“As far back as eight years old, I would cut pictures of furniture out of catalogs and magazines and paste them on paper,” says Rosetta Holmes. “I had a little scrapbook. It was my dream to own a home.”
As chief executive at the CHA, Lane says, he became troubled by “the millions of dollars we were spending with external contractors to fix up buildings. I thought, why can’t we have the residents do that?” In 1991 he began negotiating with the Chicago Building Trades Council to train residents, putting two trainees with each experienced tradesman. “The trade unions said they couldn’t go for that arrangement,” recalls Lane. “So I told them, ‘Fine. The residents will do all the work, and you can just picket us.’ I didn’t think they wanted to set up picket lines at CHA developments.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In 1993 Hammonds became a union apprentice carpenter. Though her pay fell to $9 an hour, the work–hanging doors and putting up cabinets in CHA flats–pleases her enormously. “I also know I will always have a trade to fall back on. And at my age that’s insurance.”
Yet 154 Step-Up recruits–roughly half of those who started–dropped out. Lane blames the high rate on sloth bred by the welfare system. “When you give people a check, food stamps, and a box to live in–and require nothing in return–what do you expect? People may say they want to work, but once they get jobs there are still problems at home. People are pulled back by their friends. Drugs enter in. Some of those circumstances hit the Step-Up people, and when they didn’t show up we let them go. We have to have standards.”
“I could live where I am till the day I die,” says Hammonds, who’s sitting in the living room of her two-bedroom CHA row house. “People do stay in CHA forever, you know. The immediate family plus the aunts and uncles and the grandkids–all packed in tight together. But it isn’t living really. Besides, this row house will also never belong to me, no matter how much rent I pay. With a house though, I’ll have something to pass down to my kids.” Hammonds wants the one suburban house among the ten acquired for the Step-Out participants. “I take the kids to the suburbs in the summer,” she says. “It’s quiet there, and the kids can walk to the park all by themselves.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Randy Tunnell.
