D. Bradford Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing, University of Chicago Press, 2009.  392 pages.

By Matthew Blake

In 1994, Republicans seized control of Congress for the first time in 40 years, and new Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich set out to vanquish what remained of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. This included a threat to entirely de-fund the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which ran federally subsidized public housing projects in cities across the country. Gingrich’s proposed solution – eliminating federal support for impoverished urban tenants – was hardly humane.  But he did find a big problem in big government: decaying high-rise public housing projects that had become humanitarian disasters.

Saved from the budget knife, the Clinton administration HUD discovered that while public housing was flawed across the country, it was at its worst in Chicago. In 1995, HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros testified to Congress that of the 15 poorest communities in the country – not the poorest public housing communities, the poorest communities period – 11 were projects controlled by the federally-funded, locally-run Chicago Housing Authority. Roaches, broken elevators, drug dealing, violence and isolation from the rest of the city defined Chicago public housing. When Cisneros told CHA President Vincent Lane that Chicago’s housing authority a) “had failing grades across the board” and b) might be de-funded, Lane responded the most sensible way he could: he gave up.

In his new book Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Public Housing, D. Bradford Hunt writes that “Lane, laying bare his own frustration with the CHA, threw his large set of keys across the table at HUD assistant secretary Joseph Shuldiner, and told him the federal government could have Chicago’s projects if it wanted them.” So HUD took over.  It announced plans to demolish the high-rises and agreed to a compromise strategy with the GOP Congress to give public housing tenants rental vouchers. Cisneros declared that CHA residents “have suffered long enough.”

The sub-prime mortgage crisis and home foreclosures around the country have kept attention centered on home ownership as a key public policy goal.  But as Blueprint for Disaster shows, public housing from the New Deal to the Clinton administration was about much more than a roof over people’s heads — it was a singularly ambitious social welfare program. It was also a painful instance of government losing its way.  As the projects in Chicago moved forward, Hunt writes, “planners and administrators at both the federal and local level understood that they were building problematic developments” Hunt writes. “Yet for a host of bureaucratic reasons [they] plodded forward.”

Public housing today is largely built around tax credits and vouchers meant to give low-income renters and potential homebuyers a boost in the private market. But for the vast majority of public housing’s history, both the federal and local government played a far more active role. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Public Works Administration envisioned Washington and cities collaborating on “slum clearance” programs, where housing in black ghettos was obliterated and replaced by housing with the government as landlord.  In1937, Congress passed the Housing Act, creating the Public Housing Administration – the precursor to HUD. PHA would run a “permanent program of federally funded but local controlled public housing,” where Washington gave annual contributions to city housing authorities, who would in turn select tenants and sites for public housing.

In trying to make public housing work, the Chicago Housing Authority faced two enormous external challenges: severe budget constraints from Washington and a fierce “not in my backyard” resistance from Chicago city council aldermen against the construction of public housing in their wards. Specifically, white aldermen defied CHA’s attempts to use public housing as a tool for neighborhood integration.  When the housing authority ignored aldermen and tried to move black families into white neighborhoods – like their Airport Homes project near Midway Airport – riots ensued. “The CHA had gone to war with the city council in 1949 and 1950 and largely lost,” Hunt writes. “And the battles left it battered and exhausted. White alderman had carved up site lists as they saw fit, and race become the deciding factor in public housing’s location.”

The CHA had decision-making power outside of the city council, but it was the mayor who appointed its board. And by 1955 Richard Daley, the quintessential Chicago machine politico and native of the almost all-white Bridgeport neighborhood, was mayor. Daley purged what remained of the board’s more idealistic integrationists.  The result was a CHA that agreed with City Hall to confine new public housing projects to the rapidly growing black ghettos. The city constructed row after row of cheaply built high-rises in Chicago’s poorest black communities, what Hunt calls “readily identifiable second-class housing” isolated from jobs, businesses, public transit, schools, and social services.

This kind of construction was happening all over the country after World War II, creating what some urban historians call a “second ghetto” from Newark to San Francisco. But the problem was especially pronounced in Chicago, where by the end of the 1960’s, there were 40,000 public housing apartments holding 150,000 people. The Robert Taylor Project alone had 4,400 apartments in its utilitarian row of 28 16-story buildings. These buildings had untested heating and trash systems in constant need of repairs, and other maintenance and security problems that slowly demoralized tenants. Elevators, for example, were the “Achilles heel of public housing,” with constant breakdowns and children killed while trying to play.

Hunt uses these iconic high-rise buildings to argue that public housing’s failure is about more than racism and a lack of sufficient federal money, and instead resulted from liberal bureaucrats’ infatuation with Spartan, modernist towers imported by Swiss architect Le Corbusier. The complete aesthetic neglect of these high-rises was actually seen as a fulfillment of the original New Deal vision – public housing should never compete with market-rate housing, but only be used as a safety net for those unable to afford market rates. Architectural historian Dell Upton asserted that projects had to be Spartan “to reinforce the economic principal that only those who can pay should have pleasant physical surroundings: anything more robs the industrious.”

But these modernist building theories seemed blind to how high-rise tenants would actually live and build communities. Hunt focuses on how the buildings packed in far too many children:

Widespread social disorder emerged in Chicago’s high-rise projects shortly after they opened in the 1950s and early 1960s, before poverty became entrenched, before jobs disappeared in black ghettos, before the CHA’s finances collapsed, before deferred maintenance meant physical disorder, and before the drug scourge ravaged tenants. These structural forces later deepened problems in the 1970s, but social disorder was present in high-rises with large numbers of children right from the start.

In the typical 1960’s Chicago neighborhood there were two adults for every child (defined as under twenty-one). But in the newly built housing projects, children vastly outnumbered adults. At the Robert Taylor Homes, there were five children for every two adults. Lacking adult supervision and attending severely overcrowded public schools that served the projects, these children often turned to delinquency.

In his takedown of housing officials, Hunt downplays a bit the extent to which City Hall racism led to the construction of unlivable buildings. In 1969 an Illinois state court ruled that the CHA had violated the 14^th amendment equal protection clause since it had, in effect, built segregated public housing. But even after the ruling, the housing authority was still too timid to fight City Council and integrate its projects. Such diffidence is, in retrospect, an embarrassment. But it was an understandable reaction – at the federal level, HUD declined to tackle housing as a civil rights issue, and in Chicago the autocratic Mayor Daley did not want to see Chicago’s well-defined racial and ethnic neighborhoods integrated. In failing to integrate public housing, CHA matched the prevailing political mood of the time.

Hunt’s concentration on the massive architectural mistake made by planners is justified. Imagine for a moment that in the late 60’s, Chicago had experienced both a spectacular economic boom and the unexpected onset of racial harmony between the city’s politicians and its residents. Even then, it is hard to imagine why communities had to be built around high rises that were isolated from the industry and commerce of the city, and simply dreary to inhabit. What were these planners thinking?

It’s a question that has animated the last fifteen years of Chicago public housing development. Today CHA is under the direct control of Mayor Daley (the Second), who took it over in 1999 and announced a “Plan for Transformation” that included a teardown of the high-rises and the mixing of public housing and market-rate units. This mixed-use experiment is still playing out, with new neighborhoods such as North Town Village replacing the nationally infamous Cabrini-Green high-rises.  North Town Village residents, people from a range of backgrounds, have access to decent local shopping and are well integrated into Chicago’s mass transit system.  Hunt writes that the Plan for Transformation is “essential to pointing CHA away from its past failings.”  That past has been about government confronting the great economic and racial obstacles of our time – in one of America’s most important cities – and failing to meet the challenge.

Comment RSS - You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.