On a cold morning last December, a former teacher’s aide and grandmother named Annie Ricks was the last tenant to leave the last high-rise at the Cabrini-Green public housing development. The focus of national media attention, she was the star of the end of an era.
But after that day of farewells and photographs, she disappeared from public view until Tuesday’s monthly meeting of the Chicago Housing Authority’s board of commissioners.
She stood at the microphone with her 19-year-old son, Raymond. She was nervous. He was silent; his right hand was in a soft cast.
“I’m tired of my kids getting jumped on,’’ she told the commissioners.
Since moving into the Wentworth Gardens public housing development on the South Side on Dec. 9, 2010, “my life has been a living hell,” Ricks said in an interview.
She said Wentworth Gardens, on the edge of the Bridgeport neighborhood, has been a battlefield for her family, especially for her youngest sons, who have been attacked several times.
Raymond Ricks said he broke two of the knuckles on his right hand Aug. 31 while defending his brother from a mob of at least two dozen attackers. “It was like we were fighting everybody in the complex,’’ he said.
Ricks, 55, said longtime residents of the development are hostile to newcomers from Cabrini and have been trying to chase them out. She said there are seven families from Cabrini living in Wentworth after being relocated as part of the housing authority’s ambitious plan to tear down its high-rise towers and replace them with low-rise, mixed income units.
Roberta Rendles, 32, moved into Wentworth from Cabrini in November 2010, a month before Ricks. Her two children, Rendles said, have also had to run the gauntlet of hostile neighbors. Still, she wants to stay in Wentworth.
“The community is nice,’’ she said. “It’s not the community. It’s some of the people in the community. They’ve been here a long time and they’re close knit. That’s great. But why should I suffer because I come from somewhere else?’’
Willie J.R. Fleming, an advocate of low-income housing, agreed that the source of the conflict was long-time residents of the housing project.
“The indigenous people of Wentworth seem to feel the people from Cabrini are infringing on their territory,’’ he said. “So out of that has come a situation where there have been a lot of fights. There have been beatings. Children have had their wrists broken, jaw broken.’’
Fleming, who does not reside in public housing, used to live in Cabrini. And two of his children currently live in Wentworth Gardens. “My daughter had a gun pulled on her in July because she’s from Cabrini,’’ he said. “It’s a powder keg.’’
Fleming said some of the former Cabrini residents go to the store or the gas station in pairs. Some even carry baseball bats for protection.
But Beatrice Harris, president of the Wentworth Gardens tenant’s group, called the allegations of angry, violent neighbors “a lie.”
“I’m not going to let nobody put us down because there are some people here who want to be somewhere else,” Harris said, adding that she has lived in Wentworth Gardens for 45 years and “it’s filled with good people.”
Harris said any violence is the result of poor security at the development.
“The security guards aren’t doing what they’re supposed to do,” she said. “They’re not securing anything.”
Jadine Chou, a senior vice president at the housing authority in charge of asset management, has visited the troubled South Side development several times in recent months.
“The CHA has been working very closely with management, Chicago police and our private security to keep the peace,’’ Chou said. “We have brought in social service resources to assist the families. It is important to us that all families have the opportunity to live in a safe environment.’’
Chou said the cause of the conflict is not as clear as some residents believe.
“As one of my property managers says, there’s always three sides to the story,’’ she said. “There’s your side, my side and the truth.’’
Chou said there have been at least two “major fights,’’ involving longtime Wentworth residents and the newcomers from the North Side. She said one of the fights was captured by a surveillance camera and “that is revealing a lot of information.’’
“I can assure you,” Chou said, “that in the end, the individuals who are culpable, whoever they turn out to be, will be held accountable.”
Ricks said she spends much of her time these days sitting at the kitchen window of her second-floor apartment, watching the courtyard. She keeps her shoes nearby in case she has to hurry out to protect her children.
She lived at Cabrini-Green for 21 years and did not want to leave. She said she loved the development and the neighborhood. But she had no choice. Her building at 1230 North Burling Street was marked for demolition, the last of public housing’s notorious high-rises.
Two days before she had to move out, CHA officials drove her to visit several low-rise developments, including the 343-unit Wentworth Gardens, which runs along the Dan Ryan expressway two blocks south of U.S. Cellular Field.
“Ms. Ricks was given the option of where she wanted to go,’’ Chou said in an interview. “Because she was the last resident, clearly we wanted to do everything we could to make her as comfortable with her choice as possible.’’
Ricks chose Wentworth Gardens, even though she said she had heard that other former Cabrini residents had encountered hostility.
“I went anyway, because I didn’t want to be homeless,’’ she said.
Ricks said it was not long before trouble started. She said her son Reggie Ricks, 20, was attacked by a group of men and teenagers on March 28. He was “jumped on’’ again on Aug. 31, but that time his younger brother, Raymond, happened along.
“I thank God Raymond was there,’’ Ricks said.
Raymond does not live at the development. He was visiting that day when he saw a big commotion and realized his brother was being beaten by a mob.
He went to his brother’s defense and that is when he broke the knuckles. He said he works construction but “I can’t even go to work because my hand is messed up.’’
“The guys here think we’re trying to take over or something,’’ Raymond Ricks said. “We ain’t trying to do nothing but live.’’
The Wentworth Garden residents need to talk the their Alderman. The Alderman should talk with CHA and express a concern that the northside should not be able to almost completely rid themselves from taking their fair share of CHA families. They are overwhelming the southside, doing no impact study and making it unsafe for the people being relocated. These families should be relocated to alternate housing within their own community on the northside, not shipped off to the southside. Stop using the southside as a dumping ground for low income families. It seems as if CHA is trying to drive the working class citizens on the southside to another side of town.