It was the last Friday in October, and barges filled with mounds of glistening coal sat parked in the Ohio River below Lee Esther Logan’s high-rise public housing apartment complex in Cairo, Illinois. Wispy white clouds streaked a baby blue sky. The panoramic waterfront view is one that normally gives Logan peace as she takes it in from the brown recliner on her balcony.
But on the day I visited her, Logan wasn’t at peace. She was anxious.
Two days prior, officials from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development had called Logan and about 60 of her fellow public housing residents to a meeting. An engineering assessment has found that the Connell F. Smith Sr. Building may not be structurally sound enough to withstand an earthquake. The federal government plans to raze their home, and they have to move out by early next year, the federal housing officials told them.
The building mostly houses seniors and people with disabilities and is also home to a small number of children and their parents. Officials told the residents they’d get vouchers and moving assistance. But that’s of little comfort to the many residents who want to stay in Cairo.
Since its population peaked at 15,000 residents in the 1920s, Cairo has faced decades of population and economic decline. It’s now one of the poorest cities in Illinois, and its population has dropped to about 1,600. There’s no grocery store or gas station — and most critically for the high-rise residents facing eviction, there’s an extreme shortage of safe rental options. That means that under HUD’s plan, most residents will have to move at least 30 miles away to find available units in other towns’ public housing complexes or private-market rentals.
When newcomers visit, they’re often struck by the blight of a hollowed-out city: streets lined with boarded-up homes, vacant buildings and empty lots. The Smith building itself holds a lot of history — not all of it good. Constructed in 1968, it’s named for a former housing authority board member who, the decade before, had affixed a flashing neon arrow to his garage roof; it pointed at the home of an attorney who was working to integrate Cairo’s public schools alongside Thurgood Marshall. In an essay, Langston Hughes described it as a 4-foot “red arrow of bigotry.”
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