Francine Washington for the “Other Washingtons”

Read more here about Amanda Williams’ the “Other Washingtons” public art installation in Washington Park, Chicago.

By Jamie Kalven
August 8, 2026

For four decades, Francine Washington has practiced a singular style of leadership on behalf of Chicago public housing residents–a disenfranchised, misunderstood, and feared population widely seen by their fellow Chicagoans not as neighbors or fellow citizens but as a problem to be solved.

For more than a decade, I worked closely with Francine at Stateway Gardens, the public housing development where she and her family lived and where she was president of the Local Advisory Council (LAC), the representative body elected by residents. I had several roles: directing a program that created employment alternatives for gang-affiliated young men; serving as advisor to the LAC; and reporting as a journalist on the conditions on the ground, as the city implemented the Plan for Transformation–the demolition of CHA high-rises and forced relocation of those for whom they were home.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, Francine and I worked together on an almost daily basis. By then, high-rise public housing had been utterly abandoned by public and private institutions. The space created by those conditions of abandonment was for Francine a sphere for creative action. She ceaselessly deployed her formidable intelligence, mother wit, and rhetorical skills on behalf of her neighbors. Her spirit was contagious. Strange to say, I have never felt freer or taken more joy in a struggle against long odds than I did during those years.

At that time, Stateway Gardens was often referred to as the single poorest community in the nation–a distinction bestowed upon it by a social scientist who had done a comparative study of 1990 census tracts. This deeply offended Francine.“We’re not poor,”she declared. “We’re broke. To be poor is a condition of the spirit. To be broke is a temporary inconvenience.”

This remark reflects an essential quality of her leadership. In a society that saw public housing developments in only one dimension as sites of disorder and despair, she took every opportunity to communicate the fundamental reality, eclipsed by the dominant narrative, that these were communities as complex and mysterious, as mixed and rich in their human variety as any in the city.

Francine’s indignant response to the characterization of her community as the poorest of the poor was, it seems to me now, an act of narrative self-defense. In American society, poverty is, among other things, a narrative phenomenon: a story not about rigid structural inequalities–not about the problem of affluence–but about the moral failings and pathologies of those labeled “poor.”

Francine has constantly asserted–and embodied–a counter-narrative. She and her husband Larry lived at Stateway Gardens, as she put it, “by choice” not necessity. It was for her the beloved community, the place in the world where she felt most deeply at home. She evoked its ethos with her own distinctive poetry: “Nobody cares about us but us.” And: “When we have nothing, we share it.” At a time of moral panic about gangs, she captured more of the texture of life in the developments than countless lurid journalistic accounts by speaking simply of “our inlaws and our outlaws.”

Residents never doubted that she had their interests at heart and that she would contend with powerful institutions on their behalf. During those years, I often joined her in negotiations with the CHA, HUD, the police, and private real estate developers. It always gave me pleasure to watch her outmaneuver those who made the mistake of underestimating and patronizing her. Over the last twenty-five years, the city has largely dismantled its public housing.

Development after development, including Stateway Gardens, has disappeared as a physical reality. Yet Francine persists. As president of the Central Advisory Council, the citywide assembly of LAC presidents, and a member of the CHA Board of Commissioners, she continues to act as the conscience of a city that would rather forget than reckon with the broken promise of public housing.