| This dissertation asks a pointed but deceptively simple question: "What went wrong with public housing in Chicago?" Newly available archival material from the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) allows a close examination of policy decisions surrounding site selection, tenant selection, design, and management in Chicago from 1933 through 1982. Previous scholars have focused almost exclusively on external factors in explaining public housing's demise: white racism restricted sites to the ghetto, ideological opposition from real estate interests limited tenants to the very poor, and modernist theories led to flawed high-rise designs. This study adds to---and in significant ways challenges---previous external explanations by examining the complex internal implementation problems involved in developing sustainable, large-scale, low-income communities.;This dissertation argues that public housing's disastrous decline in Chicago resulted from a series of policy decisions, often made with the best of intentions, that led to the eventual mass exodus of the African American working-class from Chicago's projects between 1966 and 1974. The working-class was soon replaced by the very poor, leaving the CHA without the crucial social and fiscal resources needed to sustain the kind of "decent, safe, and sanitary" housing developments that progressives had hoped for.;Income-based rents, while theoretically desirable, generated inequities and created incentives that pushed out the upwardly mobile and drew in the very poor. First-come, first-served tenant selection added to filtering pressures that concentrated poverty. Multi-bedroom apartments for large families caused high densities of youth that contributed to social instability in project life. Federally imposed, restrictive construction cost limits resulted in high-density, high-rise designs that proved undesirable. Finally, reliance on income-based rental receipts to pay for maintenance costs made the CHA's budget vulnerable to declines in average tenant income. These largely self-imposed restraints handicapped the program's ability to sustain a working-class tenant base and a healthy community. Despite warning signs of an impending crisis, federal and local officials responded belatedly and with weak leadership, too late to stem the CHA's downward spiral in the early 1970s. |
