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21 Thy Kingdom at Hand L ong after it was too late, long after the bad press and the grumbling even among loyal partisans, Harold Washington would admit that Renault Robinson was a poor choice to head the Chicago Housing Authority. Washington’s confession came in the final months of his first term, while overseas and drinking in the company of several aides late one night. I know he’s not working out, Washington said. But look at Robinson’s life. Washington was twenty years Robinson’s senior, but he confessed to feeling inspired by this young cop who took on the top brass over the issue of police brutality, continuing to walk a beat while battling the department in the courts and in the media. How do you stop believing in a man like that? Yet of course he had been elected to change the likes of the CHA. He had campaigned at the Robert Taylor Homes, where the murder rate among its fifteen thousand residents was more than fifteen times greater than the city average . A woman living there was twenty times more likely to be raped. He had promised residents there he’d make a difference in their lives. And yet the projects were as violent as ever. A resident living in a high-rise was as likely as in the past to carry her groceries twenty floors to her apartment because the elevators were broken—again. And she would still feel as unsafe on those stairs, especially at night, because there were always burned-out bulbs that needed replacing . To top it off, the city missed the due date for an application that meant the loss, at least temporarily, of a $7 million federal grant. In January 1987, with election day only a few weeks away, Washington ordered his press secretary to prepare a resignation statement for Robinson. More than a few supporters noted that it took the pressures of an approaching ­ election to spur Washington into action at the CHA. And of course they wanted to know 244 Chapter 21 about the progress he was making with the schools, or inside the health department , or on any number of policy fronts. By the start of Washington’s second term, it wasn’t just Lu Palmer saying it: Thanks for the contract set-asides and the top jobs that help a few but how about some real progress, Mr. Mayor, on the things we really care about? “Canyons of despair that should never have been built,” Washington said of the massive high-rise housing projects that constituted much of the CHA. They brought to mind “gigantic filing cabinets with separate cubicles for each human household,” wrote federal investigators near the end of Byrne’s term. And in 1983, they became Washington’s problem. Robinson never wanted the CHA. As a member of the CHA board, he made it his business to get a firsthand look at the scope of the agency’s problems. That was enough to scare him off. He said no when Washington first broached the idea of taking over the agency. But Washington had a way of wearing people down. You’re the only one, Washington told him. You owe it to every resident of the CHA to see through the job you started when you first said yes to a CHA board appointment. Robinson had little management experience unless one included his brief and disastrous stint as Washington’s first campaign manager in 1983. By saying yes he was agreeing to serve as chief landlord to 145,000 people who, if a city unto themselves, would rank as the second largest in the state. Ed Burke called Washington’s choice of Robinson as executive director “the worst appointment in [Chicago’s] history.” Washington recognized he was gambling, of course. In a sense, the mayor was envisioning a version of himself running the CHA. Robinson would shape the policy and surround himself with technocrats who would implement his vision. There was also the energy and zeal he would presumably bring to the task. “Thank goodness for his troublemaking through the years on the CHA board,” Leanita McClain, who grew up in the projects, wrote soon after Robinson ’s appointment, “or there would have been no voice for the tenants.” Yet now rather than demanding answers, he’d be running the show. “A damned-if-youdo , damned-of-you-don’t” job, Leanita McClain wrote: Better Robinson should be damned for doing too much...

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