The City of Chicago is trying to reverse a decades-old policy of isolating public housing with a new program to improve and expand public transportation in three neighborhoods near downtown.

The city's planning department and the Regional Transportation Authority launched the program, Reconnecting Neighborhoods, in November. It targets
three neighborhoods where mixed-income communities are replacing traditional public housing developments: Cabrini-Green in the Near North, Henry Horner Homes in the Near West and Madden-Wells and Lakefront Homes in the Mid-South.

The program aims to spur economic development by improving rail and bus access in those neighborhoods.

City planners want to know not only residents' transportation needs but also what stores and entertainment opportunities they want in their neighborhoods.

But some neighbors are skeptical about whether the city will listen, saying officials have a history of making planning decisions without considering the people affected.

"It has been our experience that the law says you have to talk to us," says Near North resident Joyce Wiggins, who attended a community meeting Wednesday night. "But it's a done deal."

That's been true in the past, acknowledges Brandon Johnson, project manager for Reconnecting Neighborhoods. In addition to limited public transportation, the city's street grid stopped in these neighborhoods. Instead, urban planners used a "superblock" design, creating miniature campuses lacking through streets, bounded by major roads.

The design, used "because they were the projects," effectively isolated residents from the surrounding city, Johnson says. In fact, when he drove around Near North to distribute fliers advertising Wednesday's meeting, he put 30 miles on his car because of the area's numerous dead ends.

"That was the idea - to keep those people in the neighborhoods where they were," he says.

But the city's new mixed-income communities are changing the equation. The Chicago Housing Authority's $1.6 billion Plan for Transformation revolves around these communities, which reserve one-third of the homes for CHA residents, one-third for market-rate buyers and one-third for people who buy at subsidized rates. The goal is to end the ghettoization of poverty.

The mixed-income communities mean these neighborhoods once again have "a population that created the political will for service," Johnson says. When the white middle class decamped for the suburbs, the city built roads. Now they're moving back to the city, and as environmentally conscious consumers, they want public transportation.

"You have planning based on a preferred constituency," he says.

That's probably true, except the new face of gentrification is more racially diverse than it used to be, says Benet Haller, Chicago's director of urban design and planning.

Affluent newcomers to city neighborhoods hold the greatest expectations about what the planning department can and should do for them, while a history of disenfranchisement makes longtime residents suspicious of neighborhood change.

But the city wants input from all constituencies on how transit should be improved. There's a Task Force for each neighborhood in the program, and community meetings planned for each one as well. So far there's been three meetings in the Mid-South, one in the Near North and the first one in the Near West will be sometime in late April.

After follow-up meetings in the summer and fall in each location, Metropolitan Planning Council - the nonprofit charged with gathering community input - will present policy recommendations to the Chicago City Council in November or December.

On Wednesday night staff from the nonprofit brought maps and hand-held voting devices to record the opinions of the approximately 50 neighborhood residents who showed up. People marked on the maps where they worked, shopped and spent their leisure time.
Almost half of the people there said their greatest barrier to using transportation a lengthy walk to the nearest stop. The area needs more through streets, and better lighting and landscaping, they said.

Metropolitan Planning Council held meetings in the Mid-South in late February and early March. Residents there told the nonprofit they wanted to be able to shop for groceries and fill prescriptions near their homes. They want more bus stop shelters and more frequent service. And they want physical upgrades to existing transportation stops so they look more attractive and feel safer.

Near the end of Wednesday's meeting several residents said they didn't think the city would take their opinions into account. Johnson said he understood their suspicions but asked residents not to reject the process out of hand.

"The expression, 'A closed mouth doesn't get fed,' is so true in this case," he said. "Change is a natural process. If we don't change we become Gary, Indiana, and nobody wants that."

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