Flophouse Charlie

Charles R. Swibel (1927-1990) was a Polish refugee from Nazi Europe who rose from janitor to president of Marks & Company, a Chicago real estate firm owned by Isaac Marks. The company operated two hotels in run-down neighborhoods. This later inspired Chicago newspapers to nickname Swibel “Flophouse Charlie.”

In 1956, Swibel, then 29 years old, was appointed by Mayor Daley to the board of directors of the Chicago Housing Authority, the nation’s second largest public housing program. Swibel, described as “outspoken,” eventually clashed with CHA executive director William Kean.

In July 1957, it was announced that Kean was resigning for “personal reasons” but it was well known that he had bitter feuds with the CHA board, and Swibel in particular.

Kean’s run-ins with the board reportedly were over his desire to run a “clean” agency. That meant no patronage workers – people hired in return for political support – and holding employees to high performance standards. Kean wanted to hire and fire CHA employees without the board’s approval.

In 1963, Daley picked Swibel to run the CHA. The CHA had well-documented problems under Swibel’s leadership. He is said to have used his position to establish himself as a city power broker. Never directly profiting from the CHA, and never convicted of any wrongdoing, but using his influence to indirectly benefit from urban renewal.

In the 1970s, lower-income CHA tenants became more vocal and then more militant, and Swibel did not offer much of a response to this.

Budget issues only made these problems worse, as the CHA became dependent on subsidies from the federal government. Between 1969 and 1972, the contribution to the CHA budget by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development increased from five to 50 percent.

Even with federal funding, the CHA struggled to implement much-needed rehabilitation of public housing. In 1981, a federal study reported CHA’s bureaucracy was overwhelmed by its problems. The CHA was “a vehicle for patronage” and had been badly mismanaged for years, and was one of the worst public housing agencies in the country.

“In every area examined,” said the study, “from finance to maintenance, from administration to outside contracting, from staffing to project management, the CHA was found to be operating in a state of profound confusion and disarray.”

At the time, CHA had 142,000 tenants in 46,000 units and a deficit of $42 per unit per month. By comparison, New York, which had more people in more units, and received less in federal subsidies, had a deficit of $4 per unit per month.

The report speculated that the CHA existed for the sole purpose of “the acquisition of as many federal government dollars as possible for the creation of patronage jobs and financial opportunities.”

In 1982, HUD demanded that Swibel step down, freezing $14.5 million in subsidies and threatening to withhold an additional $30 million.

Swibel was a close advisor and political ally of Chicago Mayor Jayne Byrne, who served from 1979 to 1983. Byrne initially defended Swibel, claiming that investigators had overlooked improvements at the CHA. She reportedly purchased $35,000 worth of newspaper ads, saying the HUD charges were a smokescreen for inadequate funding for public housing.

But she had signed an agreement binding her to the recommendations of the study, and she said that Swibel would leave the CHA by July 15.

On July 7, 1982, hours after Illinois Governor James R. Thompson signed into law reorganization of CHA management, Swibel announced he would step down.

The Chicago Sun-Times, which in 1975 had reported on Swibel giving a security contract to a company that installed a $6500 burglar alarm in his home for free (the equivalent of $25,120 today), wrote in an editorial that although his departure would bring no sudden change in public housing, “any scheme that would remove the inept Charles R. Swibel as chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority can’t be all bad.”

“My father was doing so many other things that had nothing to do with the housing authority,” reminds Howard Swibel.

“You could argue that if you have a white person in charge of Cook County jail, some people think that’s inappropriate because most of the inmates are black. Well, 90 percent of the people living in public housing are black – in family housing, almost all of them are black. The whites are mainly in the senior citizen housing. Some people thought if you...aren’t going to spread the action around, why should you have this white guy in charge of the housing for all these black people?”

Howard says his father was “point person” for Martin Luther King, Jr., and he remembers when King visited his house. “King didn’t want any new housing built that was high-rise. That was easy for my father to agree to because they couldn’t even find land cheap enough to satisfy the federal requirements, anyway.”

Swibel says locations were dictated by the cheapest public potential of the land. He says the government did not provide enough money to keep the buildings in good condition. “My father ended up going to Washington – meeting with the White House, congressional people – always got a disproportionately large amount of the money. He was vying against Boston and Philadelphia and New Jersey. All fighting for the same pot. We would always get...a better piece of the action in terms of money for rehabilitation.”

A close friend of William McFetridge, president of the union that financed Marina City, Swibel was president of Marina City Building Corporation when the complex was built. He was later president of Marina Management Corporation, the property manager. It was Swibel who purchased the land on which Marina City was built, and he negotiated the leases of its commercial tenants.

According to Taylor and Cohen, when apartments at Marina City were converted to condominiums, Swibel made more than $6 million by legally buying units at insider prices and flipping them.

Swibel had two brothers. Sidney, who was older, and Morris, who became the rental agent at Marina City. Charles and Seena Swibel had two sons, Larry and Howard. Howard, born in 1950, is a partner at Arnstein & Lehr LLP, a Chicago law firm, and in 2007 was president of the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws. Larry, born in 1954, is also a lawyer.