Speech at Legal Assistance Foundation Annual Luncheon, Grand Ballroom, Palmer House Hilton, June 23, 2008

Thank you, Diana.  It is an honor for us to be part of this occasion.  The Legal Assistance Foundation is a necessary organization.  I know how LAF attorneys are regarded in abandoned communities throughout city.  For the residents of those communities, they embody the possibility of justice.  For my own part, I am grateful for all the ways, large and small, that you and your colleagues have enriched my understanding of the issues facing public housing residents.  

During my years of immersion at Stateway Gardens, a practice developed that came to be known in certain circles as “the Jamie walk.”  Journalists, academics, civic leaders, foundation executives, and assorted others would come down to South State Street ostensibly to see what I was up to but in fact to get a glimpse of life in public housing.  I didn’t give them a formal tour; rather, they would tag along as I made my rounds.  We would talk, as we walked.  I welcomed these visits.  So much more information could be conveyed on site than in a conversation in a downtown office.  I recognized that for many the visit was not without its anxieties.  It entailed crossing a significant threshold—stepping away from the official narrative about public housing (that hallucinatory mix of folklore, fear, and highly charged symbols) and stepping forward to see for themselves the conditions of life in a particular community.  For some this proved a memorable and enduring experience.  It removed the husks from what they thought they knew about high-rise public housing to reveal the questions inside. 

Our presentation today is intended to give you a small taste of that experience.  Patsy’s photographs, orchestrated by our colleague David Eads, are intended to provide context and grounding for a set of reflections on the nature of poverty at Stateway Gardens—a community of some 1,600 families that occupied eight square blocks between 35^th and 39^th Streets, State and Federal.  Imagine, if you will, that we are wandering the development, talking as we walk. 

We are visiting, it must be noted, a place that no longer exists.  Over the last decade, we witnessed—day by day, brick by brick—the dismantling of the development.  The obliteration of Stateway and other high rise developments was among the goals of the Chicago Housing Authority program known by the Orwellian name the “Plan for Transformation.”  Today the Stateway community survives, to the extent it can be said to survive, not as a place but in the identities and relationships of its far-flung former residents, in memories and dreams, in stories and photographs. 

Back in the early 1990’s, soon after we became involved on South State Street, a social scientist reported, on the basis of analysis of the 1990 census, that Stateway Gardens was the single poorest community in the United States.  He calculated the per capita income to be $1,650.  He also reported that nine of the ten poorest communities in the nation were CHA developments and that six of them were located on South State Street. 

Stateway residents responded fiercely to the designation of their community as the poorest in the nation.  They were offended by the researcher’s statement that “no comparable concentration of the idle poor can be found anywhere else in the world.”  That did not describe the community they lived in—a community in which many of their neighbors went off to work in the morning and others labored mightily in the informal, local economy.  It did not described the human diversity around them.  As one resident told the Christian Science Monitor, “Just like any community, we’ve got middle class, low class and no class.”  

The reaction of Stateway residents to the census study was revealing, but what did it reveal?  Why did people who knew better than anyone how severely depressed their community was resist being categorized as the poorest of the poor as if their lives depended on it? 

There were methodological issues with the study.  Among them: the differences in per capita income between the most acutely poor communities were so small as to make ranking questionable as a way of presenting the findings.  That was not, however, what upset Stateway residents.  Their indignant response, it seems to me now, was a matter of narrative self-defense.  For poverty in this society is, in important respects, a narrative phenomenon.  All too often it is a story not about rigid structural inequalities but about the moral failings or pathologies of those labeled “poor.”  It is a story about problem people who need to be fixed.  My friends and neighbors at Stateway, I suspect, didn’t want that story to harden around them and their community.  They resisted being denied their full human complexity.  

My friend and coconspirator Francine Washington, the president of the Stateway resident council, once put it this way, “We’re not poor,” she said.  “We’re broke.  There is a difference.  To be poor is a condition of the spirit.  To be broke is a temporary inconvenience.” 

So, against this background, what might we learn from our walk through Stateway? 

The poor, especially those living in public housing, are often said to be isolated from the rest of the society.  There are frequent references in public policy discourse and journalistic accounts to “isolated urban poverty.”  This self-serving formulation suggests that the poor somehow moved away from the rest of us.  Were we to ascend to the upper floors of one of the Stateway high-rises and look out at the city, it would be impossible to maintain this fiction. 

To the west, on the other side of the Dan Ryan Expressway, is U.S. Cellular Field, the home of the White Sox.  To the north, across 35^th Street, is the Illinois Institute of Technology.  Two blocks to the east is De LaSalle High School, a well-endowed parochial school, attended by both Mayor Daley I and II.  Across from De LaSalle, at 35^th and Michigan, is the administrative headquarters of the Chicago Police Department.  

Stateway was not an isolated community.   It was an abandoned community embedded in an intimate landscape that contained great social distances—a geography shaped as much by how we use language and deploy our imaginations as by where we place expressways. 

Poor—or as Francine would have it, broke—communities such as Stateway can’t afford to be isolated.  It requires a large investment of individual and collective resources to insulate a community from the conditions of life around it. Looking back at the city from the upper floors of one of the Stateway high-rises, the question was inescapable: who isolated themselves from whom? 

On the grounds of the development, abandonment was manifest everywhere you looked.  To live at Stateway was to move through a physical environment that constantly reflected back disregard and contempt for you and your children.  Those squalid, degrading conditions were not the result of some fundamental design flaw or massive, irreversible systems failure—as they official narrative would have it.  Rather, they were constituted of masses of practical problems—produced by discrete acts of neglect, corruption and incompetence. 

Such conditions did not require vast amount of money to correct.  They required something more dear: sustained care and attention.  Much of the organizing we did at Stateway over the years flowed from this insight.  We engaged in what we called “grassroots public works.”  We did insurgent housekeeping.  We planted more than seventy trees on the grounds of the development.  We did the interior demolition of numerous buildings in the area undergoing renovation, including the historic Overton Building across from the development.  And we trashed out the Stateway high-rises, removing truck box after truck box of garbage that the CHA had allowed to accumulate in vacant units over more than a decade.  

My colleagues in this effort were primarily veterans of the street gangs, men who had labored in the criminal economy.  We worked hard.  We had fun.  And, for a time, under conditions of abandonment, we exercised our freedom.  In the process, we got precious glimpses of what might be possible.  For years, I couldn’t go anywhere on the South Side without being approached by gang members, some of them hard-core warlords, seeking jobs swinging sledgehammers and planting trees.  So much for the romance of the drug trade. The reality on the ground is that for most dealing drugs is an excruciatingly boring job performed in sweatshop conditions. 

As appalled as you may have been by the physical conditions you saw, as we walked through Stateway, they were not that much of a surprise.  You expected them.  What was perhaps more surprising was the vitality and conviviality of the community, the qualities of hospitality and neighborliness that are among the byproducts of abandonment.  We had encounter after encounter with an varied array of individuals, some of them immediately intriguing.  What, you may have wondered, is his or her story?  If you were lucky, you came away with a glimpse of the fundamental reality, eclipsed by the prevailing narrative, that Stateway Gardens was the site of a community as complex and mysterious, as mixed and unfathomable as any in the city. 

Why is it then that we see only part of the spectrum of human possibility, when we consider communities such as Stateway?  Why is it that the image of the gangbanger so often eclipses the rest of life?  How did places like Stateway come to be seen less as communities than as loose criminal conspiracies?  How did our perceptions of such places become so crude and one-dimensional?  Whose interests are served by this? 

There is no doubt that fear plays a central role in this dynamic.  Fear blocks our capacity for perception, for learning.  When mediated by fear, ignorance can coexist with knowledge, blindness with vision.  Fear makes us hostage to a crude geography in which there are good places where decent people live and bad places where dangerous people live.  Above all, it is hard to see ourselves in others we fear. 

This then is a final characteristic of poverty in the setting of Stateway and similar communities: those who live there are too often beyond the reach of our sympathetic imaginations.  They are oppressed by the stories people already know about them—one-dimensional narratives that displace their realities and facilitate their displacement from their communities.  It is not an exaggeration, I think, to say that the experience and prospects of our fellow citizens in abandoned communities such as Stateway are shaped as much by conditions of narrative as they are by any material conditions. 

The history of human rights is interlaced with the extension of our sympathetic imaginations via narrative.  Therein lies our power and our responsibility.