Blueprint for Disaster
eBook - PDF

Blueprint for Disaster

The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Blueprint for Disaster

The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing

Book details
Table of contents
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About This Book

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 primarilyto 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.

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Information

Publisher
University of Chicago Press
Year
2009
ISBN
9780226360874
Topic
Scienze sociali
Subtopic
Sociologia

Table of contents

  1. CONTENTS
  2. List of Illustrations
  3. Introduction: What Went Wrong with Public Housing in Chicago?
  4. 1 The 1937 Housing Act Revisited
  5. 2 Building the Chicago Housing Authority
  6. 3 Clearing Chicago’s Slums
  7. 4 The End of Integration and the Taming of the CHA
  8. 5 Designing High- Rise Disasters
  9. 6 Planning a Social Disaster
  10. 7 The Loss of the Working Class
  11. 8 The Tenants Revolt
  12. 9 The Gautreaux Case and the Limits of Judicial Activism
  13. 10 The Long Road to Rebirth
  14. Conclusion: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing
  15. Acknowledgments
  16. A Note on Sources
  17. Notes
  18. Index