What does your home mean to you?

To 26-year-old Chonta White, it means lots of little things, like letting her two girls ride their bicycles on the sidewalk without worrying about them getting shot. It also means controlling the heat in her apartment so the temperature will be at the right level for 6-year-old Rayshawnda, who has asthma. That way, Rayshawnda won't have to go to the hospital emergency room, as she once did when the family lived in a Chicago Housing Authority high-rise, where someone at a central heating plant determined how hot or cold it would be.

Last August, White moved from a 14-story high-rise at 2245 W. Lake St., part of the Henry Horner Homes just north of the United Center, to a brown brick rowhouse with white trim in the 2100 block of West Maypole Avenue. Her new place also is public housing, but to hear her talk about it, it's a whole new world. Instead of hearing gunfire at night, she says, it's quiet, "like you're up in a suburb." When she comes home in the evening from her job as a Target cashier, she no longer must walk up a dark flight of stairs where a mugger might be lurking. She enters through her own front door.

A front door, a thermostat, a sidewalk lined with black wrought-iron fences, concrete stoops where people can sit on a warm spring day -- it all sounds pretty unspectacular, right? But that's precisely the point. Things like these, so commonplace, so easy to take for granted, were missing from public housing. Combined with decades of neglect by local housing officials and federal policies that packed the projects with the poorest of the poor, their absence created a huge stigma, making public housing the kind of place people would go miles out of their way to avoid.

Now, these small touches are being put back, part of a national effort to draw working families to public housing and to break up the deep concentration of poverty that is the root cause of the projects' litany of pathologies. Call it the architecture of normalcy. While it has yet to work a miraculous transformation at Henry Horner, which is the first large-scale redevelopment of public housing in Chicago, it nonetheless has made major strides toward turning around the lives of people like White. In the process, it is sending a powerful message about the essential role that design has to play in creating thriving communities.

That message is timely because other attempts to remake notorious housing projects here are gathering steam. By Tuesday, for example, real estate developers were to submit plans for the first stage of transforming Cabrini-Green into a racially diverse neighborhood with a mix of income groups that includes the very poor. While the circumstances vary from project to project, the mandate basically is the same: Break down the barriers between public housing and the rest of America.

The subtitle of Alex Kotlowitz's 1991 book about Henry Horner, "There Are No Children Here," went to the heart of this division: "The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America." The warped expectations formed by this "other America" were encapsulated in the words of the two boys, young brothers named Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers. They would start conversations about the future by saying, "If I grow up," rather than "When I grow up."

Since 1991, things have taken a turn for the better at Henry Horner, and there are many reasons why: the 1994 opening of the United Center, which caused real estate investors to look at the neighborhood anew; a city push to improve streets and other infrastructure on the Near West Side, which culminated with the 1996 Democratic National Convention at the United Center; and the 1995 settlement of a lawsuit filed against the CHA by Horner tenants, which cleared the way for the current reconstruction and renovation.

In brief, this is what is happening as part of a redevelopment program that will cost more than $125 million. Two high-rises and three mid-rises, which once loomed like giants above the Lake Street elevated train tracks, have been demolished and are being replaced with brown-brick rowhouses, like White's, and townhouses along the L. Outside Henry Horner's borders, vacant lots that once resembled gaps in a row of teeth are being filled in with brick-faced apartment houses. A total of 466 new units are to be built, matching the number lost to demolition. The units are being split evenly between Horner tenants with very low incomes and working families whose incomes range from 50 percent to 80 percent of the median Chicago-area income (about $25,000 to $40,000 a year for a family of four). These units are being built by the Habitat Co., the court-appointed receiver for the CHA's scattered-site housing program.

At the same time, in the shadow of the United Center, the three-building Henry Horner Annex, which former CHA chairman Vincent Lane once vowed to tear down, is being renovated by the Walsh Construction Co. While the Annex's two low-rises remain untouched, the transformation of its seven-story midrise is almost complete, the old red-brick facade repainted beige, gray and white, a palette comparable to that of the United Center.

That, really, is what distinguishes the new public housing on Chicago's West Side: It strives to be indistinguishable from its surroundings.

Public housing once tried to stand apart. Its architects' motives were pure, even if racist politics confined their towers to urban ghettos. Move the towers back from filthy, packed slums, the architects said. Let them stand in the middle of oversized blocks, or "superblocks," made by closing off streets of the traditional city grid. Give everybody plenty of space, as well as access to light and air. Line the faces of the towers with breezeways, "streets in the sky," where mothers could rock their baby carriages.

The collapse of this tower-in-the-park utopia and the nightmarish conditions that put public housing on the national political agenda are well known even if the root causes aren't. The deterioration resulted as much from federal policies that restricted public housing to the poorest of the poor and a lack of maintenance by local officials as ill-conceived design. But architecture certainly exacerbated the basic problem: the social isolation of the very poor.

That's why the redevelopment plan for the new townhouses and rowhouses, drafted by San Francisco architect Peter Calthorpe and modified by the Chicago architectural firms of Solomon Cordwell Buenz & Associates and Johnson & Lee, is working: It physically reconnects public housing with the area around it. Streets, like Maypole, that were taken out to make way for the superblocks have been put back. So have alleys. So have sidewalks and street lights.

This sort of planning is called the New Urbanism, but in truth it is the old-fashioned way of making cities. Here, public space is treated not as a wide-open plain punctuated by freestanding towers, as in the original public housing, but as an outdoor room framed by the walls of its three-story buildings, which house duplexes above ground-floor apartments. By varying the colors of the bricks and the profile of the gables over each main entrance, the architects approximate the visual variety of a typical street and suggest the way detached single-family homes express the identity of their occupants.

Say goodbye, in short, to the faceless monotony of public housing.

The design serves practical purposes, too, like encouraging informal surveillance of the street by neighbors looking through windows or people sitting on stoops. Those are the "eyes on the street" absent from the old high-rises, as the urbanologist Jane Jacobs famously observed. Seemingly an ornamental touch, the wrought-iron fences demarcate where the sidewalk's public space ends and the home's private zone starts. They say, in effect: "Don't come in here unless you belong."

Not surprisingly, reported crimes at the Horner complex, which is roughly six blocks long and two blocks wide, dropped by 17 percent from 1996 to 1997, according to the CHA's Henry Horner redevelopment manager, John Tuhey, who also attributes the decline to more evictions, rigorous screening and the presence of additional CHA police and security personnel.

The new construction also helped to create a new way of thinking among public-housing residents. White, for example, now talks about living in a house rather than a project. In the past, residents would be ashamed to list their address on job applications, fearing that prospective employers would shun them. Now they can write down an address like 2213 W. Maypole and "hold their heads up high," says William Wilen, a lawyer for the tenants. Even though they're on the same land where the towers used to be, they are, in effect, "off the reservation."

There are still signs that this is public housing, like the fact that residents don't have mailboxes affixed to the front of their apartments; instead, they must walk to post-office boxes perched on pedestals at intervals along the street. In addition, there isn't a decent large grocery store for blocks. In short, though the area is moving toward a mix of income groups it still lacks the mix of uses that makes city neighborhoods lively and convenient.

Even so, much of the shame attached to living in public housing here has vanished; the waiting list for the rowhouses and townhouses is in the hundreds. Their design attracts the working families who shunned public housing in the past. Similarly, smartly designed detached apartment houses in the area south of Horner are proving a strong draw and are stimulating private investment, such as the rehab of a row of private Victorian homes along West Jackson Street.

The walls between the projects and the city also are coming down with the rehabilitation of the seven-story Horner Annex, although it may not seem that way at first glance. Instead of weaving new housing into the fabric of the city, as the rowhouses aim to do, the renovation creates a fenced and gated complex.

Does that strategy repeat the mistake of the early public housing? Not necessarily, when you realize this is the way scores of condominium complexes around Chicago and the nation are arranged today. This is middle-class high-rise living -- which is what residents are saying when they crow that the Annex "looks like condos."

A key aspect of the renovation is that the architects, the Chicago firm of VOA, designed with their ears as well as their eyes. Residents were consulted on almost every aspect of the redesign. For example, indoor hallways with tile floors replaced breezeways paved in concrete, making the corridors more like a hotel than a housing project. Apartment sizes were expanded, and kitchens got amenities like wood cabinets. "We wanted to give it a look that made it our house," says the building's president, 39-year-old Annette Hunt.

Much is still to be done at Horner, like ensuring that all of the units get built on time and on budget; already there have been delays. Disputes continue over the quality of construction as well as the screening of tenants; if these details are not attended to, Chicago will simply have replaced a high-rise ghetto with a low-rise ghetto. Even so, public officials, architects and Horner residents are taking the right first steps to erase the stigma that defined the "other America." It's all about bringing back the little things that turn "housing" into "home."