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2 books match the query 'Chicago Public Housing'
Blueprint for Disaster
The Unraveling of Chicago Public HousingD. Bradford Hunt
University of Chicago Press, 2009
Now considered a dysfunctional mess, Chicago’s public housing projects once had long waiting lists of would-be residents hoping to leave the slums behind. So what went wrong? To answer this complicated question, D. Bradford Hunt traces public housing’s history in Chicago from its New Deal roots through current mayor Richard M. Daley’s Plan for Transformation. In the process, he chronicles the Chicago Housing Authority’s own transformation from the city’s most progressive government agency to its largest slumlord.
Challenging explanations that attribute the projects’ decline primarily to racial discrimination and real estate interests, Hunt argues that well-intentioned but misguided policy decisions—ranging from design choices to maintenance contracts—also paved the road to failure. Moreover, administrators who fully understood the potential drawbacks did not try to halt such deeply flawed projects as Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes. These massive high-rise complexes housed unprecedented numbers of children but relatively few adults, engendering disorder that pushed out the working class and, consequently, the rents needed to maintain the buildings. The resulting combination of fiscal crisis, managerial incompetence, and social unrest plunged the CHA into a quagmire from which it is still struggling to emerge.
Blueprint for Disaster, then,is an urgent reminder of the havoc poorly conceived policy can wreak on our most vulnerable citizens.
Policing the Project
State Violence and the Dismantling of Chicago Public HousingMadeleine Hamlin
University of Chicago Press, 2027
Shows how policing shaped the trajectory of public housing in Chicago and paved the way for its eradication and privatization.
Public housing should be a great public good, providing an essential basic need for people with lower incomes. Unfortunately, in the United States, policymakers turned their backs on public housing early on. Intended to be a utopia for the working poor, public housing in many cities became characterized by racial isolation, extreme poverty, and infrastructural breakdown, all of which left residents vulnerable to crime. State abandonment had one major exception, however: policing. In Policing the Project, geographer Madeleine Hamlin details how police played an important role in Chicago’s public housing from its origins in 1937 to the eve of its demolition at the turn of the millennium.
Based on archival data as well as extensive interviews with former residents and police officers, Hamlin describes the progressive institutional entanglement of public housing and policing as it unfurled over the course of the twentieth century. Policing the Project transcends mere description of how policing impacted everyday life for public housing residents, instead considering how policing shaped the institution of public housing as a whole. Hamlin argues that policing conditioned public housing’s downfall: draining housing budgets while exacerbating rather than mitigating crime and violence. Thus, policing played an important role in shaping the dramatic transformation of Chicago’s housing landscape, which entailed widespread privatization and the displacement of tens of thousands of Black Chicagoans.