PUBLIC HOUSING

Public Housing

Public Housing

By 1950, public housing projects had risen in cities across the country. Their advocates in the National Housing Conference declared these projects a success, asserting that they had given low-income families their first opportunity to live in a decent, healthy environment. And the benefits, they claimed, extended to cities as a whole. By improving the social ills bred by slums public housing had saved taxpayers vast costs for police, fire, health and crime protection.

Architecture, racism and even good intentions have conspired to create a poverty trap in Chicago's housing projects. As elsewhere, public housing was first designed in the 1930s as transitional housing for the working poor, often with stiff eligibility requirements that screened out the neediest. Chicago's special problems were born in the 1950s when local politicians, including the mayor, Richard J. Daley, began to use public housing to segregate the city's rapidly growing black population. The result was hulking high-rises in poor black neighbourhoods, the worst of which was an uninterrupted four-mile stretch of public housing on the city's south side. The Robert Taylor Homes were more than two dozen 16-storey buildings, identical except for the color of their brick and the way they face. The result was the biggest concentration of poverty in America.

Land Values

The problems with public housing go far beyond the physical dilapidation of many housing projects. First, public housing has come to be dominated by, as well as to encourage the formation of low-income single-parent households, with all the social problems 'that such families bring. At the same time, because the land on which public housing stands is designated for a single, unchanging purpose, it creates what could be called a "frozen city," a poorhouse that stands in the way of the regeneration of cities. Far from benefiting cities as a whole, public housing projects preclude new uses of land and capital that could serve the larger population, including those in low income communities.

Chicago's booming downtown halts abruptly at a corridor of public housing projects named for a previous era's progressives: Harold Ickes, Ida Welles, Robert Taylor. The energy of downtown Chicago gives way to acres of vacant lots, since no one wants to build or live near the projects.

To survive and prosper, cities must be able to adapt to changing times, Land and buildings devoted to one purpose one year must be free to be used for new, unpredicted purposes the next. One cannot be certain which buildings or properties, however long overlooked, will suddenly acquire great value. The permanent allocation of large tracts of land for public housing precludes the creative recycling of land that must occur if economic revitalization of neighborhoods and cities is to take place.

The CHA Vote

The Rev. John Hatchett, a Chicago minister who has led housing marches, labeled the makeover projects "a disgrace - part of a conspiracy to remove black people from their voting power (in the inner city) and move them to the suburbs." Richard Wheelock, lawyer for disaffected Cabrini Green residents, called the ...