The Housing Authority

Under court order, the Housing Authority poured nearly $188 million into a mid-1990s revitalization. Entire developments, including Guinotte Manor, were demolished and rebuilt. Others, such as Theron B. Watkins and Riverview Gardens, got dramatic rehabs. By 2001, the HAKC's finances were in order and conditions had improved so much that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development designated the local agency a "high performer."

Chouteau was a different story. While other developments began to improve, Chouteau slid. Police department records between 1994 and 1998 log more than 120 assaults, 62 robberies and 12 rapes. Worse, Chouteau was last in line for the systemwide revitalization; by the time it was up for its rehab, the federal grants had been exhausted.

The complex had been built in 1958 on top of an old landfill, and the ground was slowly sinking as the waste decomposed. No matter was done to spruce it up, Lines tells the Pitch, Chouteau would still be an island of housing tacked onto an industrial strip lined with scrap yards and auto shops and crisscrossing thoroughfares.

"It's the only time in my life I've seen a McDonald's close down because they couldn't do enough business to stay open," Lines says of Chouteau's neighborhood.

Knowing that Chouteau would be obsolete within 10 years of its rehab, the Housing Authority secured a $4 million loan to prop up the development with a refurbishment. Workers replaced furnaces and cabinets, redesigned and consolidated some of the larger apartments and turned a maintenance shop into a community center.

In 2002, a new board of commissioners took over, though Lines still had to approve its decisions. The new commissioners had long backgrounds in social work and housing advocacy. Among them was Ellen King, a career social worker and former director of the Jackson County agency that appoints court advocates for abused and neglected children. Tapped to be chairman was Joe Egan, a longtime housing official for the Economic Development Corporation of Kansas City (he heads the division that doles out property-tax abatements to developments such as Quality Hill).

Meanwhile, the judge had appointed Legal Aid's Levin to keep an eye on the Housing Authority's improvement. By February 2006, she was convinced that, after 12 years and the longest-running receivership in the country, the Housing Authority would regain full local control.

Lizzie Brown wasn't so optimistic. Growing up in Kansas City, Kansas, Brown sped right past her childhood.

Raised in a single-family house in Gray Stone Heights, Brown was brought up by her mother and grandmother, who both suffered from seizures. Her sister, Ethel, had cancer that would end up taking her kidneys. Before she was a teenager, Brown became a strong voice in a household run by women and a caretaker for her sister's children.

Brown was no model child. By the time she was 14, she'd stopped going to church. She dropped out of Sumner High School and started drinking and sneaking across the state line.

"I wanted to be grown quick, and I made some bad choices," she admits. "We'd come over here, to this place over at 27th and Indiana, to go to concerts. I thought I was hot stuff going to Kansas City, Missouri."

When Brown was in her late teens, Ethel's cancer progressed and she became the on-call caretaker for her sister's seven children. She had jobs off and on, but with her mother's "spells" and her sister's kids, her main employment was keeping up with her family. Ethel died shortly after she moved to the Wayne Miner housing development in 1963. Suddenly, Brown was responsible for four girls and three boys — the oldest was 13, the youngest just 2.

Wayne Miner was appalling to Brown. She'd always lived in well-kept homes, not 10-story buildings cramped with 700 apartments. She hated the noise, the drug dealing, the lack of personal space. It wasn't safe to use the elevators, and in the stairwells she sometimes saw dead people with needles still stuck in their arms.

Having grown up with maternal figures who could be knocked out by a seizure one minute and be away grocery shopping the next, Brown had learned that sometimes you just do what needs to be done.

"All the women in our family are strong people. We're doers. That's the way we were raised," she says. "I wasn't raised with all that Mickey Mouse, poor-me crap. No, there's something you can do."

She joined the Wayne Miner Tenant Association and quickly became president. She worked with the Black Panthers, organizing field trips and programs for the children in the complex. She knocked on doors to get tenants to fork over their unpaid rent.

Ellen King was working for the Housing Authority as an assistant to the director back then.

"She was very outspoken, changed her hair color with every season," King says of Brown. "She was a very fascinating person, and at first, I was intimidated. But when I began understanding where she was coming from, I developed a strong appreciation for her."

Brown had private problems, though.

When the kids were grown, she moved to Heritage House, a 1920s hotel in downtown Kansas City that had been converted into public housing. (It was demolished in 1998.) There she kept her title as Tenant Association president, but her alcoholism threatened to send her to the streets.