The Chicago Housing Authority has demolished many crime-ridden high-rises under its plan to transform public housing, but some observers say crime merely has migrated between South Side neighborhoods.

Murder, they say, has become a geographical zero-sum game.

Although the number of murders in the city has dropped by 30 percent, a Medill News Service analysis of murder statistics from 2000 through 2006 shows great variation from neighborhood to neighborhood.

On the South Side, for instance, the number of killings has tripled in one neighborhood, dropped precipitously in a neighborhood just two miles south and remained stable in the community in between.

Several of those who were asked to explain the disparity attributed it to the CHA’s Plan for Transformation, now in its ninth year. Under the plan, many large public-housing projects have been torn down or redeveloped. Former tenants have had to find new homes.

The CHA vehemently disputes the notion that the Plan for Transformation is to blame, but residents in neighborhoods affected by changes in crimes are steadfast. 

“Moving people from place to place – it didn’t address the real issues that produce crime,” said Carole Parks, a spokeswoman for Ald. Leslie Hairston (5th). “If people were committing crime in one place and you wipe that place down ... those people are going to go someplace.”

“We don’t really know where the people have gone,” Parks said. “But unless they turn up dead or as murderers, it’s like they don’t exist.”

To CHA officials, it's nothing new, but it's still wrong.

"We get accused of that often and it's unfortunate that we do," said Derek Hill, press secretary for the CHA, about the idea that the transformation plan is causing murder to increase in some neighborhoods. "I don't think that we can take sole responsibility."

The Medill analysis showed contrasting changes in homicide numbers from 2000 through 2006 in Grand Boulevard, Washington Park and Greater Grand Crossing, three next-door neighborhoods bordered on the north by East 39th Street, on the south by East 79th Street, and on the west by the Dan Ryan Expressway:

In Greater Grand Crossing, eight people were killed in 2000; 24 were killed in 2006.

In Washington Park, just north of Greater Grand Crossing, 10 people were killed in 2000; 9 were killed in 2006.

In Grand Boulevard, just north of Washington Park and where the Robert Taylor Homes were demolished, 23 people were killed in 2000; four were killed in 2006.

Changes in murder rates in each of those neighborhoods remained consistent throughout the seven years.

“People talk about displaced communities in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it’s amazing to us,” Parks said. “This whole city is being transformed economically and racially by this Plan for Transformation.”

“The most dysfunctional families are no longer in the neighborhood [Grand Boulevard],” said Ald. Toni Preckwinkle (4th). “The problem is that communities that are identified as public-housing developments are magnets for bad actors.”

The new mixed- and high-income residences have had a stabilizing effect in the community, Preckwinkle said.

“Why they [murders] are so down in the Grand Boulevard area is other people are coming in with more resources,” said Warner Abrams, executive vice president of the Firman Center, a social-services agency in Grand Boulevard.

“The majority of the people are gone.” Abrams said. “What’s coming back to the community now are those people who have the means to buy property.”

But according to Abrams, the process is a slow one. Grand Boulevard has made strides, but in other neighborhoods, murder lingers.

“Things are still not that great over in Washington Park,” Abrams said. “Certain elements are still there in those areas.”