J.L. Gross moved into the Lathrop Homes, a 925-unit Depression-era public housing complex on the north side, in 1988, two decades after coming back from the Vietnam war with a bullet permanently lodged in his back. He’s lived in six different apartments in the development since then. For years Lathrop was neglected and many buildings stood empty as the Chicago Housing Authority, developers, residents, and the surrounding community negotiated redevelopment plans. Last year Lathrop had a grand reopening as a mixed-income community with public housing, affordable, and market-rate units. Gross’s latest move was to a renovated one-bedroom on Clybourn Avenue.
Personally, I don’t give a shit about this place. [The renovation] wasn’t done for my community. My community was decimated because of a lack of interest from the city and even the federal government. What I wanted all along, what our community wanted all along, was a decent place to live and police protection. That’s what every American community wants. And yet we weren’t afforded that. For all the people who came to the CHA and said, I got mold in my apartment, I got holes in this, I got holes in that, lack of water—we got patchwork attention to what was going on, and [told] there was no money, [given] excuses as to why we should move. But some of us were tenacious enough to say: Hey, whatever you build, you’re gonna have to build me one, I ain’t going nowhere. Look at the area: I’m centrally located, I’m right on the river. There’s no food desert over here, so why would I let somebody run me out of here? If I didn’t succumb to the gangs I sure wasn’t gonna succumb to City Hall or pressure from the CHA. Or the physical deterioration.
A lot of people want to return to Lathrop because they feel that it’s better now, but this is something we should have had all along. I suffered too much to live here. I went through too much for me to then turn around and be a cheerleader for Related or whoever the developers are. I’ve earned my right to be here because of all I went through that came before this. You’ve got individuals and families that are good human beings, and everybody deserves a safe place to live. I lost 525 [public housing] apartments. I don’t see how I should be jumping up and down—my community was devastated. Which has nothing to do with the buildings. And in three to five years this place will not look like my community. But I got a place to stay and I guess I should be happy about that. If I say too much more they’ll probably try to kick me out of here. But I can’t help but be brutally blunt.
I thought it was very nice because I had seen other low-income housing, with family living in the Robert Taylor Homes, and because I was a Red Cross volunteer I had serviced people in other complexes that had been burned out. This was definitely the best of all the ones that I’d ever seen. There were flowers, there was grass everywhere. At night, people would sit outside on the benches. [The gangs] came later, that started happening in the late 90s, we started having a lot of trouble between the Latin Kings and the Deuces over in the Hamlin Park area.
Joseph: There’s a saying that’s been going around for years: you can take a person out of the ghetto but you can’t take the ghetto out of them. Some of it is resident-created problems. I’ve seen on Leavitt already where people have actually had chairs in the street, up against their cars, sitting in the chairs with the kids playing in the street. They’ve got this nice field to play in. They’ve got the nice river walk with benches, but they’re not using that. I think because they’re so used to being nosy and seeing who’s coming and going [that] they feel isolated if they go somewhere where there’s not a lot of activity. Where they would get away with throwing garbage on the ground, and graffiti, and loud talking and stuff over here, they’re not getting away with it over there. They were warned that the same kind of activity was not gonna be put up with.
