Chicago's Cabrini-Green Projects Shut Down for Good

Cabrini Green

Like millions of other people across America, I grew up watching the TV show 'Good Times.' The show featured a series of sky scraper housing projects, a concrete jungle full of despair, poverty and trauma. We always hoped that James (the father) would get the good job that got the family out of their situation, but something always went wrong. When they finally made it out of the projects, the show came to an end.

In hindsight, I can't help but presume that the housing development 'Good Times' was modeled after was the Cabrini-Green Projects (pictured). Unfortunately, like the Evans family, many Cabrini-Green residents don't get to leave the projects until their lives are over. While there was a time when the projects were considered a good thing for people of color, that day has long passed.

Cabrini Green

Cabrini-Green became the house where violence lived, where one horrible crime after another made the community an unsafe and unimaginable place for any child to grow up. There is now just one more building left in the massive set of high rises, and the community has been replaced by townhouses and additional forms of development. We can now see that those who ran from the inner city 20 years ago are realizing that the land has tremendous value.

The Cabrini-Green projects were born in 1942. They were named after St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, a Roman Catholic patron saint of immigrants. The projects held as many as 13,000 residents at one point.

The projects became nationally recognized in 1981, when 11 people were killed over a three-month period during a series of gang wars. In 1992, one of the residents shot and killed a 7-year-old boy while he walked to school holding his mother's hand. After that, a 9-year-old girl was found raped, choked, poisoned and left for dead in a stairwell with graffiti all over her body.

The politics of Cabrini-Green are obvious -- the father of Chicago's mayor, Richard Daley, was the one who came up with the idea to build the development. Now, Richard Daley Jr. is tearing down the buildings that his father created. The remainder of Cabrini-Green is scheduled for demolition in January or February, and one family has until Dec. 10 to move out.

The city's housing agency says it's working with the families to help with the move, but some of them have resisted. The city is offering residents vouchers for private apartments. They are also being told that they can return to Cabrini once the new housing has been completed.

The end of Cabrini-Green is the end of a terrible era in the history of inner-city Chicago. One hopes that residing in well-maintained, less confined living spaces will heighten the perspectives of the good people who've spent their time there. While the criminals of Cabrini-Green were the ones who made national news, there are far more residents who lived as normal, hard-working, law-abiding citizens. They don't deserve the stigma of the projects.

Watch the history of Cabrini-Green here:

Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition and a Scholarship in Action resident of the Institute for Black Public Policy. To have Dr. Boyce's commentary delivered to your e-mail, please click here.