Blueprint for Disaster

Blueprint for Disaster

Author: D. Bradford Hunt

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2009-08-01

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 0226360873

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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.


Decent, Safe and Sanitary Dwellings

Decent, Safe and Sanitary Dwellings

Author: James P. Hubbard

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2018-07-11

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1476633363

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In 1973, President Nixon halted new construction of public housing, claiming that the U.S. government had become "the biggest slumlord in history." Four decades earlier, in the depths of the Great Depression, strong political support for federally-subsidized low-income housing had resulted in the Housing Act of 1937. By the 1950s, growing criticism of the housing constructed by local authorities and prejudice against poor residents--particularly African Americans--fueled opposition to new projects. This book documents the lively and wide-ranging national debate over public housing from the New Deal to Nixon.