By noon the businessmen from the suburbs and the kids from the inner city had been at it for three hours, knocking down walls and hauling away rubble. Their pants, shirts, and shoes were covered with dust.
“Six people had been shot [nearby] in gang fighting in the months before we took ownership of these buildings,” says Laura Leon, executive director of Nobel Neighbors. “Last year two people were shot right outside the Nobel school. Their bodies stayed there for two hours before the police took them away. That’s how bad things got.”
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Rival gangs had been fighting over the local turf. “It’s dangerous for a kid around here,” says Miguel Melendez, a 17-year-old senior at Prosser high school who works on the Kamerling Street project. “I get along with the gangbangers because I have to. I’d be sitting on the porch with my mother and they’d come by and say, ‘Hey, can we talk to you?’ They’d take me out into the street and say, ‘We want you to join.’ I’d say, ‘That’s not my style.’
So they started looking for a not-for-profit developer who might work with them. “We heard about some company that works in poor neighborhoods called Habitat, or something like that, so we called,” says Leon. “Only that was the for-profit Habitat company, the one that built Presidential Towers. That was a funny conversation. They were saying, ‘What neighborhood did you say you’re in?’ And I was saying, ‘First tell me something about your company.’”
By January 1993 Habitat had agreed to work with Careers for Youth, a not-for-profit job-training group that helped hire the teenagers to work on the Kamerling site. Together the groups created a partnership called the Young Builders Program, funded by federal antipoverty money funneled to it by the Daley administration.
It’s hard, often frustrating work, says Simpson. “I come home some nights mentally drained from trying to get them to understand. It’s not always easy to get a group of eight kids to learn the principles of carpentry. Some listen, some don’t. Sometimes you walk away, and when you come back you find a kid sitting on a radiator not doing what you just asked him to do.
The experience is important even for those kids who say they want to find jobs in other fields. “I want to be a physical therapist–like a chiropractor,” says Melendez, who works as an assistant crew chief. “It’s not just the carpentry work that’s important. It’s learning how to work. Some of the guys say, ‘Hey, how come you’re the boss?’ I say, ‘It follows rank. I earned this job. I come in earlier than the rest. I stay later. I did volunteer work [for Nobel Neighbors].’ But it’s not always easy to handle these questions. I have to assert myself with guys who are my age. I get nervous, but I figure the things I’m learning to do here, they’ll be with me for the rest of my life.”
