Download or read book Blueprint for Disaster written by D. Bradford Hunt and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book High Risers written by Ben Austen and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-02-13 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book High Rise Stories written by Audrey Petty and published by McSweeney's. This book was released on 2013-09-15 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Purging the Poorest written by Lawrence J. Vale and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Poorhouse written by Devereux Bowly and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2012-07-05 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book Stateway s Garden written by Jasmon Drain and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before they were torn down in 2007, the Stateway Gardens public housing projects on Chicago's South Side were known as a hot-bed of poverty, drugs, gangs, and crime. To Tracy, a shy, intelligent young boy, they are simply home. Set in the mid-1980s, this collection of linked short stories gives an intimate look at the hopes, dreams, failures and fortunes of a group of people growing up with the deck always stacked against them. -- adapted from jacket

Download or read book American Project written by Sudhir Alladi VENKATESH and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: High-rise public housing developments were signature features of the post-World War II city. A hopeful experiment in providing temporary, inexpensive housing for all Americans, the "projects" soon became synonymous with the black urban poor, with isolation and overcrowding, with drugs, gang violence, and neglect. As the wrecking ball brings down some of these concrete monoliths, Sudhir Venkatesh seeks to reexamine public housing from the inside out, and to salvage its troubled legacy.

Download or read book Making the Second Ghetto written by Arnold R. Hirsch and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1983-09-30 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book When Public Housing was Paradise written by J. S. Fuerst and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The South Side written by Natalie Y. Moore and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2016-03-22 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lyrical, intelligent, authentic and necessary look at the intersection of race and class in Chicago, a Great American City.Mayors Richard M. Daley and Rahm Emanuel have touted Chicago as a "world-class city." The skyscrapers kissing the clouds, the billion-dollar Millennium Park, Michelin-rated restaurants, pristine lake views, fabulous shopping, vibrant theater scene, downtown flower beds and stellar architecture tell one story. Yet swept under the rug is another story: the stench of segregation that permeates and compromises Chicago. Though other cities - including Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Baltimore - can fight over that mantle, it's clear that segregation defines Chicago. And unlike many other major U.S. cities, no particular race dominates; Chicago is divided equally into black, white and Latino, each group clustered in its various turfs.In this intelligent and highly important narrative, Chicago native Natalie Moore shines a light on contemporary segregation in the city's South Side; her reported essays showcase the lives of these communities through the stories of her family and the people who reside there. The South Side highlights the impact of Chicago's historic segregation - and the ongoing policies that keep the system intact.

Download or read book From Tenements to the Taylor Homes written by John F. Bauman and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-12-31 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Authored by prominent scholars, the twelve essays in this volume use the historical perspective to explore American urban housing policy as it unfolded from the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries. Focusing on the enduring quest of policy makers to restore urban community, the essays examine such topics as the war against the slums, planned suburbs for workers, the rise of government-aided and built housing during the Great Depression, the impact of post–World War II renewal policies, and the retreat from public housing in the Nixon, Carter, and Reagan years.

Download or read book New Deal Ruins written by Edward G. Goetz and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-15 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Public housing was an integral part of the New Deal, as the federal government funded public works to generate economic activity and offer material support to families made destitute by the Great Depression, and it remained a major element of urban policy in subsequent decades. As chronicled in New Deal Ruins, however, housing policy since the 1990s has turned to the demolition of public housing in favor of subsidized units in mixed-income communities and the use of tenant-based vouchers rather than direct housing subsidies. While these policies, articulated in the HOPE VI program begun in 1992, aimed to improve the social and economic conditions of urban residents, the results have been quite different. As Edward G. Goetz shows, hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced and there has been a loss of more than 250,000 permanently affordable residential units. Goetz offers a critical analysis of the nationwide effort to dismantle public housing by focusing on the impact of policy changes in three cities: Atlanta, Chicago, and New Orleans.Goetz shows how this transformation is related to pressures of gentrification and the enduring influence of race in American cities. African Americans have been disproportionately affected by this policy shift; it is the cities in which public housing is most closely identified with minorities that have been the most aggressive in removing units. Goetz convincingly refutes myths about the supposed failure of public housing. He offers an evidence-based argument for renewed investment in public housing to accompany housing choice initiatives as a model for innovative and equitable housing policy.

Download or read book Integrating the Inner City written by Robert J. Chaskin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-11-13 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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."

Download or read book There Are No Children Here written by Alex Kotlowitz and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2011-11-30 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A moving and powerful account by an acclaimed journalist that "informs the heart. [This] meticulous portrait of two boys in a Chicago housing project shows how much heroism is required to survive, let alone escape" (The New York Times). "Alex Kotlowitz joins the ranks of the important few writers on the subiect of urban poverty."—Chicago Tribune The story of two remarkable boys struggling to survive in Chicago's Henry Horner Homes, a public housing complex disfigured by crime and neglect.

Download or read book Public Housing That Worked written by Nicholas Dagen Bloom and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2014-08-04 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Third City written by Larry Bennett and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-08-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our traditional image of Chicago—as a gritty metropolis carved into ethnically defined enclaves where the game of machine politics overshadows its ends—is such a powerful shaper of the city’s identity that many of its closest observers fail to notice that a new Chicago has emerged over the past two decades. Larry Bennett here tackles some of our more commonly held ideas about the Windy City—inherited from such icons as Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, Daniel Burnham, Robert Park, Sara Paretsky, and Mike Royko—with the goal of better understanding Chicago as it is now: the third city. Bennett calls contemporary Chicago the third city to distinguish it from its two predecessors: the first city, a sprawling industrial center whose historical arc ran from the Civil War to the Great Depression; and the second city, the Rustbelt exemplar of the period from around 1950 to 1990. The third city features a dramatically revitalized urban core, a shifting population mix that includes new immigrant streams, and a growing number of middle-class professionals working in new economy sectors. It is also a city utterly transformed by the top-to-bottom reconstruction of public housing developments and the ambitious provision of public works like Millennium Park. It is, according to Bennett, a work in progress spearheaded by Richard M. Daley, a self-consciously innovative mayor whose strategy of neighborhood revitalization and urban renewal is a prototype of city governance for the twenty-first century. The Third City ultimately contends that to understand Chicago under Daley’s charge is to understand what metropolitan life across North America may well look like in the coming decades.

Download or read book Blueprint for Greening Affordable Housing written by Global Green USA and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2012-06-22 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blueprint for Green Affordable Housing is a guide for housing developers, advocates, public agency staff, and the financial community that offers specific guidance on incorporating green building strategies into the design, construction, and operation of affordable housing developments. A completely revised and expanded second edition of the groundbreaking 1999 publication, this new book focuses on topics of specific relevance to affordable housing including: how green building adds value to affordable housing the integrated design process best practices in green design for affordable housing green operations and maintenance innovative funding and finance emerging programs, partnerships, and policies Edited by national green affordable housing expert Walker Wells and featuring a foreword by Matt Petersen, president and chief executive officer of Global Green USA, the book presents 12 case studies of model developments and projects, including rental, home ownership, special needs, senior, self-help, and co-housing from around the United States. Each case study describes the unique green features of the development, discusses how they were successfully incorporated, considers the project's financing and savings associated with the green measures, and outlines lessons learned. Blueprint for Green Affordable Housing is the first book of its kind to present information regarding green building that is specifically tailored to the affordable housing development community.