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 Housing Chicago Style written by and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 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 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 High Risers written by Ben Austen and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-02-13 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joining the ranks of Evicted, The Warmth of Other Sons, and classic works of literary non-fiction by Alex Kotlowitz and J. Anthony Lukas, High-Risers braids personal narratives, city politics, and national history to tell the timely and epic story of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green, America’s most iconic public housing project. 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. 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.
Download or read book Crossing the Class and Color Lines written by Leonard S. Rubinowitz and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2002-04-15 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Thousands of low-income African-Americans, mostly women and children, began in 1976 to move out of Chicago's notorious public housing developments to its mostly white, middle-class suburbs." "They were part of the Gautreaux program, one of the largest court-ordered desegregation efforts in the country's history. Named for the Chicago activist Dorothy Gautreaux, the program formally ended in 1998, but is destined to play a vital role in national housing policy in years to come. In this book, Leonard Rubinowitz and James Rosenbaum tell the story of this unique experiment in racial, social, and economic integration, and examine the factors involved in implementing and sustaining mobility-based programs." "Today, with vouchers replacing public housing, the Gautreaux success story with its strong legacy is the most valuable record of the possibilities for poor people to enhance their life chances by relocating to places where opportunities are greater." --Book Jacket.
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 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 Creating Defensible Space written by Oscar Newman and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 1997 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The appearance of Oscar Newman's Defensible SpaceÓ in 1972 signaled the establishment of a new criminological subdiscipline that has come to be called by many Crime Prevention Through Environmental DesignÓ or CPTED. Over the years, Mr. Newman's ideas have proven to have significant merit in helping the Nation's citizens reclaim their urban neighborhoods. This casebook will assist public & private organizations with the implementation of Defensible Space theory. This monograph draws directly from Mr. Newman's experience as consulting architect. Illustrations.
Download or read book The Origins of the Dual City written by Joel Rast and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-11-14 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chicago is celebrated for its rich diversity, but, even more than most US cities, it is also plagued by segregation and extreme inequality. More than ever, Chicago is a “dual city,” a condition taken for granted by many residents. In this book, Joel Rast reveals that today’s tacit acceptance of rising urban inequality is a marked departure from the past. For much of the twentieth century, a key goal for civic leaders was the total elimination of slums and blight. Yet over time, as anti-slum efforts faltered, leaders shifted the focus of their initiatives away from low-income areas and toward the upgrading of neighborhoods with greater economic promise. As misguided as postwar public housing and urban renewal programs were, they were born of a long-standing reformist impulse aimed at improving living conditions for people of all classes and colors across the city—something that can’t be said to be a true priority for many policymakers today. The Origins of the Dual City illuminates how we normalized and became resigned to living amid stark racial and economic divides.
Download or read book Public Housing Myths written by Nicholas Dagen Bloom and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-10 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular opinion holds that public housing is a failure; so what more needs to be said about seventy-five years of dashed hopes and destructive policies? Over the past decade, however, historians and social scientists have quietly exploded the common wisdom about public housing. Public Housing Myths pulls together these fresh perspectives and unexpected findings into a single volume to provide an updated, panoramic view of public housing. With eleven chapters by prominent scholars, the collection not only covers a groundbreaking range of public housing issues transnationally but also does so in a revisionist and provocative manner. With students in mind, Public Housing Myths is organized thematically around popular preconceptions and myths about the policies surrounding big city public housing, the places themselves, and the people who call them home. The authors challenge narratives of inevitable decline, architectural determinism, and rampant criminality that have shaped earlier accounts and still dominate public perception.
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 Hidden in Plain Sight written by Rui Jorge Garcia Ramos and published by Park Publishing (WI). This book was released on 2021-08-19 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compendium on the history and development of subsidized housing in Europe of the twentieth century. Social housing has a long tradition in Europe. Since the early twentieth century, these often anonymously built and unappreciated structures have arisen all across the suburbs of Europe's major cities. In the multidisciplinary and international research project Mapping Public Housing, the Center for Studies in Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Porto's Faculty of Architecture has been tracing the architectural heritage of social housing. The findings demonstrate that, in many cases, vibrant neighborhoods and entire city districts have emerged from such social housing programs. This book takes a closer look at exemplary developments in Germany, Great Britain, Portugal, Switzerland, and Spain. The case studies cover a wide range of social and historical contexts, from the beginnings of social housing in Portugal sparked by German investment during World War I to the propaganda policies associated with subsidized housing for the working class in the 1940s, and to sustainable concepts and ideas for the future. Hidden in Plain Sight offers a wide-ranging panorama that recognizes the development of subsidized residential construction as a part of Europe's cultural history and traces the important role that state-funded housing has played in the emergence of the European welfare state. A contemporary photo essay on a 1960s social housing complex in Lisbon rounds out this volume.
Download or read book The New Chicago written by John Koval and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2006-09-15 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For generations, visitors, journalists, and social scientists alike have asserted that Chicago is the quintessentially American city. Indeed, the introduction to The New Chicago reminds us that "to know America, you must know Chicago." The contributors boldly announce the demise of the city of broad shoulders and the transformation of its physical, social, cultural, and economic institutions into a new Chicago. In this wide-ranging book, twenty scholars, journalists, and activists, relying on data from the 2000 census and many years of direct experience with the city, identify five converging forces in American urbanization which are reshaping this storied metropolis. The twenty-six essays included here analyze Chicago by way of globalization and its impact on the contemporary city; economic restructuring; the evolution of machine-style politics into managerial politics; physical transformations of the central city and its suburbs; and race relations in a multicultural era. In elaborating on the effects of these broad forces, contributors detail the role of eight significant racial, ethnic, and immigrant communities in shaping the character of the new Chicago and present ten case studies of innovative governmental, grassroots, and civic action. Multifaceted and authoritative, The New Chicago offers an important and unique portrait of an emergent and new "Windy City."
Download or read book Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City written by Wendell E. Pritchett and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-02-15 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From his role as Franklin Roosevelt’s “negro advisor” to his appointment under Lyndon Johnson as the first secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Robert Clifton Weaver was one of the most influential domestic policy makers and civil rights advocates of the twentieth century. This volume, the first biography of the first African American to hold a cabinet position in the federal government, rescues from obscurity the story of a man whose legacy continues to affect American race relations and the cities in which they largely play out. Tracing Weaver’s career through the creation, expansion, and contraction of New Deal liberalism, Wendell E. Pritchett illuminates his instrumental role in the birth of almost every urban initiative of the period, from public housing and urban renewal to affirmative action and rent control. Beyond these policy achievements, Weaver also founded racial liberalism, a new approach to race relations that propelled him through a series of high-level positions in public and private agencies working to promote racial cooperation in American cities. But Pritchett shows that despite Weaver’s efforts to make race irrelevant, white and black Americans continued to call on him to mediate between the races—a position that grew increasingly untenable as Weaver remained caught between the white power structure to which he pledged his allegiance and the African Americans whose lives he devoted his career to improving.
Download or read book Spatializing Blackness written by Rashad Shabazz and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2015-08-30 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over 277,000 African Americans migrated to Chicago between 1900 and 1940, an influx unsurpassed in any other northern city. From the start, carceral powers literally and figuratively created a prison-like environment to contain these African Americans within the so-called Black Belt on the city's South Side. A geographic study of race and gender, Spatializing Blackness casts light upon the ubiquitous--and ordinary--ways carceral power functions in places where African Americans live. Moving from the kitchenette to the prison cell, and mining forgotten facts from sources as diverse as maps and memoirs, Rashad Shabazz explores the myriad architectures of confinement, policing, surveillance, urban planning, and incarceration. In particular, he investigates how the ongoing carceral effort oriented and imbued black male bodies and gender performance from the Progressive Era to the present. The result is an essential interdisciplinary study that highlights the racialization of space, the role of containment in subordinating African Americans, the politics of mobility under conditions of alleged freedom, and the ways black men cope with--and resist--spacial containment. A timely response to the massive upswing in carceral forms within society, Spatializing Blackness examines how these mechanisms came to exist, why society aimed them against African Americans, and the consequences for black communities and black masculinity both historically and today.
