For Public Housing, A Vision Of Hope A Plan To "De-densify Poverty" Is Eyed For A Phila. Complex.

The man has traveled to the church in Queen Village from halfway across the country to talk about the importance of shower heads and mini-blinds and closet doors.

He is talking about dignifying the lives of poor people in public housing. He is talking about ending the isolation of poor people by bringing working- class people into public housing to live alongside those on welfare.

"I want the boundaries of public housing to vanish," says Vincent Lane, the outspoken chief of the Chicago Housing Authority.

The audience - tenants of the crumbling Southwark Plaza public-housing project and their gentrified Queen Village neighbors - is captive. They already know that, in one high-rise public-housing complex on the faraway

shores of Lake Michigan, those boundaries have indeed vanished.

In Lake Parc Place in Chicago, Vince Lane's vision has become reality: Working people - police officers, bus drivers, secretaries, janitors, child- care workers, accountants - live side by side with people on welfare in renovated high-rises.

There is virtually no crime. There is no graffiti. There is strict enforcement of leases, excellent private management and timely repairs. The elevators work.

There are splash pools and basketball courts and an afterschool program for the more than 500 children in the two 15-story towers. There is constant, visible, unarmed security.

Visitors must sign in, and their visits are monitored by computer. Known troublemakers are barred. Rules are obeyed. Deadbeats are evicted.

There is a sense of community.

"It gives everyone a chance to help them get on their feet," tenant Hattie Taylor, 62, said last week while keeping a strict watch over children playing in the Lake Parc social room. "I look at a high-rise like this one . . . . It's a nice place to raise a family."

At Lake Parc Place, there are even shower heads, something the federal government once considered too luxurious to install in public housing.

Today, Vince Lane will ask the Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA) to give him a chance to restore life - along with shower heads, ceiling fans and working elevators - to Southwark, a dismal place where about the only recent improvements are fences around the towers to protect people from falling concrete.