And it sound like resisting Chicago's plan will be as successful as resisting San Francisco's plan was.

Quote of note:

The lawsuit says that housing officials don't have a firm plan for what will be built in place of the run-down buildings. They don't know when residents would be able to return, or how many would be accommodated in the new housing.

The complaint also highlights evidence   including an independent report commissioned by the Chicago Housing Authority   that the agency has moved residents from Cabrini and other projects into poor neighborhoods to the south and west such as Englewood and Roseland, which have some of the city's highest crime and poverty rates.

"Why should we go, if the alternatives aren't much better?" asked Carol Steele, 53, one of the leaders of the lawsuit. Steele has spent her whole life in the Cabrini neighborhood and wants to rebuild a way of life she remembers with fondness.

It's Bleak but It's Home
Chicago is tearing down the notorious Cabrini-Green projects. Some tenants refuse to go, saying the city won't provide anything better.
By P.J. Huffstutter
Times Staff Writer
March 1, 2005

CHICAGO — For 24 years, Gladys Franklin has called the Cabrini-Green projects home.

The high-rise where she lives is decaying, and nearly a third of the doors and windows are boarded up. Squatters have broken into some of the apartments. Other units sit empty.

The elevator works only when it wants to, so Franklin refuses to take it. Instead, she hobbles to the stairwell that reeks of urine. Stepping over a broken crack pipe, she inches down the 14 steps from her second-floor home.

It's a journey that can take an hour.

Franklin knows that Cabrini-Green is a flawed and dangerous place to live, especially for an 83-year-old grandmother crippled by arthritic pain. But the gangs couldn't drive her away and, swears the old woman, neither will the city of Chicago.

"The city talks of a new world, a better life for all of us," Franklin said. "But all we get are broken promises."

Housing officials want to relocate Franklin and about 1,400 residents who remain at Cabrini-Green, one of the nation's most notorious public housing projects. For the last five years, the Chicago Housing Authority has been gradually emptying Cabrini-Green as part of a 10-year, $1.6-billion plan to level public housing projects. Similar efforts are underway across the country.

The towers of poverty in different projects throughout Chicago have been deemed unlivable by federal and city officials. They are to be replaced with condominiums and row houses where the impoverished and the well-heeled would live side by side.

It is the biggest overhaul of public housing in the country: 51 high-rises across the city, totaling 16,000 apartments, would be replaced by about 25,000 new or rehabilitated units.

"We will do what it takes to break the cycle of generations of families living in public housing," said Terry Peterson, the housing authority's chief executive. "We have a lot of work ahead of us."

But no matter how bad life is at Cabrini-Green, many residents don't believe the city will find them better temporary housing until the new apartments become available. Nearly 400 families have banded together and are suing the city to prevent their eviction and stop the demolition.