From Paradise to Hell: Chicago's Public Housing Disaster

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From Paradise to Hell: Chicago’s Public Housing

Disaster.

Steven Oudejans

5961165

MA History: American Studies

University of Amsterdam

stevenoudejans@gmail.com

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Introduction

In 1956, the Ashford household moved into the recently opened Harold Ickes Homes, a public housing project in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago’s Near South Side. The high-rise development had replaced part of the run-down nineteenth-century

tenement buildings in the district, which had long housed impoverished Afro-Americans. Progressive reformers in the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) coordinated the

construction of these new public housing units as part of their plan to rescue poor families from Chicago’s slum neighborhoods.1_{Vonsell Ashford, the mother of the}

household, could not be happier with her new home. She recalled her feeling of the project when she just moved in: “I moved into Ickes in April. The building was new, and they had a beautiful playground for the children. You could not ask for a better location, and the place was just marvelous. I had three bedrooms, a nice storage area, and a linen closet… And I had wonderful neighbors… I thought I was moving to paradise.2

Ms. Ashford’s positive recollection of the project was not uncommon. During the 1950s, families who moved into the newly constructed public housing developments were very happy with their homes and communities. Many residents described their new residence as paradise. As Maude Davis, a former resident of the Altgeld Gardens projects recollected: “We felt it was just paradise. We felt this was just the greatest housing that we could live in!”3_{Arnold Weddington, a former resident of the Ida B. Wells Homes,}

recalled his childhood: “In Ida B. Wells, when I grew up, we thought we were rich. We never envisioned ourselves as being poor people. As a child I believed we were more fortunate than many people because of where we lived.”4_{Arnold was right. The CHA}

waiting lists were long, and a lot of impoverished families that were stuck in Chicago’s slums envied those who gained admission to the subsidized multiple bedroom

apartments.

However, during the 1960s, the CHA public housing projects started to shown signs of decay. The buildings became physically deteriorated and the feeling of

1 Audrey Petty, High Rise Stories: Voice From Chicago Public Housing (San Fransisco: McSweeney’s, 2013) 19.

2 J. S. Fuerst, When Public Housing Was Paradise: Building Community in Chicago (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003) 144-145.

3 Fuerst, When Public Housing Was Paradise, 137. 4 Ibidem., 175.

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community was slowly being replaced with social disorder. Vonsell Ashford remembered this time: “We got through the 1950s pretty good, then slowly through the 1960s things got worse… What really started destroying things was when the family structure broke down. But the most important thing, I think, was the kind of people they were putting in. The CHA wasn’t being as careful.”5_{She eventually moved out of the Harold Ickes}

Homes in the late 1970s: “It’s not that I didn’t like the apartment, I loved my

apartment… but then you go across the hall, and this person doesn’t have a door on the bathroom, the oven door is pulled off, the sink is broken, and you’d be saying, ‘What in the World...?’”6_{Arnold Weddington experienced the same decay in his project and left in}

the late 1960s in search of a better living environment. He visited his childhood

neighborhood in the early 1990s: “We had everything at Ida B. Wells. And now if you go down there, what do they have? The last time I went down to look at 653 East 37th_Place,

I had tears in my eyes. I couldn’t believe it.”7

By the 1980s, most public housing projects in Chicago, in particular the high-rise developments, were severely distressed. Impoverished, Afro-American families were cramped into flats that were haunted by vandalism, gang violence, and physical neglect. Gangs controlled everyday life in the projects and used the towers as impenetrable fortresses for their drug trade. The amount of vacant housing units reached new heights during the 1980s, which reflected the inefficiency of the CHA to renovate the housing units in poor condition and the undesirability of the projects. In the following decade, the concentration of poverty in Chicago’s public housing neighborhoods reached shocking levels, and in 1995, the secretary of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Dvelopment (HUD) Henry Cisneros, announced to Congress that CHA projects

accounted for eleven of the fifteen poorest communities in the nation.8_{In just one}

generation, the public housing projects of Chicago had transformed from beacons of hope to symbols of hopelessness.

This thesis will examine how the public housing utopia of the 1940s and 1950s could turn into the social disasters of the 1980s. The question that will lead my research

5 Ibidem., 145. 6 Ibidem., 153. 7 Ibidem., 175.

8 House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, HUD’s Takeover of the Chicago Housing Authority; Hearing before the United States House of Representatives, Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, September 5, 1995, 21.

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is: how did the well-intentioned progressive ideals of Chicago’s policy makers result in a devastating public housing failure?

To be able to give a satisfying answer to this question, this thesis will follow a chronological structure. The first chapter will briefly examine how policy elites created the foundation for the social disaster of the later decades. During the late 1930s and 1940s, progressive housing officials in Chicago were influenced by two interlinked ways of thought: first, that the private housing market would never produce a secure,

comfortable and affordable home to the poorest residents of the city; and second, that the Afro-American ghettos were in such a bad shape that significant redevelopments were needed to be able to provide decent housing to the black underclass.9_Progressive

reformers saw the overpopulation in the poor Afro-American neighborhoods as a

problem that had to be resolved. Many of the progressive policy makers in the CHA had become fascinated by Le Corbusieu’s “towers in the park” concept as a plan to provide a green and safe environment for the underclass.10_{Because of the racial politics, the focus}

on cost-efficiency, and the concentration of poor people in the projects, the CHA projects were doomed to fail from the start.

The second chapter of this thesis will examine what caused the downfall of the public housing projects. The central question in this chapter will be: What caused the widespread social disorder in the projects? I will argue that the extraordinary high youth to adult ratio in public housing, combined with the high-rise design of the projects, severely crippled the ability of the community and the CHA to encounter the social disaster.

The third chapter will examine how policy elites and the mass media stimulated the development of a top-down discourse of disaster that stigmatized public housing and its residents. It will furthermore explain how this discourse was utilized to justify

proposed housing reforms in the form of the HOPE VI plan.

The final chapter will explore how the CHA intended to solve the public housing catastrophe. To defeat the vicious circle of concentrated poverty and the social disorder in the projects, policy makers created a ‘Plan for Transformation’ that called for the

9 Charles Waldheim and Katerina Ruedi Ray, Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives (Chicago, 2004) 302.

10 Roger Biles, “Race and Housing in Chicago,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society volume 94, Race and Housing in Post-WW II Chicago (2001) 31-38.

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demolition of the buildings and the relocation of its residents. While it is too early to examine the long-term success of the initiative, this thesis will examine reports on the early results of the plan.

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Chicago’s Afro-American slums, known as the Black Belt, were created during the early twentieth century. Due to the huge influx of Southern blacks during the Great Migration, the city’s black population increased eightfold between 1910 and 1940. The far majority of these newcomers moved to the South Side of Chicago, and formed what came to be knows as a “black metropolis”.11_{The tenement buildings that housed thousands of poor}

black Chicagoans were in very bad shape and the living conditions were grim. This inspired progressive policy makers to experiment with new forms of social housing. In January 1937, Edward Kelly founded the Chicago Housing Authority. The bureau swiftly grew to be one of Chicago’s most progressive government agencies. Kelly appointed a number of nonpartisan professionals to the board, including Coleman

Woodbury, the executive director of the National Association of Housing Officials, who had helped Catherine Bauer in Washington to pass the 1937 Housing Act; John Fugard, architect and chairman of Chicago’s progressive housing reform agency, the

Metropolitan Housing Council; and Robert R. Taylor, the first accredited Afro-American architect and first black member of the CHA.12_{Taylor became chairman of the CHA in}

1942, and held this position until 1950. He realized that the Afro-American community in the city was looking to him to challenge the injustices that created the inferior housing conditions and the severe lack of housing available to Afro-Americans. The direction of the CHA was strongly motivated by these progressive executives on the board, and therefore the main focus of the agency was to rescue impoverished families from the slum neighborhoods in the city.

While the slum clearance public housing projects were created to improve the lives of poor Afro-American city dwellers, the projects would eventually become even more dangerous and crippling than the slums they had replaced. This chapter will first examine how white policy elites stimulated racial segregation in Chicago’s early public housing projects. It will then explain how progressive reformers in the CHA used the ideologies of Modernist architects to create a utopian slum clearance ideal and how an overzealous focus on cost efficiency during the construction process created the

foundation for the social disaster that would start to develop in the 1960s. By showing the

11 St. Claire Davis and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1970) 3-29.

12 Roger Biles, Big City Boss in Depression and War: Mayor Edward J. Kelly of Chicago (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1984) 91.

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flaws in the early policies of the CHA, I will explain how the projects were doomed to fail from the very beginning.

§1: The 1937 Housing Act and Chicago’s first Public Housing Projects

In Chicago the Public Works Administration (PWA) wanted to build three giant slum clearance projects that could house between 1,000 and 3,000 families. The sites for these projects were located in three densely populated areas inhabited by Polish-Americans, Italian-Americans and Afro-Americans. The PWA’s planning advisors, Jacob Crane and Coleman Woodbury, suggested these ethnically balanced locations. They argued that these sites were “a good beginning point” and every location had “good possibilities of future expansion.”13

The Afro-American units were planned in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. This created a strong backlash from whites living in the nearby lakefront homes and from the Chicago Real Estate Board; they argued that this site should be used for a greater purpose than low-cost public housing for blacks. They wanted to use the site for housing for whites and did not want blacks to live so close to their own neighborhood. The PWA refused to listen to the resistance and continued to plan the building of the Bronzeville units until the 1935 Louisville decision blocked the federal government from utilizing eminent domain to condemn the land for public housing project purposes.14_{Because the}

PWA was now legally unable to carry out wholesale slum clearances, the administration focused on purchasing smaller sites from individual owners. As a result of this setback, the PWA had to build projects that were much smaller than their intended size. For example, the Julia Lanthrop Homes consisted of 960 units, and the Trumbull Parks Homes of only 450. Even though the PWA did build some new public housing units between 1935 and 1937, they were unable to fulfill most of its large-scale slum clearance plans due to the ongoing legal harassment and vocal resistance.

The biggest problem was that these new smaller public housing projects were all located in white districts of Chicago. The director of the PWA, Harold L. Ickes, was the first policy maker that tried to manage racial integration in public housing projects by

13 D. Bradford Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster. The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009) 38-39.

14 Lawrence M. Friedman, Government and Slum Housing: A Century of Frustration (Chicago: Rand McNally & Co, 1969), 106.

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promoting the ‘neighborhood composition rule’, which declared that the composition of public housing projects should correspond with the predominant racial composition of the neighboring district.15_{The rule was originally implemented to protect poor}

Afro-American neighborhoods from slum clearance projects that would favor white tenants through racist tenant selection, but it also prevented confrontation with whites racists by reassuring them that the policy makers would not force racial integration in public housing projects.16_{Because of the neighborhood composition rule, the PWA was thus}

unable to provide the Afro-American community in the city with adequate affordable housing. This frustrated Harold LeClaire Ickes, the former president of the Chicago NAACP, who acknowledged that the blacks in the city were still suffering from a lack of housing and poor housing quality because of discrimination and segregation.17

The CHA was well aware of this problem and the priority after its founding in 1937 was to finish the Bronzeville public housing plans. Unfortunately, there were still a few obstacles that slowed down the construction of new projects. The PWA Housing Division of the New Deal of 1933 made a very slow organizational shift to the United States Housing Authority (USHA) as a result of the 1937 Housing Act.18_{The Housing}

Act of 1937, also known as the Wagner-Steagall Act, determined that the United States federal government would subsidize local public housing agencies to improve the living conditions of poor families in the slum neighborhoods of the cities.19_{While the PWA}

already started experimenting with early forms of public housing during the New Deal era, it was not the sole purpose of the agency. The creation of the USHA meant that the federal government would now play a much more active role in the creation of public housing for the poor. However, this organizational shift brought with it all kinds of bureaucratic problems that slowed down the construction of new housing in Bronzeville. Furthermore, embittered white politicians tried to interrupt the Bronzeville plans by accusing the public housing developments of unjust tax exemption and unauthorized

15 Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940-1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) 14.

16 Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 161-162. 17 Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster, 39.

18 Friedman, Government and Slum Housing, 106-110.

19 D. Bradford Hunt, “Was the 1937 U.S. Housing Act a Pyrrhic Victory?,” Journal of Planning History vol. 4 (2005) 212-215.

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worker permits. On top of that, the conflict between Chicago’s labor unions and the contractors of the projects intensified to a point that led to work stoppages.

Despite all these delays, the CHA completed its most important Bronzeville project in January 1941. With 1,662 units, the Ida B. Wells Homes project was seen as a major accomplishment and was well received by the black community in Chicago.20_{In a}

city starved for new housing for the underclass, the opening of the Ida B. Wells Homes was a huge media event and more than 18,000 families applied for an apartment in the project. The famous Afro-American newspaper, the Chicago Defender, published a twenty-page special to celebrate the opening, and the Chicago Herald-American printed a photo article praising one family’s move “from hovel to haven.”21

§2: The Future of CHA’s Slum Clearance Policies

Even though there was a lot of political resistance to the CHA’s plans to clear the city’s worst slums, the agency continued to push for redevelopment of these neighborhoods in the early 1940s. There were two slum clearance projects in these years that had a major impact on the future policies of the CHA.

The first project, the Cabrini-Green Homes, was situated in a mostly Italian neighborhood nicknamed “Little Hell” on the North Side of Chicago. The CHA misjudged the willingness of the Italian residents to accept the construction of a public housing project in their midst. Italian-Americans took great pride in owning their own homes and had the highest homeownership rate in Chicago, even higher than native whites.22_{Therefore, renting a public housing unit did not appeal to many residents of the}

neighborhood. While the CHA paid little attention to the criticism of the Italian

community, it also faced strong competition on the Cabrini site from Chicago’s sanitation and highway department. Both agencies wanted to use sections of the neighborhood for their own projects. This enduring conflict severely delayed the project and raised the costs. By 1941 the Cabrini plan was reduced to less than half of its initial capacity.23

20 Fuerst, When Public Housing Was Paradise, 2-3. 21 Ibidem., 2.

22 Thomas Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) 147.

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The second slum clearance project, which would later be known as the Robert Brooks Homes, saw a very different outcome than the Cabrini project. This project was located on the Near-West Side of Chicago, an area that was mostly inhabited by Afro-Americans. In stark contrast to the Italian-American neighborhood, most people in the Near-West slum rented their homes. Many homes in the neighborhood had been rapidly build after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, when there was an immediate demand for new cheap houses. Many of these buildings were in bad shape after years of neglect by poor residents and shortsighted landlords. A sense of community was non-existent in this area, again in stark contrast to the strong Italian community that existed in the area of the Cabrini project.24_{Because of the broken down state of many of the buildings, a lot of}

property owners were willing to sell their real estate to the CHA. The purchase of land in the Afro-American neighborhood was therefore much easier than in the Italian

neighborhood and the CHA did not experience many problems with the relocation of the residents.25

The difference between the complications in the Italian neighborhood and the relatively few problems in the Afro-American neighborhood affected the attitude of the CHA towards slum clearance projects. With the lengthy disputes surrounding the

development of the Cabrini project in mind, the CHA never again planned any extensive slum clearance in white neighborhoods. During the 1940s, progressive policymakers in Chicago identified multiple white neighborhoods as slums and argued that the residents were living in a miserable environment.26_{However, the CHA decided to not focus on}

these neighborhoods, since the likelihood of active resistance on these sites made slum clearance in white neighborhoods a time consuming and politically risky effort. Because of these difficulties, the CHA planned slum clearance projects solely in easy to acquire Afro-American neighborhoods. Even though some black property owners opposed slum clearance in their neighborhood and actively voiced their resistance during the 1940s and 1950s, their political power was very limited and made it hard for Afro-Americans to fight for their neighborhood with the same persuasiveness as whites.27

24 Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto 45-47. 25 Ibidem., 47.

26 Biles, “Race and Housing in Chicago,” 35-36. 27 Ibidem., 32-34.

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§3: The Tenant Selection Process

Many low-income families in Chicago applied for a home in the new public housing projects. Coming from poor slum neighborhoods, these people saw the multiple bedroom housing units as paradise.28_{However, there were not nearly enough available units to}

house every poor family in the city, and thus the selection of tenants was something that preoccupied many administrators at the CHA.

The CHA decided to select the tenants for their new projects by using a progressive selection process. Elizabeth Wood created a scoring system that could prioritize the families who were living in the worst situation and who paid a

disproportional amount of their income for rent. The system relied upon social workers from Chicago visiting the neighborhood of applicants and giving objective judgments about the living situation of the families that applied.29_{At first the CHA turned down}

applicants that received public welfare, since these families would be unable to pay the monthly rent of the new public housing units. However, in 1940 the USHA convinced the CHA to give a section of the new units to families on welfare. From that moment on, the CHA started to admit families that received welfare to the public housing projects.30_By

allowing tenants from the lowest part of the income scale into the projects, the developments transformed into neighborhoods with a huge concentration of poverty.

Economic class of the applicants was an important factor in selecting the tenants for a new project, but during the late 1930s and 1940s race became more and more important as well. In the James Addams Homes, one of the few public housing projects that was planned to house both black and white residents, CHA executive secretary Elizabeth Wood limited the number of Afro-American families so that it resembled the racial balance of the area before the project was built. Even though the white residents technically shared the same buildings with the Afro-American residents, the blacks were forced to live on a segregated side of the buildings. This was argued to be part of the

28 Fuerst, When Public Housing was Paradise, 1-9.

29 Lawrence J. Vale, From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 178-183.

30 Rachel G. Bratt, Rebuilding a Low-Income Housing Policy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989) 57.

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neighborhood composition rule, since that was how the neighborhood looked like before the redevelopment.31

While the Jane Addams Homes were marked by segregation until after the Second World War, the project did lead to a change in the CHA policy regarding housing and race. By 1940, the CHA, motivated by criticism from black sociologists and local progressive politicians, was convinced that racial segregation in public housing projects could not be maintained. This shift is best seen from the racial policies in the Cabrini-Green Homes. In the years prior to the development of the Cabrini Homes, the

predominately Italian-American neighborhood where the project was built saw an influx of Afro-Americans. This development shifted the racial balance in the neighborhood to 80 percent white and 20 percent black.32_{As a result, the CHA, following the}

neighborhood composition rule, had to deny the applications of a large number of whites in order to maintain the racial balance of the preclearance site. The CHA reserved 20 percent of the housing units for Afro-Americans, and there was an abundance of black applicants for the limited number of homes. In contrast, the CHA had a difficult time in finding white residents for the remaining 80 percent of units. The Italian community did not agree with the strict tenant selection and especially disagreed with the racial

integration policies. Many whites did not want to live in a racially integrated

neighborhood, even with the severe housing shortage during the war and the fact that only a small number of black residents would be admitted to the project. A lack of white applicants, the excessive number of Afro-American applicants, and the embarrassment of holding housing units vacant in a time of wartime housing shortage forced the CHA to abandon the neighborhood composition rule and allow more black families to move into the project. By 1949, Afro-Americans inhabited 40 percent of the units in the Cabrini-Green project, and in the following years this percentage rose quickly.33

The Cabrini Homes exposed fundamental complications in racial integration policies. First, mixed race projects did not appeal to whites and keeping white families in public housing projects with Afro-American residents proved to be problematic.

Furthermore, it was virtually impossible to find enough white families to meet the quota

31 Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 218. 32 Ibidem., 218-219.

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in projects that were predominately inhabited by blacks. A striking example of this problem was the Robert Brooks Homes project that opened in 1943. The CHA intended to give 80 percent of the housing units to Afro-Americans and 20 percent to whites, since according to the neighborhood composition rule this best represented the composition in the area before the redevelopment.34_{A small number of white families decided to move}

in the project when it opened, but they promptly moved out again. Within a year the tenants of the Robert Brooks Homes were exclusively black families.35_While

Afro-Americans were prepared to be a minority group in public housing projects that were predominately white, whites did everything in their power to avoid living in a project that housed mostly black families.

§4: Architectural Modernism and Progressive Ideals

The theories of the intellectual forefathers of architectural modernism, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, served as a blueprint for the ideals of the progressive policy makers of the CHA. Modernist ideologies were very popular amongst progressive housing

reformers and were used as a model for Chicago’s slum clearance projects during the late 1940s and 1950s. While the earlier CHA projects involved solely low- and mid-rise buildings, in the postwar era massive high-rise buildings became the most favorable design to quickly increase the organization’s public housing stock.

The first appearance of the high-rise design in Le Corbusier’s work was his 1922

La Ville Contemporaine. In subsequent publications, the Plan Voison of 1925 and La Ville Radieuse of 1933, Le Corbusier argued that in order to decongest city centers,

augment urban density, improve mobility and accessibility and impose rational order, the old center should be demolished and rebuilt with high-rise buildings in its place.36_This

utopian city center would be constructed geometrically, based upon the abstract shape of the human body. The high-rise housing blocks, combined with plentiful green spaces would create “towers in the park” that would reflect the large-scale industrialism of that

34 Martin Meyerson and Edward C. Banfield, Politics, Planning, and the Public Interest: The Case of Public Housing in Chicago (New York: The Free Press, 1966) 123.

35 Meyerson and Banfield, Politics, Planning, and the Public Interest, 124.

36 Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002) 222-224.

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time.37_{The design of these high-rise housing projects would be uniform and they would}

be mass-produced to be able to house a huge number of city dwellers.

In Le Corbusier’s eyes, the problem of mass housing was “the problem of the epoch” and he spent a lot of time to place urban dwellings on the agenda of architecture.38

Through his own writings he played a key role in promoting the issue and designing architectural solutions to complications surrounding mass housing. Unlike his more socialist peers, he argued that high-rise buildings were not just for the poor, but instead for all socioeconomic classes.

The high-rise design of buildings was just one element of Le Corbusier’s complex vision, and he clearly acknowledged the necessity of adequate management. He argued that a rotating 24-hour staff should always supervise the buildings in order to maintain order. Le Corbusier furthermore argued that policemen should patrol the floors of the high-rise buildings, a task that would replace their outside traffic duties since there were significantly fewer roads in his urban plans.39_{Elevators had to be operated around the}

clock by professional attendants so that there would not be any major complications with this vital part of the high-rise design.40_{Building “self-contained, soundproof cells” would}

prevent noise complaints, and an incorporated gymnasium, swimming pool, and staffed kindergarten in the building would eliminate youth problems.41_{A sense of community}

was created by providing communal recreation spaces, facilities, and clubrooms. Walter Gropius had similar ideas about the future of American cities. Gropius first introduced his idea about high-rise designs in urban America during the 1934

Museum of Modern Art Housing Exhibition in New York City. This exhibition wanted to incite public interest for the housing condition of the urban poor in the United States by showing pictures of American city slums, while displaying contrasting photographs of successful social housing projects in Europe. In his essay Minimum Dwellings and Tall

Buildings, Gropius argued that all high-rise housing units should meet two basic

necessities: a private room for every person in the family, and enough windows space to allow plentiful air and sunlight into the rooms and provide the residents with a view of

37 Hall, Cities of Tomorrow, 222-227.

38 Alexi Ferster Marmot, “The Legacy of Le Corbusier and High-Rise Housing,” Built Environment vol. 7 (1978) 84-85.

39 Le Corbusier, The Radiant City (London: Faber and Faber, 1967) 39. 40 Le Corbusier, The Radiant City, 38, 50.

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the green spaces surrounding the building.42_{While he agreed that single-family low-rise}

housing was the most desirable type of housing, high-rise projects were much more efficient in urban centers with limited space and high lands prices. He furthermore argued that high-rise neighborhoods offered a greater opportunity for informal social interaction than any other type of housing. Gropius promised that the high-rise apartments of the future would bear no resemblance to the “squalid, cramped tenement housing of the past.”43

Progressive slum reformers at the CHA strongly believed in environmental determinism, the belief that the physical environment of a certain area determined the social development of the people that lived inside this area. In their eyes, the poor shape of the slum neighborhood thus greatly affected the culture and life of its residents. By using the high-rise designs of Modernist ideologists, the CHA progressives believed that they could solve the complex social problems of the impoverished Afro-American slum families.

The choice of the high-rise design was further stimulated by pressure from policy makers of the federal government to cut the costs of new public housing projects and to use a more cost-efficient design. By the mid-1940s, the USHA required local housing authorities to create budgets for new projects that were far lower than the sanctioned cost restrictions of the 1937 Housing Act.44_{The USHA proposed the construction of high-rise}

towers, based on the ideas of the Modernist architects Le Corbusier’s and Gropius’s, as the most cost-efficient and sensible model for new public housing units.45

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the CHA started to follow USHA’s advice and build high-rise project that could accommodate big families with a large number of children. The results of the USHA’s pressure for cost-efficiency were clearly noticeable in Chicago’s public housing projects. Projects that were designed before the new USHA guidelines, for example the Ida B. Wells Homes, were planned to look like the buildings in typical middle-class black neighborhoods. They were decorated with copper awnings,

42 Jill E. Pearlman, Inventing American Modernism: Joseph Hudnut, Walter Gropius, and the Bauhaus Legacy at Harvard (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007) 160-161.

43 Walter Gropius, “Minimum Dwellings and Tall Buildings,” in the catalog for Housing Exhibition, America Can’t Have Housing, (New York: The Museum of Modern Art,1934) 41.

44 Hunt, “Was the 1937 U.S. Housing Act,” 212-215.

45 Gail Radford, Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) 75-83.

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balconies, and brick embellishments. In contrast, the high-rise Robert Taylor Homes that were designed according to the machine-like and functional Modernist ideals were organized and sober. To keep the costs as low as possible, the CHA used untested heating throughout the buildings, did not use isolation material to cover the exterior walls, and included only two elevators per buildings to move the hundreds of residents across multiple floors. The design was so popular amongst policy makers in the CHA, that the Modernist high-rise concept became the CHA’s most important way to increase its housing stock. As the Chicago Tirbune points out: “Of the nearly 21,000 low income family apartments built by the CHA from 1955 through 1968, all but 2,000 were in high rises.”46

Since the high-rise projects were more expensive to build than earlier low-rise developments, the CHA built between thirty and forty units per acre to compensate for the high costs of slum clearance.47_{Critics of the high-rises, however, had warned for}

high-density public housing as a result of slum clearance and advised that twelve units per acre was the ideal number for new public housing projects.48_{By ignoring the advice}

of these critics and trying to be as cost-efficient as possible, the CHA created narrow public spaces in the high-rise projects and the overcrowding that followed lead to the social disaster that devastated the city’s public housing.

While the CHA reformers based their high-rise design on Le Corbusier’s

concepts, they completely ignored the fact that Le Corbusier’s high-rise ideal demanded active and continuous maintenance to keep the project running smoothly. To maintain the green spaces, run the social clubs, keep the elevators operating, and have adequate space in the kindergartens, there had to be a 24-hour staff in the development.49_{Instead, the}

CHA merely built the high-rise constructions, which were just a small element of Le Corbusier’s complex vision. As chapter two will show, the lack of active management and maintenance from the CHA, combined with the huge number of unrestrained children in the towers, lead to social disorder on a huge scale.

46 Chicago Tribune, December 2, 1986, quoted in Sudhir Venkatesh, American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002) 7.

47 Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster, 45-46.

48 Catherine Bauer, Modern Housing (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1934) 146-147. 49 Marmot, “The Legacy of Le Corbusier,” 93.

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§5: The Origin of the Public Housing Disaster

By the late 1950s, CHA had built more than 40,000 housing units for the poorest citizens of Chicago.50_{However, the political resistance from white racists, the admittance of}

welfare families in the projects, racial segregation, and the high-rise design all proved to be detrimental to public housing in the long run. The focus on the low-cost production of the projects gave public housing their recognizable grim architecture and inferior quality. On top of that, income-based rents would ultimately lead to a concentration of poverty in the public housing projects and as a result the income streams that were needed for maintenance were insufficient.

The location that the CHA chose for their projects reinforced the existing

inequalities. Between 1937 and 1945, the CHA constructed nine public housing sites with 6,300 units, but while Afro-Americans only accounted for 15 percent of Chicago’s population in 1945, they inhabited 92 percent of these newly created public housing units.51_{The most important goal for policymakers such as Robert Taylor and Elizabeth}

Wood was to create good homes for the Afro-American community, since this was the group that suffered the most in the overcrowded and inferior black neighborhoods of Chicago and there was no other organization in the city that was able or wanted to alleviate their position. The units that were created with low rents, modernized comforts, and a strong sense of community appealed to many of the poor blacks that lived in the ghettos of Chicago during a period of severe housing shortage. Many saw these public housing projects as a “paradise” and those who passed the selection policies were perceived to be very fortunate.

By using criteria such as the housing conditions in the applicant’s current neighborhood and their income, the CHA disregarded important factors that had shaped communities for decades. Whereas family ties, race, and religion had formed

communities throughout the different neighborhoods in Chicago, the public housing projects were increasingly inhabited by very poor Afro-Americans from different

neighborhoods of the Black Belt. The CHA did not realize that this concentrated poverty

50 The Chicago Housing Authority, A Brief History of the Chicago Housing Authority, http://www.thecha.org/pages/about_cha/18.php, accessed on 21-05-2014.

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could lead to the disaster seen in decades, but instead argued that public housing would be easily managed as long as working class families lived alongside welfare families.52

As explained in this chapter, Chicago’s public housing disaster had its origins in the late 1930s, with the first problems emerging by 1945. The continuous obsession with reducing production costs, the strict tenant selection procedures, the ambition to

redevelop the slums into large-scale high-rise projects, and the seemingly unsolvable problem of inequality and segregation all reinforced the existing problems. What started out as an effort to clear the slums and create fair housing conditions for the poor Afro-American community ended in a tragedy that nobody foresaw.

Chapter 2: From Paradise to Hell

As was explained in the previous chapter, the CHA planned their 1950s high-rise public housing projects to house Afro-American families with a large number of children. By the late 1950s, eighty percent of the public housing units consisted of between three or five bedrooms apartments.53_{While many poor black families welcomed this design}

choice, the CHA policy makers did not think of the consequences. By welcoming families with a lot of children into the new projects, the ratio of youths to adults reached

52 Ibidem., 40.

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levels that were unprecedented in previous projects. In this chapter, I will argue that this ratio was one of the main reasons for the demise of Chicago’s public housing projects.

§1: Collective efficacy

By housing a massive number of adolescents and relatively few adults in public housing projects, the CHA stimulated the creation of rampant social disorder in these

communities. Wesley Skogan, an expert on crime and community policing, and Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson, are two of the most influential scholars in the research of social disorder in impoverished communities. While earlier research focused primarily on the flaws of individuals in a certain neighborhood, Skogan and Sampson looked at the significance of “neighborhood effects” in regulating unethical behavior in a certain communities. They claimed that communities with very little crime prevented social disorder through collective power, by keeping an eye out for each other and supporting those in need.54_{Tenants of public housing projects cooperated and protected their}

community against immoral behavior, especially from the youth in the neighborhood, through social networks and community groups. These groups were in constant contact with local law enforcement agencies to ensure the safety of the neighborhood. Skogan and Sampson argued that when the ability of tenants to actively work together is impaired, for example because of changes in the community, governmental neglect, or poverty, the community would then be unable to keep local youth under control, work out conflicts in the community, remove troublesome outsiders, and cooperate with local law enforcement to prevent crime in the neighborhood.55_{They classified this capability as}

“collective efficacy,” a measure of the capacity of tenants to cooperate with each other and local law enforcement to preserve social order in the neighborhood and prevent crime.56_{Skogan and Sampson implied that the concentration of poverty, the turnover rate}

54 Wesley Skogan, Disorder and Decline: Crime and the Spiral of Decay in American Neighborhoods (New York: Free Press, 1990) 1-21; Robert J. Sampson and Stephen W. Raudenbush, “Systematic Social Observation of Public Spaces: A New Look at Disorder in Urban Neighborhoods,” American Journal of Sociology vol. 105 (1999) 603-651; Robert J. Sampson, Jeffrey D. Morenoff, and Felton Earls, “Beyond Social Capital: Spatial Dynamics of Collective Efficacy for Children,” American Sociological Review vol. 64 (1989) 633-660.

55 Skogan, Disorder and Decline, 125-187.

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in public housing projects, and the separation of families, were the most negative influences on collective efficacy.57

In Chicago’s public housing project, the ratio of youths to adults is another crucial element to help explain the failure of collective efficacy. In the projects where children significantly outnumbered adults, the people who tried to maintain social order were discouraged by an overwhelming demographical inequality. While other factors like governmental neglect and poverty certainly have had a negative impact on collective efficacy, widespread social disorder in Chicago’s public housing projects already started to appear before unemployment became an issue in black ghettos, before postponed maintenance created deteriorated buildings, before poverty became rooted in public housing projects, before drugs tormented residents, and before the CHA budget broke down. These fundamental issues worsened the problems during the 1970s, but social disorder was already existent in high-rise projects with large numbers of youths from the very beginning. The ratio of youth to adults in the high-rise projects, together with the design of the buildings, made collective efficacy much more difficult. This would eventually lead to social disorder on a scale that was unmatched in the history of Chicago’s public housing.

§2: Youth to Adult Ratio and High-Rise Designs

To understand the significance of the large number of children in the public housing project, it is important to compare the youth to adult ratio in different neighborhoods of Chicago. The ratio of youth to adult is determined by looking at the number of people under the age of twenty-one, divided by the number of people aged twenty-one and older. This ratio can be used as a measure how effective collective efficacy is in certain

neighborhoods, just like a student-teacher ratio can tell us how the environment in a classroom will be.

By using data from the United States Bureau of Census, it becomes clear that during the 1960s the average ratio of youth to adults in different sections of Chicago was about 0,53.58_{This means that there was one child per two adults in a traditional Chicago}

57 Sampson and Raudenbush, “Systematic Social Observation of Public Spaces,” 608-613; Skogan, Disorder and Decline, 21-51

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neighborhood. This can be explained by looking at the demographics of the average community. Unlike public housing projects, the traditional Chicago neighborhood housed not only families with a large number of children, but also couples without children and unmarried men and women. As a result, there were more adults than children in most Chicago neighborhoods.

Public housing projects were the complete opposite of the traditional

neighborhoods. The average youth to adult ratio in the CHA’s projects developed from 1,42 in the early 1950s to 2.39 in 1970.59_{This can be explained by the CHA’s focus on}

giving priority to large families with a large number of children and the construction of housing units with multiple bedrooms. One example of the out of control youth to adult ratio was the ABLA Homes (a public housing site that combined the Jane Addams Homes, the Robert Brooks Homes, the Loomis Courts Homes, and the Grace Abbott Homes) project. The youth to adult ratio in this project was 1.67. While this ratio by itself is already distressing, the fact that the ABLA Homes housed more people than most Chicago neighborhoods makes it even more alarming.60_{The sheer number of children in}

the project was enormous. The ratio in the ABLA Homes was no exception to other public housing projects. The youth to adult ratio in the sections of the city with a large number of public housing projects were far higher than the ratio of neighborhoods without public housing.

While virtually all public housing projects had a higher youth to adult ratio than traditional Chicago neighborhoods, the high-rise buildings experienced extraordinary high ratios and as a result faced the biggest social disorder. For example, the Cabrini-Green Homes had a ratio of 2.09. The Robert Taylor Homes had the highest ratio in the city, with a 2.86 youth to adult ratio.61_{The high-rise projects with a large number of}

children endured the biggest turnover rate, the highest crime rates, and had the largest number of vacant housing units. Even though older low-rise CHA projects had a lower average income, more residents who were dependent on welfare, and more single-parent

59 United States Bureau of Census, 1990 Census of Population and Housing; United States Bureau of Census, United States Census of Population: 1970

60 Ibidem.

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families than the high-rise projects, the environment in these neighborhoods was far better than that of the high-rises.62

The waiting list statistics of various public housing projects during the 1970s again show the significance of the youth to adult ratio combined with the high-rise design. Families on the waiting list could request a housing unit in a particular project, but could also turn down an offer from an unwanted project. A lot of families wanted to live in the older low-rise projects like Jane-Addams Homes and the Ida B. Wells Homes, which had a 1.0 and 1.2 youth to adult ratio respectively. Even the in 1959-opened LeClaire Courts project, which had a 2.0 youth to adult ratio, was very popular.63_While

the ratio was very high in this project, the fact that it consisted of solely low-rise buildings in a low-density neighborhood made collective efficacy very efficient, and youth-related social disorder was therefore adequately controlled. However, families had to be on the waiting list for several years to be eligible for these attractive projects. Another option were the high-rise projects, such as the Cabrini-Green Homes (2.09 youth to adult ratio) and the Robert Taylor Homes (2.86 youth to adult ratio). There was no waiting period for these projects, and families could move in immediately once they applied for housing. However, families often preferred waiting for years to be admitted to more favorable projects instead of moving into one of the infamous high-rise buildings. Even though the waiting lists were getting bigger, the high-rise projects suffered from a high number of vacancies from the 1970s to well into the 1990s.64

The correlation between youth to adult ratio, high-rise designs and social disorder is again confirmed by looking at high-rise projects with different demographics. From the late 1950s to the early 1980s, the CHA build forty-nine high-rise public housing projects specifically for the impoverished senior citizens of Chicago. Even though the high-rise buildings shared the same design as the Cabrini-Green Homes and the Robert Taylor Homes, and the average income of the residents was remarkably low, vandalism and crime barely existed in these projects. Even while some senior housing projects were built next to infamous high-rise projects with a lot of crime and violence, the quality of life for the elderly was relatively high.65_{The high-rise public housing projects for senior}

62 Chicago Housing Authority, Annual Statistical Report, 1950-1975 63 Ibidem.

64 Chicago Housing Authority, Annual Statistical Report, 1975-1990 65 Chicago Housing Authority, Annual Statistical Report, 1947-1987

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citizens emphasize the importance of the youth to adult ratio. The high-rise design was not the key element for the surge of social disorder, but instead the staggering amount of children in the projects was the determining factor.

§3: Vandalism

As was explained in the first part of this chapter, the CHA’s public housing projects were home to many families with a large number of children. The huge density of youth made collective efficacy nearly impossible, and as a result, the projects saw social disorder on a huge scale.

Vandalism was one of the problems that controlled the lives of many residents. While it is hard to measure how widespread the problem of vandalism was, there are countless of statements from public housing inhabitants, project administrators, and CHA officials to argue that the youth in public housing projects did have a huge negative impact on the quality of life in the community.66_{Only months after the Cabrini}

Extension North- and South buildings were added to the Cabrini-Green Homes in 1957, broken down laundry machines forced residents to do their laundry in their own housing unit, profane graffiti throughout the buildings frightened people in the community, and the demolition of mailboxes by groups of youngster made mail delivery impossible.67

Another widespread problem in the projects was the destruction of light bulbs, which kept the buildings in the dark and terrified many residents. The CHA had to replace 18,000 light bulbs a month in 1958, because people kept stealing the light bulbs and young boys destroyed the lights by hitting them with baseball bats.68

A similar form of vandalism haunted the inhabitants of the Harold Ickes Homes. The CHA replaced all the wooden doors in the project with reinforced steel doors shortly after its opening, because groups of young boys kept breaking down the wooden doors.69

Various glass windows in public space were taken out and never replaced, because shattered glass was filling the floors of the hallways. At the Stateway Gardens project, a

66 Petty, High-Rise Stories,11-25. 67 Ibidem., 29-42.

68 Charles Waldheim and Katerina Ruedi Ray, Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) 308.

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high-rise project adjacent to the Robert Taylor Homes, a few hundred pound of brass from fire equipment was stolen, and in 1961 vandals switched on the fire hoses in one of the buildings, which flooded nine floors.70

However, the most vulnerable features of public housing projects were the elevators. Since most high-rise buildings only had two elevators for the whole building, the breaking down of the elevators generated the biggest discomfort for its residents, especially those on the upper floors. Problems with elevators were so common that residents usually preferred walking as many as 17 floors to avoid the possibility of getting trapped in a malfunctioning elevator. Breakdowns were frequently caused by young vandals who forced open the elevator doors, crawled into the elevator shafts to ride the elevators, or destroyed the electrical controls. Elevators also suffered from the CHA’s obsession with cost-efficiency. To cut initial costs, the exterior walls of public housing buildings consisted only of a singly layer of bricks and concrete without any insolation to prevent the building up of ice within the building. Elevators and stairways were often constructed on the outside of the buildings, since this was the cheapest and most cost-efficient place.71_{However, during Chicago’s harsh winters, solid ice formed}

inside the elevator shafts on a regular basis, and elevators froze stuck between floors. The malfunctioning of elevators was embarrassing, dangerous, and harmful to many residents of the public housing projects. Peggy Byas was embarrassed when visitors came to her apartment in the Ida B. Wells project: “The elevator might be broken…. and they have to walk to the 10th_{floor. When you step on the elevator, you see garbage and the smell of}

urination.”72_{Eddie Leman, a former resident of the Robert Taylor Homes explained how}

dangerous the elevators could be: “Even when the elevators were working, the lights were out half of the time. They used to call them death traps. People got their arms or their body caught up in there. The elevator closed tight, like a clamp… there was no safety sensor.”73_{She continued: “You get on the elevator, you risk getting stuck, you risk}

70 Ibidem., 309. 71 Ibidem., 297-299.

72 Patrick Reardon and Bonita Brodt, Public Housing Draws The Dividing Line, Chicago Tribune, November 30, 1986, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1986-11-30/news/8603310237_1_chicago-housing-authority-public-housing-chicago-river.

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getting hurt, you risk getting robbed. That was everyday, all the time. And I lived on the fifteenth floor, so you know I had my exercise on.”74

§4: Social Disorder and Race

Social critics often looked at the underlying causes of vandalism in public housing buildings and linked it to the racial segregation that was stimulated by racist policy makers in the housing authorities. The devastating results of segregation through tenant selection and the depressing aesthetics of the public housing buildings were key factors in the widespread social disorder in the projects. Afro-American social critic and prominent spokesperson for the Civil Rights Movement, James Baldwin, labeled public housing projects, “colorless, bleak, and revolting.”75_{He argued: “The projects… are hated. They}

reveal the real attitude of the white world, no matter how many liberal speeches are made, no matter how many lofty editorials are written, no matter how many civil rights commissions are set up.”76_{According to Baldwin, this revulsion of public housing and}

the underlying issue of racial segregation caused the violence of the residents towards the buildings that they inhabited. The Afro-American residents “began smashing windows, defacing walls, urinating in the elevators, and fornicating in the playgrounds,” because they wanted to express their anger.77

Lee Rainwater, a Harvard sociologist, researched the infamous Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louis during the 1960s and 1970s and developed the theoretical framework for the causes of social disorder in Afro-American projects. Rainwater argues that his research and theory is valid not only for the Pruitt-Igoe project, but for “lower-class black people, and even more generally as representative members of the American underclass.”78_{He concludes his research by stating that:}

White cupidity creates structural conditions, highly inimical to basic social adaptation (low income availability, poor education, poor services, stigmatization), to which Negroes adapt by social and personal 74 Ibidem., 100.

75 James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985) 201.

76 Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket, 207. 77 Ibidem., 209-210.

78 Lee Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Families in a Federal Slum (Piscataway: Aldine Transaction, 2006) vii.

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responses, which serve to sustain the individual in his punishing world, but also generate aggressiveness towards self and others, which results in suffering directly inflicted by Negroes on themselves and on others.79

Rainwater thus provides the theoretical framework for the social critique of Baldwin. Because of the widespread racial segregation and horrible environment in public housing projects, Afro-Americans developed hostility towards their environment and the people that put them there. This anger and resentment against the policy makers generated the vandalism that was such a big problem in the projects. By vandalizing the properties of the CHA, the youth expressed their anger, but simultaneously also worsened their own situation.

While the social critique of Baldwin and the social research of Rainwater

demonstrate how social disorder in public housing projects was stimulated by bad policy making, it is important to look at Chicago and realize that the circumstances in the CHA projects were stimulating the extensive vandalism that haunted the residents. Racial segregation and discrimination were the causes for the deep resentments in the Afro-American community, but the out of control youth to adult ratio in the CHA projects made collective efficacy, and thus the restraining of the youth, an impossible task. This huge obstacle crippled the efforts of the tenants, the CHA, and the local law enforcement to reduce the social disorder in the projects.

§5: The Rise of Gangs

Another problem that was created by the combination of the high youth to adult ratio and the high-rise design was the rapid growth of gangs in the public housing projects. From the early 1970s until the late 1990s, a gang called the Gangster Disciples dominated the Afro-American projects. The leader, Larry Hoover, cultivated a drug empire that according to the Department of Justice at one point earned 100 million dollars a year.80

The projects served as recruitment centers for the gang, and large numbers of young boys joined the gangs in search of a better economic position. The gang gave these young men

79 Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls, 4.

80 Elaine Cassel and Douglas A. Bernstein, Criminal Behavior (Abingdon: Taylor & Francis Group, 2007) 263.

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a job in the underground drug economy at a time when unemployment numbers were skyrocketing. Joining the gang was often the only way for these young men to have some form of income.81

As the theory of Rainwater has shown, many young men expressed their anger through vandalism, but the racial segregation and discrimination also stimulated the growth of gangs. The decline of the social movements of the 1960s resulted in the spread of “nihilism” amongst young black men. As American philosopher and Harvard graduate Cornel West explains:

Nihilism is to be understood here not as a philosophical doctrine that there are not rational grounds for legitimate standards or authority. It is, far more, the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness. The frightening result is a numbing detachment from others and a self-destructive disposition toward the world. Life without meaning, hope, and love breeds a coldhearted, mean-spirited outlook that destroys both the individual and others.82 By the mid 1970s, the black underclass realized that the social movements of the 1960s did not improve their situation, and that they were still stuck in an environment of racism and poverty. Young Afro-American men felt like nobody cared about them anymore, and tried to find a sense of identity by associating themselves with a gang.

An additional reason for the rapid growth of the gangs in the high-rise projects was the fact that they could sells drugs fairly easily and safely within a “defensible space”. Architect and city planner Oscar Newman first introduced the concept in his 1973 book Defensible Space: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design. He explains the term by writing that defensible space is: “"a residential environment whose physical

characteristics—building layout and site plan—function to allow inhabitants themselves to become key agents in ensuring their security."83_{This description is fairly similar to the}

collective efficacy theory of Skogan and Sampson, but while Skogan and Sampson focused more on the sociological effects in public housing projects, Newman looks closely at the high-rise design of the buildings. Newman’s idea was that the government could control and prevent criminal activities in public spaces by looking closely at the

81 John M. Hagedorn, A World of Gangs: Armed Young Men and Gangsta Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008) 131-134.

82 Cornel West, Race Matters (New York: Vintage Books, 1994) 23.

83 Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design (London: MacMillan Publishers, 1973) 12.

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environmental design of the neighborhood. He argues that high-rise buildings were the least favorable design, since it was the hardest to prevent crime in these buildings.84

This is exactly what happened in the high-rise public housing buildings of Chicago. Gangs made smart use of the high-rise design of projects such as the Robert Taylor Homes by creating a smoothly running 24 hour drug market. These projects were like fortresses, ideal to set up shop and to evade the police. Since there was only one entrance, gang members searched and screened everyone who entered the building. Lookouts, usually children as young as 8, on upper floors watched for police cars and communicated with other gang members by using walkie-talkies or shouting down the stairwells. With most of the drugs hidden on the top floors, it was very hard for the police to sneak up to the these floors and raid the apartments undetected. Even if the police successfully infiltrated the buildings, gang members often forced legitimate residents in helping then by hiding drugs and guns in their apartment.85

As the drug market grew bigger with the introduction of crack cocaine, the gang related problems worsened. During the 1980s, the highly defensible space, the continuing supply of young frustrated black men, and the big number of vacant housing units made the high-rise projects the heart of Chicago’s drug trade. Other drugs like heroin,

marijuana and cocaine had already been widely available in the projects for over two decades, but the much cheaper and more addictive crack cocaine created huge expansion of the drug profits and gang violence. As the drug market grew, the Gangster Disciples fought their two main enemies, the Vice Lords and the P-stones for the right to deal drugs at the most profitable locations.86_{The public housing project started to look like war}

zones. The gangs even sniped at each other from opposing buildings. Residents lived in terror, as they feared getting hit by crossfire. Children could not play outside or go to school anymore, and snipers from the top floors even shot at police and paramedics.87_By

84 Newman, Defensible Space, 18.

85 Robert Blau, Cabrini Drug War Breaks Old Rules, Chicago Tribune, January 05, 1995,

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1989-01-05/news/8902220887_1_drug-turf-weapons-charges-drug-trade. 86 Thomas Joseph Jurkanin and Terry G. Hillard, Chicago Police: An Inside View. The Story of

Superintendent Terry G. Hillard (Springfield: Charles C. Thomas Publisher, 2005) 80.

87 Devereux Bowly, The Poorhouse: Subsidized Housing in Chicago (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012) 178-180.

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the mid 1980s, the body count in Chicago’s public housing project was in the hundreds per year. 88

Gangs now took complete control of the elevators and other public spaces in the buildings. Sexual assaults, fights, and murders destroyed the lives of the residents and many young men were forced to join a gang to protect themselves and their families. As Dolores Wilson, a former resident of Cabrini-Green, recalls: “The older kids – the boys – they didn’t join gangs because they wanted to, but in the eighties, with other gangs moving into the neighborhood, this made them form gangs in response, for self-protection… Even I wanted to carry a gun. There was so much slicing and shooting… One lady was shot at who had a baby in the stroller. They were just sniping from that one building, I’m telling you. And at 1150 and 1160 Sedgwick. One group just took over those two buildings and guys that used to live in the buildings had to go along.”89

The horrible living environment of Chicago’s high-rise projects is best illustrated by comparing the crime statistics of the projects with other neighborhoods. During the time of the escalating gang violence, a resident of the high-rise projects had a better than 1-in-10 chance of becoming a victim of a violent crime, a murder, a sexual assault, a shooting or a robbery. Nationally, the chance of being a violent crime victim was 1 in 135. In Chicago’s Northwest Side suburb Jefferson Park, it was 1 in 207.90_{This dreadful}

figure for high-rise projects may even be higher, since a greater proportion of crime went unreported in public housing projects than in the city of Chicago as a whole.

Eventually, the gangs had more power and control of the projects than the CHA or the law enforcement agencies.91_{The Chicago police was outmanned, inefficient, and in}

some cases corrupt. Gang leader became the authority figures in the high-rise projects instead of the police. In the words of Cabrini-Green resident Sabrina Nixon: “The thing about ambulance and police at Cabrini is that when there were reports of a shooting, they’d come eventually, but they didn’t come right away. It wasn’t in a hurry. Police

88 City of Chicago Police Department, Statistical Summary 1985. 89 Petty, High-Rise Stories, 37.

90 George Papajohn and William Recktenwald, Living In A War Zone Called Taylor Homes: Residents Trapped In Battles Over Drug Turf, Chicago Tribune, March, 10, 1993,

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1993-03-10/news/9303190679_1_gang-war-gangster-disciples-gang-members.

91 Susan J. Popkin, The Hidden War: Crime and the Tragedy of Public Housing in Chicago (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006) 67.

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knew that shooting happened in the neighborhood on a constant basis. Nine times out of ten, they weren’t going to risk their lives when they knew it was plain-out gang activity going on. It was the norm, so to speak. I’m sure that’s how a lot of them looked at it.

They’ll just kill each other off. They didn’t care.”92

§6: The Public Housing Hell

Historians, sociologists, and other scholars who have studied public housing usually see social disorder as the result of governmental neglect, poverty, drug problems, and racism.93_{These factors had a huge impact on the Afro-American community in public}

housing, and contributed greatly to the emergence of widespread problem like vandalism and the rise of gangs. However, huge demographic inequality is a specific element in Chicago’s public housing that was the key factor of the social disorder and physical deterioration in many of the high-rise projects.

As this chapter has explained, the progressive policy makers of the CHA created communities with youth to adult ratios that were unseen in previous urban spheres, and this unique situation was the key factor in the growth of social disorder in the public housing projects. The idea of building public housing units suited for families with a large number of children was founded on progressive ideals to help those in the worst situation. The HUD actively supported this idea, since high-rise buildings with multi-bedroom units were a very cost-efficient and fast way to build a large number of public housing apartments.

The vast number of children in the projects combined with the high-rise design of the projects made collective efficacy incredibly difficult and the efforts of tenants to restraint the youth was often a lost cause. This created an environment where vandalism severely affected the quality of life for many residents, gangs dominated the

neighborhood, and where defenseless tenants lived in a prisonlike situation. The resulting vandalism and crime drove out the tenants who still had other options, which in turn concentrated poverty in the projects. Because of the concentration of poverty, income

92 Petty, High-Rise Stories, 119.

93 Sampson, Morenoff, and Earls, “Beyond Social Capital,” 633-660; Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls, 1-11.

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based rents went down, which consecutively decreased the financial resources of the CHA. As a result, the CHA had a smaller budget to respond to the problems in the projects. This vicious cycle made the high-rise projects ungovernable. The social disorder, coupled with the unforgivable layout of the high-rise buildings, made social control by law enforcement virtually impossible. Communities in other projects

throughout the United States were far more successful in containing vandalism and crime in their neighborhood, even though these neighborhoods were also overwhelmed with problems like poverty, governmental neglect, and drugs.94_{The high-rise projects of the}

1950s were already doomed to fail before the first families moved in. Corbusier’s idealistic ‘Towers in a Park’, in reality became towers of never-ending misery.

Chapter 3: HOPE VI and the Discourse of Disaster

By the 1980s, the CHA public housing projects that were originally intended as slum clearance projects had ironically become slum neighborhoods themselves. The conditions that the residents had to live in were grim; many had to deal with broken elevators, leaking roofs, extreme temperatures within the building due to lack of isolation, rodent

From Paradise to Hell: Chicago's Public Housing Disaster