Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing
Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing
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Abstract
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, this book 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, it chronicles the Chicago Housing Authority's (CHA) 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, the book 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. The book is a reminder of the havoc poorly conceived policy can wreak on our most vulnerable citizens.
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Front Matter
- Introduction What Went Wrong with Public Housing in Chicago?
- 1 The 1937 Housing Act Revisited
- 2 Building the Chicago Housing Authority
- 3 Clearing Chicago's Slums
- 4 The end of Integration and the Taming of the CHA
- 5 Designing High-Rise Disasters
- 6 Planning a Social Disaster
- 7 The Loss of the Working Class
- 8 The Tenants Revolt
- 9 The Gautreaux Case and the Limits of Judicial Activism
- 10 The Long Road to Rebirth
- Conclusion the Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing
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End Matter
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