After the Demolition: Residents Are Safer, but Sicker

Over the last decade, officials all over the country have torn down public housing with promises of better neighborhoods to come. This week, we're exploring whether those promises were kept in our series "After the Demolition." Read other posts here, here, here and here.

Raising kids in the Ida B. Wells housing project on Chicago's near South Side wasn't easy. Renee, a single mother of five, remembers some really close calls.

"One time I was looking out my window, a bullet went past my head and my daughter, the bullet came through the house. It went right through the wall. Came through, boom! And we had just walked from right by the wall."

The overwhelming stress of living in such a violent place, coupled with the burden of poverty, left many residents, including Renee, suffering from depression, anxiety and other serious mental health problems. Since Wells was torn down and Renee's moved away, her neighborhood has gotten less intense, but her depression hasn't.

Renee's not alone. Years after they've moved away from Wells, former residents still say they struggle with the mental health problems that plagued them there. Their physical health isn't much better. Although their neighborhoods are safer, their health is still suffering from years of life in the projects.

The good news is that violence is down and safety is up, according to comprehensive studies conducted by the Urban Institute. While 70 percent of Wells residents said that drugs, loitering and gangs were a problem where they lived in 2001, only 25 percent of them say that about where they live now. Back in 2001, four percent of the residents surveyed said they had also had a bullet come into their home, like Renee. None reported that kind of incident in 2009.

But that new-found safety hasn't contributed much to better overall heath.

To start with, the residents of the Madden/Wells complex were already less healthy than the general population. Since they've left, their health has declined rapidly. One in four former residents say they can't walk three city blocks, climb 10 steps without resting or stand on their feet for two hours. The worst health problems are reported by those who lived in public housing the longest. Obesity, asthma, stroke, diabetes, hypertension, arthritis — the rates of all these diseases among former residents are much higher than in the general population, and even higher than the rates of black women, who tend to have the poorest health outcomes.

Even though they're in safer neighborhoods, Wells residents are still dying at much higher rates. Mortality rates for these former public housing residents are double that of the general population. Double.

"Moving to better quality housing in a safer community has not been enough to undo the damage that years of living in a dangerous, stressful environment has done to residents' health," the Urban Institute concluded.

Maybe that's the limit of these kinds of programs that offer opportunities to people who've lived in squalor for so long. You can redo, but you can't undo. You can tear down their apartments and build them new ones. You can make the area a little safer. But a bulldozer can't tear down 20 years of memories of dodging bullets. It can't go back and get someone the preventive health care she needs before an illness becomes a crisis. The depression and anxiety these residents experienced was real, and years of that kind of suffering can't be undone. The policies that created those environments were also real, and not even a new policy designed to undo years of neglect can clear away the damage.

Photo credit: David Schalliol