The Auburn-Gresham community has become home to 159 former public housing households with rental-subsidy vouchers, more than Chatham, its more middle-class neighbor to the west. But the problems besetting Auburn-Gresham were locked in long before the new tenants arrived.
The neighborhood has suffered since businesses and investment capital disappeared in the aftermath of the “white flight” that began in the 1960s, residents said. Over the years, gangs, drugs, and poverty also have migrated into Auburn-Gresham.
“When I first moved over here everyone was homeowners, and they were stakeholders and had more control over their children,” said Shirley Bryant, a block club leader and community policing volunteer who has lived at 77th and Marshfield for 30 years.
As longtime home-owners grew older, some of their children lost their jobs, got involved in drugs, or simply failed to invest in the community, Bryant said. “I think the change came with the grands and the great-grands,” she said. “That’s where we lost the children.”
Bryant and other residents often hear gunfire at night—some of it seemingly from high-powered, automatic weapons. “I think it’s part of the drug trade. But then, a lot of people, those grands or great-grands who live on the street, they’re just hanging out, and things are going to happen when you’re just hanging out.”
There are clearly broader economic forces at work: Stretches of some commercial thoroughfares, including Racine and Ashland avenues, have few surviving businesses, and some residential blocks have multiple foreclosed homes. Between 2000 and 2009, the number of owner-occupied housing units declined 14 percent in Auburn-Gresham and surrounding communities, according to an analysis of census data by the Chicago Rehab Network.
Most of the people selling drugs on Ms. Bryant’s block were familiar faces long before the Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan for Transformation began a decade ago. “Displaced people from the projects could be some of the problem, but most of the people on my corner, they’re from the area,” she said. “They grew up here so they think the corners are theirs.”
Police Commander Eddie Johnson agrees. Johnson has led the Sixth Police District, which includes Auburn-Gresham, since 2008, and was a beat cop in the district from 1988 to 1998.
“A lot of people I was locking up back then, their families are still involved in illegal activity,” he said. “And a lot of the people who took such care with their homes, they have started to pass on. And some of their children don’t have the same morals that their parents and grandparents have.”
Some residents feel the neighborhood is getting safer, but the economic recession has been devastating. The Rev. Michael Pfleger, who has been pastor of St. Sabina Church in Auburn-Gresham for 30 years, said high unemployment and neighborhood violence have made the last year his most difficult in ministry. “I’ve never seen people so desperate and so hopeless,” he said. “I think the CHA is a piece, but it’s not the only piece.”
Reporting for this series was supported in part by a grant from the Center on Media, Crime and Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.