to 4429 South Federal -- just across the courtyard -- and run for an office with the tenant association. That way, she could urge the Chicago Housing Authority to build replacement housing on the Taylor grounds, and maybe she wouldn't have to leave.

Ms. Hewitt knows such a result is unlikely, but she is trying to hang on to what is left of her home. A few years ago, she hired an artist to paint murals on the bright green walls of her four-bedroom apartment. The mural she treasures most is a detailed painting of the high rise in which she grew up, 4331 South State. It's all there: the fenced-in breezeways, the brick facade, the young men loitering out front, even a police car cruising by.

She says she has spoken to the artist about repainting the mural in her new home, wherever it may be. But Ms. Hewitt's counselor has told her most landlords wouldn't let her paint on the walls.

Pressure From the Children

The moving trucks continue backing up to her building. The housing authority confirms that it will be demolished by March.

"How come everybody's leaving except us?" Ms. Hewitt's six-year-old daughter, DaAngela, asks one afternoon.

"It's hard," her mother explains.

"I wanna move, too," says seven-year-old Katina.

"I did make a list of new houses," Ms. Hewitt says, pushing a piece of paper with phone numbers across the table. "See?"

Just after Thanksgiving, a bullet blows through Vernon Samuels's apartment next door and lodges in Ms. Hewitt's bedroom wall. She pulls out her list again and phones a few more of the landlords.

One of them has a house on 126th Street that sounds nice. It has a two-car garage and central air-conditioning. It is far away, almost in the suburbs. She calls her counselor. She hasn't made up her mind, but Ms. Hewitt is willing to take a look.

Write to Jonathan Eig at jonathan.eig@wsj.com
 

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