I have no theoretical perspective to offer on the issue of property rights for the poor. I do have some relevant experience with respect to what can happen when the poor have no meaningful say in the fate of the place where they live. My experience is grounded at Stateway Gardens, a high-rise public housing community that was located, until its recent demolition, on South State Street in Chicago.

Since 2000, Chicago has been implementing a public housing strategy it calls “The Plan for Transformation.” The stated objective of the Plan is to replace high-rise concentrations of public housing with “mixed income communities.” To date, the City has proved far more effective at demolition than construction, at destroying neighborhoods than renewing them.

The name—“The Plan For Transformation”—used to seem, at best, comically grandiose and, at worse, Orwellian. Today it seems quite precise. The city has, indeed, been "transformed." No other word will do. Within a few years, entire communities have disappeared. Places have been erased. And fundamental human rights issues have receded from view.

I offer two statements written almost a decade apart.

The first was prepared for a seminar on “The Consequences of Abandoned Communities,” convened by the Open Society Institute in Harlem in 1998.

The second is a speech that opened a conference--"The View From The Ground: Issues and Inquiries Arising From Eight Square Blocks of Chicago's South Side”—at the University of Chicago Law School in 2007.