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The largest concentration of public housing in America stands in a four-mile procession along Chicago's State Street, south of the city's central business district. Each project (five in all) grows successively more intimidating and imposing in scale, climaxing with the massive Robert Taylor Homes - 28 identical, 16-story high-rises, containing over 4,400 apartments. Named after the Chicago Housing Authority's first African American chairman, the Robert Taylor Homes opened in 1962 as the largest single public housing project in the country, housing 27,000 people when fully occupied, more than 20,000 of them children, and nearly all of them African American.1
In 1965, three years after the project's opening, the Chicago Daily News ran a six-part series describing conditions that horrified readers. Taylor residents, the series explained, faced a daily nightmare of broken elevators, erratic heat, excessive vandalism, and unsettling violence.2 By 1975, Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) budget crises, deepening maintenance woes, and escalating violence had driven out those with alternatives. That year, the CHA reported that one in eight units was vacant and 92% of Taylor's families relied upon government assistance. Taylor had become a national symbol of public housing failure. In 1996, CHA initiated plans to tear down the entire complex; as of the summer of 2000, ten of Taylor's 28 buildings had met the wrecking ball.3
What went wrong with the Robert Taylor Homes? How did a well-intentioned effort to house low-income families in a positive new environment instead produce the bleak, prison-like, demeaning warehouses for only the very poorest of black Chicagoans? Previous scholars have pointed to a formidable list of anti-public housing antagonists to explain the program's failure in most cities. Racist white local politicians interfered with site decisions, forcing segregated "second ghetto" locations.4 Real estate interests blocked quality construction and limited eligibility, ensuring public housing's second-class status.5 And modernist architects imposed untested design theories, creating dysfunctional, hideous, high-rises.6 The overriding conclusion of previous analysts is that public housing was basically a sound program that fell victim to forces beyond its control.
Recently opened archives of the Chicago Housing Authority provide new material for evaluating the policies that led to the construction of the Robert Taylor Homes, as well as the conditions that led to its ultimate failure.7 These archives point to...