Last Resident of Chicago's Cabrini-Green Faces Uncertain Future

CHICAGO (Dec. 9) -- The ungainly 15-story high-rise pierces the blue winter sky, a lonely emblem marking the end of an era in this city's public housing program.

Lights flicker on the 11th floor. Only one apartment is occupied -- and not for long.

Annie Ricks and five of her children (the youngest is 13) are packing their basketball trophies, framed photographs and TV sets -- a life in Chicago's most notorious project -- into a U-Haul today. They are leaving the Cabrini-Green high-rise to its fate, a demolition planned for early 2011, which closes a contentious chapter in Chicago history.

Ricks, 52, challenged a Chicago Housing Authority edict to empty the building by late November, winning a court extension to stay through Friday. By Tuesday, the Ricks family were the only residents of the 134-unit high-rise, whose steeled-in, open-air galleries provide a southern view of Chicago's skyline.

While Cabrini-Green has come to symbolize the violence of inner-city public-housing projects, for Ricks, a state-employed nanny who grew up in a one-room shack in Riverview, Ala., arriving at the complex that once housed 15,000 families represented a step up in the world.

After a fire devoured her house in 1988, Ricks and her eight children moved from one relative's house to the next, even spending two weeks in the waiting room of the county hospital, before being approved for a three-bedroom apartment in Cabrini-Green.

"We came a long way from being homeless," Ricks told AOL News. "I always told my kids from day one that they were blessed that they didn't have to go through what I had to go through as a child growing up in Alabama."

When a 7-year-old boy was slain by a stray bullet in 1992, Ricks realized her children could be in danger. But her fear of returning to the streets outweighed any other concern.

Despite the bouts of violence, after 20 years she grew to love her home, a public housing building on another part of the Cabrini complex that was demolished last year.

"I would have loved to have stayed for many more [years], but they tore it down," she said.

Ricks is being uprooted yet again. The housing authority first offered her a home in a row-house apartment within the Cabrini complex, built in 1942 for war veterans returning to factory jobs.

But Ricks feared gun battles between "the reds," the nickname for residents of the long red-brick apartments, and new transplants from "the whites," the name for the residents of Cabrini's towers, an old rivalry that always seems to heat up in warm weather.

"You put a bad neighborhood into another bad neighborhood and the violence just escalates," said Deonte Ricks, her 25-year-old son, a home security salesman. "If you put bad-behaving people in a good neighborhood, they have no choice but to adapt to the environment."

That is the prevailing theory behind Chicago's decade-old Plan for Transformation, a project to demolish the worst of the city's public housing and replace it with a smattering of units in new mixed-income developments.

"We recognize change is tough, but I do think Chicago is better off with the housing choices we're making for our residents," the Chicago Housing Authority's chief executive, Lewis Jordan, said in an interview.

Ricks' public housing voucher is good for anywhere in the city, and for many places around the country, but she would most like to use it on an affordable unit in a mixed-income development back on the North Side, built on the ashes of Cabrini-Green.

Until then, Ricks and her four children will live in a four-bedroom unit in a public housing project called Wentworth Gardens on Chicago's South Side. Ricks' 21-year-old daughter and 3-year-old grandson are moving into another subsidized apartment.

"Even though I chose Wentworth, I might be there a month, but I'm still going to come out every day, bugging them for the right to return, because I'm not giving up. I'm going to hold them to it," she said.

Cabrini-Green, popularized in the 1970s sitcom "Good Times," is an icon of an era, said Keith Magee, director of the National Public Housing Museum.

"This building will be torn down, so there will not be the structure here but will be the memory Miss Ricks will have. That story and how we share it is important to America," Magee said.