Blueprint for Disaster

Blueprint for Disaster PDF Author: D. Bradford Hunt
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226360873
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
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, D. Bradford Hunt 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, he chronicles the Chicago Housing Authority’s 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, Hunt 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. Blueprint for Disaster, then,is an urgent reminder of the havoc poorly conceived policy can wreak on our most vulnerable citizens.

Blueprint for Disaster

Blueprint for Disaster PDF Author: D. Bradford Hunt
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226360873
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
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, D. Bradford Hunt 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, he chronicles the Chicago Housing Authority’s 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, Hunt 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. Blueprint for Disaster, then,is an urgent reminder of the havoc poorly conceived policy can wreak on our most vulnerable citizens.

High-Risers

High-Risers PDF Author: Ben Austen
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062235087
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
A Booklist Best Book of the Year: “The definitive history of the life and death of America’s most iconic housing project,” Chicago’s Cabrini-Green (David Simon, creator of The Wire). Built in the 1940s atop an infamous Italian slum, Cabrini-Green grew to twenty-three towers and a population of 20,000—all of it packed onto just seventy acres a few blocks from Chicago’s ritzy Gold Coast. Eventually, Cabrini-Green became synonymous with crime, squalor, and the failure of government. For the many who lived there, it was also a much-needed resource—it was home. By 2011, every high-rise had been razed, the island of black poverty engulfed by the white affluence around it, the families dispersed. In this novelistic and eye-opening narrative, Ben Austen tells the story of America’s public housing experiment and the changing fortunes of American cities. It is an account told movingly though the lives of residents who struggled to make a home for their families as powerful forces converged to accelerate the housing complex’s demise. Beautifully written, rich in detail, and full of moving portraits, High-Risers is a sweeping exploration of race, class, popular culture, and politics in modern America that brilliantly considers what went wrong in our nation’s effort to provide affordable housing to the poor—and what we can learn from those mistakes. “Compelling.” —Chicago Tribune “[A] fascinating narrative.” —Booklist (starred review) “A weighty and robust history of a people disappeared from their own community.” —Kirkus Reviews “Austen has masterfully woven together these deeply intimate stories of the residents at Cabrini against the backdrop of critical public policy decisions. Ultimately this book is about how as a country we acknowledge and deal with the very poor.” —Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here Named a Best Book of the Year by Mother Jones Nominated for the Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Nonfiction; the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize; and the Chicago Review of Books Award

High Rise Stories

High Rise Stories PDF Author: Audrey Petty
Publisher: McSweeney's
ISBN: 1940450055
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
In the gripping first-person accounts of High Rise Stories, former residents of Chicago’s iconic public housing projects describe life in the now-demolished high-rises. These stories of community, displacement, and poverty in the wake of gentrification give voice to those who have long been ignored, but whose hopes and struggles exist firmly at the heart of our national identity.

When Public Housing was Paradise

When Public Housing was Paradise PDF Author: J. S. Fuerst
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252072130
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Collecting seventy-nine oral histories from former public housing residents and staff, J. S. Fuerst's When Public Housing Was Paradise is a powerful testament to the fact that well-designed, well-managed low-rent housing has worked, as well as a demonstration of how it could be made to work again. J. S. Fuerst has been involved with public housing in Chicago for more than half a century. He retired from Loyola University, where he was a professor of social welfare policy. He was the editor of Public Housing in Europe and America. D. Bradford Hunt is an assistant professor of social science at Roosevelt University. John Hope Franklin is James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of History at Duke University. He has served as president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and many more.

Purging the Poorest

Purging the Poorest PDF Author: Lawrence J. Vale
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022601231X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
The building and management of public housing is often seen as a signal failure of American public policy, but this is a vastly oversimplified view. In Purging the Poorest, Lawrence J. Vale offers a new narrative of the seventy-five-year struggle to house the “deserving poor.” In the 1930s, two iconic American cities, Atlanta and Chicago, demolished their slums and established some of this country’s first public housing. Six decades later, these same cities also led the way in clearing public housing itself. Vale’s groundbreaking history of these “twice-cleared” communities provides unprecedented detail about the development, decline, and redevelopment of two of America’s most famous housing projects: Chicago’s Cabrini-Green and Atlanta’s Techwood /Clark Howell Homes. Vale offers the novel concept of design politics to show how issues of architecture and urbanism are intimately bound up in thinking about policy. Drawing from extensive archival research and in-depth interviews, Vale recalibrates the larger cultural role of public housing, revalues the contributions of public housing residents, and reconsiders the role of design and designers.

The Poorhouse

The Poorhouse PDF Author: Devereux Bowly
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 080939068X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Chicago seems an ideal environment for public housing because of the city’s relatively young age among major cities and well-deserved reputation for technology, innovation, and architecture. Yet The Poorhouse: Subsidized Housing in Chicago shows that the city’s experience on the whole has been a negative one, raising serious questions about the nature of subsidized housing and whether we should have it and, if so, in what form. Bowly, a native of the city, provides a detailed examination of subsidized housing in the nation’s third-largest city. Now in its second edition, The Poorhouse looks at the history of public housing and subsidized housing in Chicago from 1895 to the present day. Five new chapters that cover the decline and federal takeover of the Chicago Housing Authority, and its more recent “transformation,” which involved the demolition of the CHA family high-rise buildings and in some cases their replacement with low-risemixed income housing on the same sites. Fifty new photos supplement this edition. Certificate of Excellence from the Illinois State Historical Society, 2013

Making the Second Ghetto

Making the Second Ghetto PDF Author: Arnold R. Hirsch
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521245692
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
This book analyses the expansion of Chicago's Black Belt during the period immediately following World War II. Even as the civil rights movement swept the country, Chicago dealt with its rapidly growing black population not by abolishing the ghetto, but by expanding and reinforcing it. The city used a variety of means, ranging from riots to redevelopment, to prevent desegregation. The result was not only the persistence of racial segregation, but the evolution of legal concepts and tools which provided the foundation for the nation's subsequent urban renewal effort and the emergence of a ghetto now distinguished by government support and sanction. This book not only extends our knowledge of the evolution of race relations in urban America, but adds a new dimension to our perspective on the civil rights era - an age marked by the rise of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the explosion of northern cities in the wake of his assassination.

Public Housing That Worked

Public Housing That Worked PDF Author: Nicholas Dagen Bloom
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812201329
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
When it comes to large-scale public housing in the United States, the consensus for the past decades has been to let the wrecking balls fly. The demolition of infamous projects, such as Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis and the towers of Cabrini-Green in Chicago, represents to most Americans the fate of all public housing. Yet one notable exception to this national tragedy remains. The New York City Housing Authority, America's largest public housing manager, still maintains over 400,000 tenants in its vast and well-run high-rise projects. While by no means utopian, New York City's public housing remains an acceptable and affordable option. The story of New York's success where so many other housing authorities faltered has been ignored for too long. Public Housing That Worked shows how New York's administrators, beginning in the 1930s, developed a rigorous system of public housing management that weathered a variety of social and political challenges. A key element in the long-term viability of New York's public housing has been the constant search for better methods in fields such as tenant selection, policing, renovation, community affairs, and landscape design. Nicholas Dagen Bloom presents the achievements that contradict the common wisdom that public housing projects are inherently unmanageable. By focusing on what worked, rather than on the conventional history of failure and blame, Bloom provides useful models for addressing the current crisis in affordable urban housing. Public Housing That Worked is essential reading for practitioners and scholars in the areas of public policy, urban history, planning, criminal justice, affordable housing management, social work, and urban affairs.

Integrating the Inner City

Integrating the Inner City PDF Author: Robert J. Chaskin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022616439X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
The Chicago Housing Authority s Plan for Transformation repudiated the city s large-scale housing projects and the paradigm that produced them. The Plan seeks to normalize public housing and its tenants, eliminating physical, social, and economic barriers among populations that have long been segregated from one another. But is the Plan an ambitious example of urban regeneration or a not-so-veiled effort at gentrification? Is it resulting in integration or displacement? What kinds of communities are emerging from it? Chaskin and Joseph s book is the most thorough examination of the Plan to date. Drawing on five years of field research, in-depth interviews, and data, Chaskin and Joseph examine the actors, strategies, and processes involved in the Plan. Most important, they illuminate the Plan s limitations which has implications for urban regeneration strategies nationwide."

The Hidden War

The Hidden War PDF Author: Susan J. Popkin
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813528335
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Describes what it is like to live in some of the worst neighborhoods in the United States and discusses what government officials can do to improve the safety and quality of public housing developments.