Demolished: The End of Chicago's Public Housing
apps.npr.org
apps.npr.org
Not only are these interior parts of the building streets in the sense that they serve the comings and goings of residents, most of whom may not know each other or recognize, necessarily, who is a resident and who is not. They are streets also in the sense of being accessible to the public. They have been designed in an imitation of upper-class standards for apartment living without upper-class cash for doormen and elevator men. Anyone at all can go into these buildings, unquestioned, and use the traveling street of the elevator and the sidewalks that are the corridors. These interior streets, although completely accessible to public use, are closed to public view and thus lack the checks and inhibitions exerted by eye-policed city streets.
From "The Death and Life of Great American Cities", Chapter 2: "The uses of sidewalks: safety", Jane Jacobs
Sometimes I would like to see a comparison between Council Estates in the UK and Section 8 housing in the US. as well we the estates in Eastern Europe to see if the experiences are similar or, if there are differences, why/
I grew up in a concrete panel building in then Czechoslovakia and since the population was mixed, it was all fine. These days, some of these buildings have turned into ghettos due to failed/racist social policies[1].
Also failed housing projects in the outer sections of Paris (outer arrondissements). They also developed into segregated ghettoes.
But it's interesting to see that if everyone is in the same boat --i.e. that's the only kind of housing stock there is, then people can make it work, even if it kind of looks drab and unimaginative from the outside.
But in this transition, they mangled a lot of the informal economy -- good old-fashioned under-the-table businesses operating out of privately-rented homes, gleefully ignoring all regulations it feels like, and the source of livelihood for many urban poor. Obviously, this was no boon to the future of the community.
I unfortunately don't have a published source for this, but it's from a family member who was a social work professor in Chicago during that period.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markham,_Illinois
In journalism school I was assigned to cover happenings at the Markham Courthouse, which often led me out to Markham proper.
As a middle class white guy raised in a white suburban small town, the 3 months I spent there were an eye-opening experience. Most people I talked to had a shooting story or knew someone who had one. There was also little confidence in local government as many believed that Markham was run by former criminals who'd managed to win office.
At the time, there were two reporters at a newspaper called the Southtown Daily Star who covered the numerous claims of police wrongdoing and general violence in Markham. The Star's parent company, the Chicago Sun-Times, hit the skids soon after and killed the Southtown. I don't know if anyone's reporting on Markham these days.
For what it's worth the code that drives the story is open source: http://github.com/nprapps/lookatthis/
The high rises were empty and coming down by the time i moved in, but the low-rises were still mostly inhabited. They were just awful places. Cinder block cells.
Cabrini Green was interesting to me as an armchair urban planner because it was surrounded by affluence. The main drag dumped right into a luxury car garage. And the whole thing was about 100 feet from Groupon's headquarters. When Groupon employees would step outside on smoke breaks, they faced a view directly down into Cabrini Green. Very bizarre to have all that wealth created so near a place without any.
We knew one young woman who had an affair with an older man, got pregnant, then moved out of moms house into a hotel. She then called up the gov't and went right to the top of their list (pregnant single woman with no means of support and no skills, and in temporary housing). The next week, she was living in a nicer condo than I could afford. She had free housing, food, medical, and legal.
We visited the old neighborhood a few years after we left and there were open air drug markets.
I think a negative income tax would be a much better approach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM
At the end of the day, you can't address urban poverty by creating ghettos. Such areas just become the breeding ground for the next generation of urban poor--kids who have no exposure to successful behaviors and attitudes, but do have a cultivated distrust of authority and social structure. It's not an "unfair" burden on residents. It's a burden that we have to bear in order to create integrated, successful communities.
When I worked at the Chicago Tribune, I covered crime extensively and saw some distinct patterns that coincided with gentrification in Wicker Park: an increased concentration of night time crime, specifically theft and muggings, along Milwaukee avenue. Because crime is down on average, crime definitely did not go up in Wicker Park, but theft, assault, and battery did not go down as quickly as the average in the night life zones. That said, it seems very likely some former public housing residents caused trouble in some of their new neighborhoods.
Similarly, I had a petty thief from the projects once tell me that on 35th street, he saw me as either a drug buyer or a do-gooder, but either way it wouldn't make a lot of sense to mess with me. But if he saw me in Hyde Park, where I lived at the time, he would have seen me as "prey". I think it's safe to say that to some degree, affluent neighborhoods are targeted by criminals because they are affluent.
There are parallels here to mass transit. Minor theft is very high at downtown CTA stations, places with tremendous foot traffic and jostling bodies. It's one of the few crime categories that has seen some increase/very little decrease and it seems to track with the widespread use of smartphones.
Your comment also gets at some of the really tough questions of social ethics around these issues. For example: is it better to have more petty crime or to incarcerate people at unprecedented rates?
None of this stuff is easy, but the ways it is often framed -- like making unsubstantiated causal links between Section 8 and crime -- make the conversation that much harder.
(Full disclosure: I'm the author of the piece)
I am a Detroit native so I hate the idea of ghettos but I would prefer to live around people of similar means / financial ability. Public housing introduces inorganic problems with equality and perceived equality.
Bundling up the poor in massive housing complexes was/is a structurally racist, classist move.
So you've doubled down on the hardship these children have to overcome. Even if you are ok with this from a moral perspective (which is a pretty high bar to get over in my opinion) it seems like a pretty ineffective way to limit the number of "unproductive" in your society.
Now if you want to say that none should be, I agree. Find a way to stop crime. Spreading crime around is not that way.
(FYI my thinking on this issue draws far more from neo reactionaries than libertarians.)
There is also the idea that by separating out problem elements, that in the long term you decrease overall crime.
A child in a ghetto who knows not of the potential for escape will likely stay in that ghetto. A child who is surrounded by choices, options, and multiple role models has a choice to make.
Not knowing one can leave can be handled with direct communication. For example, billboards: "get a job and you can leave this place. Any adult is here by choice."
- Not having sex means no babies.
- Don't do drugs.
- Stay in your local, neighborhood school to perform as equally well as your similarly-aged peers in schools located in more affluent areas.
Well, maybe that last one not so much.
Your argument strikes me as a reason people raise in objection to mass transit: the "undesirables" might come to town. I'm actually somewhat sympathetic to your position. I live in an area of my city that, on paper, has a pretty high average household income but due to history also has a decent amount of petty crime. The answer isn't to redline those people off to somewhere else. There is a huge difference between being poor and committing crime, except that the poor tend to go to jail and the wealthy tend to pay a fine with no admittance of wrongdoing. And the latter also tend to screw over more people in one pop.
The answer is to make it socially unacceptable, in all areas, to commit crime and to demonstrate that the law and society won't tolerate it.
If you scroll up, you'll see that I agree with you about stopping crime. I oppose our current system of anarcho tyranny (to borrow an excellent term).
It's easy to say "just get a job and leave the slums." It's much, much more difficult to do that, especially when there is a bifurcated society.
I guess the solution to this is some sort of paternalistic dictatorship? Is the purpose of spreading the poor around merely to dilute their vote?
It seems to me the classic economic arguments you're making need to be turned around: In an environment where the options in the mainstream economy are unstable, low-reward work and you lack the capital to secure credit to get an education or make serious investments, wouldn't you think about joining the drug economy?
Also both the gangs and community groups were entirely capable of self-governing.
I remember being in military uniform in the early 90's and still being harassed by the locals as I walked down Division St the 3 miles to the train I had to get to. I remember everyone I knew, black, white, well off, poor.. all of them hating being around those things.
I remember the other set further up north (that still exist, and I'm not sure if they were "renovated") just two years ago when I lived nearby, and the crime that centered around it.
I also can't provide any sort of evidence to this, but I strongly remember an idea that these were only ever intended to be stopping points - temporary housing, and the problem being them becoming "homes" at all. No "Home" in this country should resemble a prison cell as much as those did. Complete with block wardens, cages to prevent violence or suicide on porches, etc.
To that end, is it really a bad statistic when you see that 44% that weren't in the system 10 years later? The single biggest bucket if you lumped "no longer qualified", "lost contact", and "private market" would be almost 30% ten years later don't need to be in there anymore. Add in the other 35% that are in mixed rentals (a la the questionably effective Wilson Yard development), or just accepting a subsidized rental, I'd say that the bulk of the community - those who lived there as well as those who lived around there, are doing better without those terrible towers.
1. Cops getting shot for being in the area
2. It being run by gangs
3. Airline shuttle being shot at. (http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2001-07-31/news/010731019... Crap, I've been to that hospital they were transported to)
If this article is trying to make me feel bad that Cabrini Green was shut down, I consider the author and the individuals who put it on the site completely lacking in any credibility.
We're not trying to make you feel bad that the projects were shut down. We are trying to convey:
* The scale of the process (the equivalent of relocating my entire hometown over the course of a decade). * Some of what was gained and what was lost for residents * The housing authority's demonstrated inability to meet their projections or deliver what they told residents they would. * The story of the photographer, who responded to an act of violence by trying to understand where that violence might come from, and in the process documented a historic moment in American urban life.
Like I said, I worked there and I'm not nostalgic about it. I saw some truly awful stuff. But that doesn't mean there wasn't a huge social and personal cost to residents in dismantling that system. If that cost had been honestly reckoned with during the Plan For Transformation, some of the more egregious problems could have been avoided.
Providing legitimate services to people is a win for everyone not just the people that are utilizing them.
http://www.amazon.com/Gang-Leader-Day-Sociologist-Streets/dp...
This is about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_Homes. The author contributed to the drug dealer economics portion of _Freakonomics_.
Lots of trees, paths, playgrounds and small commerce between buildings seem to help.
Does it? What's happened in Chicago has many parallels with public housing projects in (some) European countries. There was a boom in large scale public housing developments in many European countries in the 1950s and 1960s. Many of these housing developments were large monolitic blocks. Some random examples:
- Droixhe in Liege, Belgium http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Vue_de_Droixhe.Jpg.
- The Aylesbury estate in London: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aylesbury_Estate_View.jpg.
- Chêne Pointu in the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois https://www.flickr.com/photos/noobax/6188995903/
Many public housing developments were not stitched into the fabric of the city, but set apart from surrounding towns or city centres. The architects who built these blocks had the best of intentions (although some also had strong ideological views that influenced their designs). But today, we recognise that this style of overscaled, monolitic block design was a mistake. In the UK, the era of large scale mass public housing was largely over by the 1970s, but their effects linger on today in our attitudes to public housing and housing development.
Despite the run-down nature of many estates, strong social ties developed among residents. When estates are marked for regeneration, those ties are often broken as people are re-housed and dispersed. What does community even mean nowadays in cities when housing is snapped up by absentee investors and buy-to-let landlords with no interest in their neighbours or the neigbourhood?
This kinds of buildings don't necessarily need to be public projects. There are a lot of private investments like that.
And it works. It provides plenty of green spaces that make living pleasent while providing extraordinary privacy. You can easily live there for a decade without as much as knowing a name of any of your thousand neighbours or faces of more than 5 of them. People comming from smaller communities often value this newfound privacy and freedom to pick people to interact with.
It allows for proximity to public transportation. You are never farther than 10 minutes walk from a vehicle that can take you anywhere in the city.
It really works. You just have to design it for working people and their families that keep to themselves. Don't build too large, leave plenty of space and set up the rates so that not too many troubling people can afford that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit%C3%A9_d%27Habitation
Two issues : living in the south of France is rather different to living in the big cities of the east coast USA, or in northern Europe. Cold, dark and wet mean that life is really different for the apartment dwellers.
Second, small changes to the implementation, minor drops in quality, alteration to the spaces create deep problems with the practice of living in these buildings. Implementing the vision of Corbusier requires genius, and genius is something that is in short supply.
There was also one old Tech dorm building on that side of the street, separated from campus. On paper it was the least appealing dorm - old, poor facilities and a proximity to crime. In practice, many of the student who lived there did so by choice, as kind of a mild misfit/artistic community. People were always doing interesting things in their dormrooms there.
My mom and stepdad owned a mechanical engineering firm that did a lot of work in Atlanta housing projects. Mostly replacing old metal gaslines with plastic ones. Me, my brother, and one of my stepbrothers all worked for them at various points, so we all got a fair amount of experience in the Atlanta projects. My stepdad always made sure each crew had a couple guys from whatever project we were at, which was a good practical step. Otherwise we'd have been a bunch of white guys (mostly really redneck construction dudes) in all-black projects. We rarely had much trouble, beyond some petty theft of our tools, and one doofus on the crew who followed someone into a basement to "buy a cheap TV" and got robbed at shotgun point as a result.
I didn't do the job at Techwood, but my brother did, and one day there was a gun fight in the street. The crew all ran and hid in doorways and behind steps. My brother said he saw one of the teens who was shooting crouched behind a car door, and the guy looked at him and grinned like he was having a great time, then went back to shooting.
In retrospect, it's kinda crazy our mom let us work there, but we never really told her those kind of stories. Heh.
I'm quite excited to see the move to what will hopefully be more integrationist attempts at public housing. I really like the idea of Section 8 (we had Section 8 buildings in Streeterville where I lived in Chicago) and would love to see it extended to wealthy suburban neighborhoods.
These large homes, the Chicago interstate system, and the placement of UIC were all outgrowths of the segregationist and the cynical political climate of the time, much more so than any optimistic belief in the future.
[edit] Blueprint for Disaster was a pretty good book that covered this topic.
1. http://nationalaffairs.com/public_interest/detail/bauhaus-bl...