Annette Hunt believes she was there that day, but she says she has blocked the events from her memory. She still seethes with anger when she talks about the men on the dais who had ignored the residents of Horner for years and then took credit for dismantling the housing development. She and the other residents had banded together. They formed the Horner Mothers Guild, which forced the Chicago Housing Authority’s hand in bringing down the towers. And even as the wrecking ball chipped away at the first building and some of the residents collected falling bricks as mementos, Hunt doubted that the politicians would honor their promise to improve the lives of residents, not just build better housing....

And the revamped development, which once was the exclusive domain of very low-income families, now includes middle-class residents and homeowners. But that wasn’t what Hunt and other longtime residents envisioned the day the first tower came down. What began as a mothers’ crusade to protect their children from gangs, rats and roaches evolved into something else. The mothers’ goals, and those of other residents, took a back seat to new hypotheses, favored by housing officials, about how to help poor people move up and then out of public housing. Creating mixed-income communities where public housing once stood was the product of the hypotheses....

The unemployment rate for black adults in and around the former Horner Homes is 29 percent, roughly the same as it was a decade ago. One-quarter of the 1,000 black households in the neighborhood earn less than $10,000 per year, while more than one-quarter of the almost 200 white households earn more than $125,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Academics, lawyers, developers and even public housing activists argue that the mixed-income redevelopment of Horner was the most successful such endeavor in the city, because residents like Hunt had a seat at the table. But Hunt and other residents counter that turning public housing into mixed-income communities has always been for the benefit of the politicians and middle-class homeowners — not for them.