The Chicago Reader’s Deanna Isaacs reviews Blueprint for Disaster, a new book about the Chicago Housing Authority, by sociologist D. Bradford Hunt, a professor at Chicago’s Roosevelt University. To those unfamiliar with CHA, Isaacs gives 40 years in seven sentences:

As working-class families fled the projects, the rents—based on income and earmarked to cover maintenance—fell short. CHA leaders were grossly ineffective at best (Hunt says he found no evidence of scandal). Repairs were deferred, the towers deteriorated, and by the 1980s the CHA was a notorious slumlord. When the crack epidemic of the 1990s hit, many of its buildings fell openly under the control of gangs. Finally, in 1995, the federal government took the bankrupt agency over and cleaned it up, handing it back to the city in 1999. The current Mayor Daley privatized management and began demolishing the towers. His plan calls for replacing them with mixed-income housing that, more often than not, looks a lot like the 19th-century structures that were removed 50 years ago to make way for the high-rises.

What is missing from this summary is what has happened in the last ten years. Mayor Daley’s plans were announced in 1999 — and there hasn’t been that much reporting on how successful this plan has fared (though a Chicago group called the Business and Professional People for the Public Interest put out a comprehensive report a month ago). From books like Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children to movies like Hoop Dreams and even, um, Candyman, there is a lot of well-known material about decrepit Chicago public housing in the late 80’s and early 90’s. I hope that Hunt’s book looks at the more complex issue of Chicago moving public housing tenants to “mixed-income” buildings (the review mostly focuses on Hunt’s take on what went wrong with since-demolished CHA high-rises). Has the nation and Chicago learned from the CHA’s slumlord days?

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