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Beyond exorbitant rent and a scarcity of affordable housing, former Cabrini tenants complain that the path to building a new life away from the projects is blocked by the same obstacles that helped keep them there in the first place: bad credit; a sagging job market; hostile, sometimes racist landlords; and neighborhoods that reject or make life uncomfortable for the incoming poor. "It's tough dealing with landlords when they know you have a voucher," says Berryman. "They treat you different when they know you're coming from the projects." Many of those landlords, she says, harbored misguided suspicions that she or her teenage son was involved with drugs and subjected them to nasty interrogations before slamming the door in their faces. That kind of treatment continued even after she moved in. One landlord, she recalls, discouraged her from complaining about rats, telling her, "You're from Cabrini; you should be used to rats."
A recent investigation by the Chicago-based Lawyers' Committee for Better Housing found that nearly 75% of the city's landlords illegally refuse or rebuff apartment-seeking tenants who present housing vouchers. That makes it almost impossible to integrate poor families into economically diverse parts of the city. On the city's South Shore, which is undergoing an economic rebound, some neighborhoods are organizing against a possible influx of the poor, who they fear will lower property values. Nearly 80% of families relocated by the CHA in the past three years wound up in neighborhoods that are almost entirely black, with household incomes averaging $15,000 or less a year. Berryman says she would prefer not to move into a mixed-income neighborhood. "The first time something goes wrong in the neighborhood, I know they'll blame it on the poor people."
Sharonda Harper is one of the CHA's success stories. After leaving Cabrini in 1996 and shuttling through two shabby apartments on the city's gritty South Side, Harper, 26, received a phone call from the CHA inviting her to attend a housing meeting. (Not every relocated tenant is so lucky; Harper's aunt happens to work for the CHA.) She put her name in a lottery, passed a drug test and now sits in a clean three-bedroom apartment in a new cluster of town houses within sight of the remaining condemned Cabrini towers. When the town houses are complete, the income mix will be divided this way: 50% of the population will pay the full market rate; 20% will pay up to one-third of their monthly income; and 30% will be former public-housing tenants who also will pay no more than one-third of their income. Harper, who was laid off from her job as a temp at the post office six months ago and is now looking for work, pays $700 a month. As her daughter Shalonda, 10, and son Samuel, 8, play in the apartment, Harper explains that "if you venture a couple blocks away from here, you see the same bad stuff--drugs and gangs--but it's getting better. You don't feel like you're walking into danger all the time." Sam stops to tell what he likes about the new apartment: "It's got a washing machine. And a big closet."
For the moment, though, happy endings like this one remain few. "I'm not going to tell you we have it all figured out yet," says CHA boss Peterson, "but we are willing to tweak the system as we move forward."