[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 107 (Friday, August 5, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: August 5, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                       CHICAGO HOUSING AUTHORITY

  Mr. DOLE. Mr. President, I want to commend to my colleagues an 
article that recently appeared in the Heritage Foundation publication, 
Policy Review.
  In the article, Vincent Lane, the chairman of the Chicago Housing 
Authority, explains how ``capping crime'' is the most important public-
housing reform. He writes: ``How can you build a community if people 
are afraid to go out and talk to their neighbors? People have to board 
up their windows because they're afraid of random gunfire. It's no good 
offering programs in the evenings if people are afraid to go out and 
take advantage of them. Safety is our first priority.
  Mr. Lane is, apparently, a man of action. In an effort to tackle the 
crime problem head on, he instituted a policy of requiring visitors to 
CHA buildings to present photo ID's at the door. He has also 
implemented midnight curfews and a policy allowing emergency 
inspections of apartments for illegal weapons. As Mr. Lane explains: 
``We've held sweeps whenever conditions got so bad in a building that I 
determined there was a health and safety hazard.''
  These policies have had a positive impact. While still unacceptably 
high, the murder rate has declined by almost 50 percent.
  Unfortunately, the American Civil Liberties Union has been lurking in 
the wings, challenging the identification policy and challenging the 
curfews. Although 18 of the 19 building presidents in the CHA and the 
overwhelming majority of CHA residents support the sweeps, the ACLU has 
been active on this front too. Apparently, when it comes to ensuring 
the safety of CHA residents, the ACLU knows better than the residents 
themselves.
  Mr. President, I want to commend Mr. Lane for his efforts, and I urge 
my colleagues to take a few moments to read the Policy Review article.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the article be inserted 
in the Record immediately after my remarks.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

          Public Housing Sweep Stakes--My Battle With the ACLU

                           (By Vincent Lane)

       In the late 1980s, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) was 
     the worst public housing authority in the country. Its crime 
     rate was three times that of the city as a whole. It seemed 
     as if public housing had a monopoly on nearly every example 
     of inner-city rot: shootings, open-air drug deals, assault, 
     poverty and fear. The first thing I did when I took over CHA 
     was to hold town meetings with the residents, and define what 
     the problems were. The major problem that I heard then--and 
     still hear--was safety.
       In the five-and-a-half years since I became CHA chairman, 
     we have made real headway in a number of areas. Since 1991 
     serious crime of nearly all types has declined between 30 and 
     60 percent. Sexual assaults, homicides, and battery are all 
     down by 44 percent. At our notoriously violent Cabrini-Green 
     development, for example, there have been only two murders--
     over a love triangle--and no gang-related killings in the 
     last 18 months. No longer do criminals set curfews; they 
     don't control and keep people from coming and going; they 
     don't sell drugs in the open, or shoot craps in the lobby.
       Have we solved all the problems? No. Random shootings, 
     assaults and thefts continue. Have we eliminated gangs? No, 
     because many of the gang members are the children of our 
     residents, and they live in the buildings. We've lowered the 
     CHA's crime rate to only twice that of the city, but it costs 
     $70 million a year. Not exactly a resounding success.
       The most important thing we've accomplished, however, is to 
     bring a sense to the residents that it doesn't have to be 
     this way. we've brought a sense of possibility, of innovation 
     to public housing--by not just reacting to problems, but 
     finding long-term strategies that get at their root causes. 
     That's something I've been trying to convey to Congress and 
     to legislative groups, public housing residents, foundations, 
     and the business community.


                             capping crime

       Reforming public housing requires simultaneous attacks on 
     several fronts--on welfare, job training, and education. But 
     all these efforts are doomed to failure unless you tackle 
     head-on the crime issue.
       When I joined the CHA, the gangs were in control. It was 
     not just a management problems, it was a sociological 
     problem. Gang members were firebombing apartments, setting 
     curfews for the tenants, and refusing to allow janitors to 
     clean buildings.
       If you're not in control of property, it's impossible to 
     institute management improvements. I went to the police and 
     told them, ``We've got to take these buildings back. We've 
     got to control the access; we've got to issue photo ID cards; 
     and we have to inspect the units and try to clean them up.'' 
     We've now accomplished these tasks in over 200 buildings.
       In 1991 there were 90 homicides throughout the CHA. In 
     1992, there were 66. In 1993, the number fell to 50. So we're 
     making progress. Sometimes that's overlooked because homicide 
     still is a major problem. But as I've always said, you have 
     to take the first step if you ever hope to complete the 
     journey.
       Because of our anti-crime tactics we've tangled in court 
     with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) nearly from 
     day one. And unfortunately for the residents of the 
     developments, they've prevented us from doing several things. 
     First, in an out-of-court settlement, the ACLU forced us to 
     end our policy of positive verification. The policy has 
     allowed us to require visitors to the buildings to show photo 
     IDs. ACLU lawyers objected on the grounds that in non-public 
     housing guests aren't required to prove their identities. The 
     problem with that argument is that someone can come in and 
     claim to be Yogi Bear, and as long as the tenant backs him 
     up, we have no choice but to let him in. His identity is 
     never on record, and very often he's a drug dealer.
       We also set curfews when we first secured buildings, rather 
     than allow the gangs to set them. At midnight, all visitors 
     had to leave; any apartments with visitors who hadn't signed 
     out were checked on. We found that many of the ``visitors'' 
     had been living there for years, fathering children, without 
     being on the lease. Again, in an out-of-court agreement, the 
     ACLU prevented us from maintaining the curfews.
       There has been an interesting byproduct of our policy, 
     however. Although people say, ``You can't have a traditional 
     family in public housing,'' many of the men who were being 
     flushed out of the building came to me and complained that 
     they didn't have any place to go; they wanted to stay with 
     their children and their common-law wives. I suggested that 
     they get on the leases of the apartments, which would make 
     them legitimate tenants. Many of them decided they wanted to 
     get married, but couldn't afford blood tests or rings. So we 
     had a fundraiser, and put together a mass wedding for 18 
     couples. All but three of the couples are still together.
       The curfew, as viewed by the ACLU, was onerous. But that 
     curfew, as a practical matter, forced a lot of men to come 
     forward and make a choice. And it helped stabilize families.


                       housecleaning: the sweeps

       Another policy we think is essential to restoring order to 
     the developments--and which has been partially blocked by the 
     ACLU--are so-called ``building sweeps.'' We call them 
     emergency inspections, in which Chicago police and CHA 
     security can raid and search apartments without warrants. 
     We've held sweeps whenever conditions got so bad in a 
     building that I determined there was a health and safety 
     hazard.
       Because we did not want people saying we were doing an 
     illegal search, when we went into the apartments we did not 
     look under mattresses and in drawers. This was our modus 
     operandi: We sent in a team of people to identify physical 
     deficiencies in each unit. They looked under beds or see if 
     the tiles were loose; they looked in the closets to make sure 
     there were no leaks; they looked on the windowsills to make 
     sure the windows were closing property. Very often, during 
     that process, they ran across drugs, contraband, weapons, and 
     other illegal items.
       We were especially concerned about the windows. In the 
     summer of 1993, a number of children fell out of the windows. 
     It was like an epidemic. Yes, it is the mothers' 
     responsibility to keep their children safe; there is no city 
     code here, or in most other cities, that requires child 
     guards on windows. But kids were being injured and killed by 
     these falls, so we reallocated, on an emergency basis, about 
     $7 million to install child guards throughout the system.
       One day I inquired how the installations were going at one 
     of our developments, the Robert Taylor Homes. I was told the 
     installers had to ``pull out.'' One of the gang members told 
     the superintendent on the job to ``get his white ass out of 
     there.'' They said they didn't want the window guards in 
     Robert Taylor. Then they sprayed the superintendent's car 
     with automatic weapons fire.
       When I asked the staff what they'd done about it, they said 
     they'd wait a week or two, and then see if the workers could 
     sneak back in. That was totally unacceptable to me. There's 
     no way we could go back to the period when the gangs 
     determined when legitimate workmen could come and go from 
     these buildings.
       I organized a search for weapons, on the premise that when 
     gunmen are firing randomly at cars and out of windows--things 
     that go on all the time in public housing--it's really no 
     different from a bomb threat in an airport or in an office 
     building. When there's a threat of a bomb and you don't know 
     where it is, you look everywhere you can; you don't run and 
     get a search warrant before you look for the bomb.
       We carried out a weapons search and found a number of 
     weapons, ranging from .45s to MAC-lOs to high-powered rifles 
     with scopes. The weapons we took out of the building could do 
     a lot of damage on the street in the wrong hands.
       This April, a federal judge sided with the ACLU in banning 
     the search for weapons except in emergencies, calling them a 
     violation of Fourth Amendment rights prohibiting unlawful 
     search and seizure. The Clinton administration, however, 
     through the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) 
     and the Department of Justice seems willing to allow the 
     searches. Despite the fact that 18 of the 19 building 
     presidents in the CHA support the sweeps--along with the 
     overwhelming majority of residents--I know we haven't heard 
     the last from the ACLU.


                            The Welfare Lie

       To understand what's really going on in public housing, you 
     must look at the broader public policy issues. We have set up 
     two standards in America: One for poor minorities, and one 
     for everybody else.
       The welfare system and the government assistance system 
     have said, ``Assume that poor people can do nothing to help 
     themselves.'' And so the standard that we set for them was 
     either very low or no standard at all. After three or four 
     generations, we have people who are totally dependent on the 
     government for everything. We should have maintained high 
     standards, and put programs and support systems in place that 
     would help them achieve those high standards.
       Anyone who wants to talk about welfare and why poor black 
     women have babies and no fathers around should look at the 
     early record of public assistance. Thirty years ago, public 
     aid wouldn't support families when there was a father in the 
     house. What father, if he cared anything about his children 
     and their mother, would have them penalized because he was 
     out of work?
       An underground culture, a system of lying in order to 
     survive, developed in poor communities. Even though the rules 
     have changed, so that now you can be on welfare and have an 
     unemployed male in the house, a culture has built up. It's 
     hard to break the fear that somehow the system will punish 
     the woman and the children if the father is there and 
     unemployed.
       Developing this culture was a mistake. Children grow up in 
     an environment where they watch men sneak in after dark, and 
     hide if someone knocks on the door. Soon, children think 
     that's the way it's supposed to be. On a public television 
     program a couple of years ago, they interviewed a young man 
     whose girlfriend was having his baby. He had three or four 
     other babies by three or four other women. He said, ``Well, 
     you know, I'm just supposed to bring the babies here, and the 
     state's supposed to take care of them.'' And it's public 
     policy that triggered that kind of behavior.


                           no reason to work

       Another problem is government-created rules that discourage 
     work. Why would we want to prevent a mother on welfare from 
     saving money if she wants to make a better life for her 
     children? But when she saves $1,000, welfare slaps her on the 
     wrist and says, ``You shouldn't be sacrificing and saving for 
     something positive. And we're going to cut your grant, or cut 
     you off, or put you in jail.'' It's insanity.
       Public housing's rent agreements reinforce this craziness. 
     The Brooke Amendment, the first federal law controlling 
     public housing rents, was passed some 25 years ago. Because 
     federal resources for providing housing assistance were 
     limited, Congress decided that only the very needy would be 
     assisted. They set up a rent formula: now 30 percent of an 
     individual's income would be charged for rent in public 
     housing.
       That may not sound like a bad idea, but it meant that if a 
     family member got a job and started doing well, the family 
     could be paying as much as $800 a month for an apartment that 
     on the private market would be worth no more than $200 a 
     month. It doesn't take long for people to decide that they 
     might as well move someplace where the houses are worth that.
       That's exactly what the families who could afford to have 
     done. Unfortunately, the families that replaced them had 
     single, young, female heads of households with children--all 
     on welfare. And that change has ruined public housing. This 
     is not racial issue. In the 1940s, 75 percent or more of the 
     families in public housing worked, and only the balance were 
     on assistance. Now, 90 percent of our families are single 
     mothers on welfare. It's a disaster.


                           no more isolation

       No one should be surprised by the conditions in public 
     housing and inner-city communities, because our public policy 
     did it to us. I believe that people largely are creatures of 
     their environment, and when children only see adults waiting 
     for their welfare checks, gangs, the drug culture, and 
     children having children, they think it's normal. For a young 
     girl in these communities, it's a rite of passage: Have a 
     baby as soon as possible, get your green card, get your 
     public housing unit, get your food stamps--and you're home 
     free.
       We have destroyed millions of people in this country with 
     this kind of bad public policy. To undo the damage, we're 
     going to have to break up these concentrations of welfare 
     recipients who simply reinforce themselves with each 
     generation. We know the problems that occur in these 
     communities cannot be isolated and contained--as I think they 
     once were.
       The schools are terrible in the cities, and the work force 
     is not being educated. It may take 50 to 100 years, but 
     America is going to be substantially a brown and black 
     country. We're not turning out people in our communities who 
     can help us compete on a global basis. We've got serious 
     problems. America is finally realizing that it's everybody's 
     problem, not just a problem of our core cities and our most 
     depressed neighborhoods--gangs are now moving into suburban 
     communities and shopping malls.


                        luring the working class

       We must bring working families back into the cities to 
     create some economic diversity and vitality. One way to do 
     this is to provide multiple housing options for poor people. 
     Public housing gives its residents no choice in terms of 
     location or type of housing. Not everyone wants to live in a 
     high-rise; we should be able to provide options like single-
     family homes and two-flats. Why? Because when you've got 
     something of value, you will hold onto it. Improve the 
     housing, increase the standards, let people know they have to 
     adopt sociable behavior and can't trash the places they're 
     living in or they'll be evicted. I believe people will change 
     their behavior.
       As I noted before, this concentration of poor people, 90 
     percent of them on welfare, does not work. We need to 
     distribute them throughout the Chicago metropolitan area. Of 
     course, many people are opposed to creating socio-
     economically mixed communities. One obstacle is our elected 
     officials. Many of them, whether black or white, want to 
     retain the demographic profile of their constituency--a 
     constituency that either won't vote or will vote the way 
     they're told to vote. Elected officials, black and white, 
     have told me, ``Vince, it's OK for you to repair these 
     places, but I don't want you moving people around, and moving 
     them out of my district, and bringing in people of a higher 
     income and educational level who may not think I'm doing the 
     kind of job I ought to be doing.''


                            mixing things up

       It makes more sense to encourage every new private 
     development to include some very low-income families. Don't 
     tell me it won't work, because we've tried it at Lake Parc 
     Place, at 39th and Lake Park. We had 50 percent working 
     people and 50 percent families on welfare. We fixed up the 
     buildings so that any working family would want to live 
     there. The units aren't lavish, but they're safe, clean, and 
     decent. Lake Parc Place has become a rental bargain for 
     working families.
       The results at the complex are almost exactly what we'd 
     hoped: after two-and-a-half years, we don't have any 
     vandalism; we don't have any graffiti; crime is practically 
     zero; and 20 percent of the families who started out on 
     welfare now have members working at full-time jobs. Clearly, 
     the mixed-family approach is worth pursuing.
       Until we break down the perception that poor is synonymous 
     with bad, we've got to have an incentive for working families 
     to live shoulder to shoulder with poor families. It's a myth 
     that families with children can't live in high-rises 
     successfully. When you drive along North Lake Shore Drive in 
     Chicago, all you see are high-rises. We all know that 
     families are raised successfully in high-rises. The problem 
     in public housing is the concentration of poor people living 
     there, not the buildings themselves.
       True, the mixed-family strategy requires both vision and 
     tough-minded negotiating. We took the rehabilitation money 
     that was available and fought with HUD to put in normal 
     amenities: ceiling fans, mini-blinds, ceramic tile in the 
     bath, hardwood cabinets, and frost-free refrigerators. 
     Normally, HUD officials wouldn't allow that, because of their 
     ``modest design'' standards for poor people. But you can't 
     get working people to rent from you without those amenities.
       HUD's standards are often self-defeating. HUD would not 
     approve a $250 air conditioner for poor tenants. But crime 
     goes up dramatically in the summer because it's so hot up in 
     those little units. No one could stand to stay up there in 
     the heat. When people come out, they're hot, they're 
     irritated, and that's when they get into trouble. Summer is 
     when our crime rate goes through the ceiling. If we had air 
     conditioning in the low-income units, where would people be? 
     I suggest they would be in their apartments, in that air 
     conditioning, and not outside, hot and angry, driving up the 
     crime rate.


                           holistic solutions

       We need a holistic approach to our housing problems. It's 
     not enough to build these units and integrate them into 
     neighborhoods that are socio-economically mixed. You can't 
     just take a family out of an old apartment, put them into a 
     new apartment, and expect them to make it on their own. Some 
     will, but there has to be a support system in place that will 
     deal with a range of problems. Many residents are substance 
     abusers; many have children who drop out of school; many are 
     not able to go to work because they haven't learned a skill.
       To pull together such a support system we are developing a 
     structured program at local schools, wherever these units 
     are, so that parents will participate with children in 
     education. This will include a mentoring program, creating 
     ``residential academies'' in CHA buildings.
       We also do referrals for substance-abuse problems and 
     mental health counseling, with built-in incentives. We train 
     the participants to be successful in a specific job, help 
     them to get that job, and then set up an escrow program over 
     five to seven years, so that they can accumulate a down 
     payment on a home.
       Then what happens? They move where they want to move, and 
     where they can afford to move, just like anybody else. Then 
     their housing unit is freed up for another public housing-
     eligible family to take advantage of that opportunity.
       Public housing units are a valuable commodity. I'm against 
     selling units to their tenants, because as a practical 
     matter, young people and older people are always going to 
     need help with low-cost housing. We ought to get back to what 
     public housing was originally intended to be: A short-term 
     helping hand. During this transition, we should put supports 
     and incentives in place to help people get to the point that 
     most Americans achieve in their lifetimes: To be able to move 
     wherever they want. If housing authorities decide to sell 
     units to the tenants, there must be an immediate hard unit 
     replacement available to maintain the public housing stock.
       To teach this sort of self sufficiency, we have training 
     programs for entrepreneurs. Two years ago we created the 
     Resident Self-Employment program. Almost two dozen people 
     have gone through the program and are now trying to 
     capitalize their own businesses.
       Rather than letting a contractor repair apartments, we 
     started a ``Step-Up'' program in 1992. We hired 300 
     residents, at $14 an hour, to repair apartments. They have 
     repaired 1,500 apartments so far, and many of those people 
     now are moving into apprentice programs with construction 
     trades. Some are going into the environmental area--asbestos 
     abatement and removal, and lead-based paint abatement and 
     removal. We've trained people in pest removal, landscaping, 
     and other skills that we can use to perform meaningful work 
     at the Authority.
       We're also helping people who already have skills and who 
     were, in some instances, already running little businesses 
     out of their apartments--hairdressers and seamstresses, for 
     example.They are receiving training in running those 
     businesses. Both of these approaches let people work close to 
     home.
       We have set up interagency committees that meet regularly 
     to target resources and prevent the duplication of services. 
     We have used this concept with various departments in the 
     city: with the Park District; with the Police Department on 
     the sweeps; and with the city's lighting department. We have 
     even obtained funding for an alternative school. Government 
     money can be a wasteful trap unless you're working together 
     in partnership.


                      bring back the helping hand

       When I look at the conditions in most of what passes for 
     public housing today, it seems to me that well-intentioned 
     people have really caused great pain and suffering over the 
     years. Their entire approach to the poor and to public 
     housing has helped destroy self-esteem and undermine 
     families.
       We need to get our society back to where we were 40 or 50 
     years ago. When people came to the cities then, they didn't 
     have welfare systems to provide for them. What they had was a 
     network of extended family. They could stay with relatives 
     until they got jobs and could afford their own apartments--
     but the pressure was there: get a job, get on your own feet.
       Today, the poor know the government will take care of them, 
     so there's no incentive to put forth any effort. We've got to 
     give people a helping hand, and not a handout. We've got to 
     understand that everybody, no matter how poor, can do 
     something to contribute to their independence--and to the 
     well-being of this country.
       Most of the public-housing residents out here--the decent 
     ones, and 90 percent of them are decent--support these views. 
     I don't know whether anybody would classify families who have 
     been on welfare for three generations as ``conservative,'' 
     but they certainly recognize that the approaches of the past 
     have not worked for them. We have to find approaches for the 
     future that will enable them to join the American mainstream. 
     It's not enough for government bureaucrats or ACLU lawyers to 
     reject the sort of steps we've taken in Chicago's public 
     housing developments.
       How can you build a community if people are afraid to go 
     out and talk to their neighbors? People have to board up 
     their windows because they're afraid of random gunfire. It's 
     no good offering programs in the evenings if people are 
     afraid to go out and take advantage of them. Safety is our 
     first priority. Because rebuilding neighborhoods requires 
     people getting together to find solutions to their common 
     problems, and that's not possible if you have to bolt the 
     doors and windows and not let your neighbor come in to talk.

                          ____________________