Word: cabrini
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...market. The CHA's rapid rate of demolition is worsening the problem; so far 7,300 units have been demolished, but only 699 have been built, forcing tenants in and out of temporary housing as they vie for permanent shelter in a desperate game of musical chairs. At Cabrini a total of 922 units have been demolished, but only 700 new units will replace them, which means residents wishing to return will be selected by lottery. All others will be placed in housing elsewhere or will receive vouchers...
...economically struggling neighborhood in the Far North Side, appeared fine at first, and at $585 a month was in her price range. "It was a relief to not have to duck when I walked by my own window," she says, referring to the stray gunfire that crackled through Cabrini after dark. Nearly anything would be safer than Cabrini, she reasoned. But just two months after she moved in, a vandal torched the building entryway. In the fire and smoke, all her possessions were lost. After enduring several days in a shelter, Berryman and her son squeezed into the three-bedroom...
Deidre Brewster, 29, who left Cabrini in the late 1990s with her two children, had a similar experience. She had hoped to find something close to Cabrini, but even with a voucher she found herself priced out of her neighborhood. While she expanded her search to the city's North and South sides, she was forced to move her family in with her mother. "If it weren't for her, I would have been homeless," Brewster recalls. "I couldn't find a decent place. The only apartment I could find was in a slum area" suffering from "drug issues, gang...
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...
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...