On a freezing morning in February four years ago, Verna Berryman, 46, packed up her things, bade goodbye to the Cabrini-Green housing project and embarked on a journey that she would probably rather forget. Forced out of the 16th-floor apartment that had been her home for six years, Berryman and her youngest child, Vernon, 17, joined a small group of other Cabrini families in what were the first steps of a massive plan to empty and demolish Chicago's decaying high-rise projects.
The program is ambitious, envisioning no less than a revolution in housing the poor. Other cities--Atlanta, Boston, Miami and Oakland--are...