Editor's note.

Success, it seems, is in the eye of the beholder--especially when money is involved.

At least, that's what we thought last month when Terry Peterson, head of the Chicago Housing Authority, called to compliment us for our analysis of property sales around former public housing high-rises. (Rightly or wrongly, we're always a little suspicious when an official likes one of our stories.)

Among other things, our investigation showed that tearing down those high-rises has helped create a nearly $2 billion real estate bonanza as many of those neighborhoods begin to attract far more middle-class and white homebuyers. While Peterson and I ended up trading voicemails, I assume he viewed our findings as positive outcomes of the agency's D-year plan to tear down thousands of high-rise apartments and replace them with low-rise, mixed-income housing. Economic integration, after all, was one of its goals.

But the reporter and interns who worked on the story also talked to longtime residents of the developments--all of them poor and the vast majority black. They had concerns about how they and their families would benefit from all of this. Will the wealth and whiteness end up pushing them out? In other words, when it comes to individuals, how will we measure this plan's success?

That question, as far as I can tell, remains unanswered. And stories in this issue amplify it, far beyond our public housing developments.

Forget about the extreme conditions of those buildings for a moment, or the searing images of the poor abandoned in the face of Hurricane Katrina. Many, many more of us, it appears, simply aren't making enough money to live reasonably.

We're not talking about whether a family can buy a second car. Phone bills pile up when school fees come due. Heat gets paid by credit card. Toddlers rarely see their parents, who work two jobs to make ends meet. Adults with college degrees work full-time but can't afford to rent their own apartments-much less buy homes.

It would be one thing if these were temporary, relatively infrequent annoyances for a handful of Chicagoans. But even with variations by race, they represent the state of life for many of us: At the turn of this century, more than a third of Chicago's singles did not earn enough to support themselves. The same was true for nearly half the city's families with two adults and two children.

To afford this city, what they need, according to the University of Illinois at Chicago's Center for Urban Economic Development, is nearly $4,000 a month for a family of four, or $47,000 a year.

That doesn't allow for any savings, any college fund.

That also assumes one adult can work full-time and the other part-time, both earning at least $15 an hour. To everyone I know in retail or food service, that's a really good management job that can take years to get. Chicago's wages, it appears, simply aren't, rising as fast as its expenses.

And the community organizations that help fill in the gaps have to spend time playing politics to get the grants they need to operate. In fact, most of the $125 million the city gets through the federal Community Development Block Grant Program stays with city departments. Just $31 million goes directly to community groups, with local aldermen getting quite a say over who gets funded.

Meanwhile, what happens to the low- and moderate-income residents served by these programs? How well are they faring?

From a look at our sparkling downtown and booming crop of new and rehabbed condos (in nearly every neighborhood), we might think all is well.

But should a two-bedroom home or apartment cost more than $1,000 a month? Should child care cost nearly as much as a mortgage? Should a worker opt out of health care because she can't afford the deduction from her paycheck?

These are not typically the measures we use to judge a city's health. We look at new construction, not what it costs. We look at the number of new jobs, not what they pay. We look at whether the population is growing, not how certain groups fare.

But as our city grows and our economy rebounds, it is far less certain what will happen to our citizens. The emotional, physical and mental toll of scrambling, of not knowing how the next bill will get paid, of not seeing one's own children much, could end up costing us more in the long run than we're gaining.

The opinions expressed by the editor and publisher are her OWn.

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