High Rise Stories: Voices From Chicago Public Housing edited by Audrey Petty (review)

Violence in Chicago has become a fixture in the mass media over the past several years. Reports on gun and gang violence, protests, and riots on Chicago’s South Side, which has earned the neighborhood the nickname “Murder Capital,” are constant. High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing, the latest book from Voice of Witness, a Bay Area–based nonprofit organization that uses oral history to document global human rights issues, allows those affected the opportunity to share their firsthand experiences while providing a deeper understanding of the complexity of issues that arise from living in public housing.

This volume features twelve edited narratives from people who lived in Chicago public housing before it was demolished. The book is prefaced with three sections: a foreword, an introduction, and an executive editor’s note. The twelve narratives function as the main body and are followed by six appendices. Alex Kotlowitz, a writer and documentary filmmaker who is best known for The Interrupters, a documentary about violent crime in Chicago’s South Side, has written the foreword. He explains why public housing in Chicago is considered a crisis and posits that “[p]ublic housing had become an embarrassment to a nation that likes to think of itself as generous and compassionate” because it reminds us “of who we are—and who we aren’t” (13). His contribution frames the book, provides readers with historical context, and conveys the importance of this volume.

Audrey Petty, a native Chicagoan who is a writing professor at the University of Illinois, has compiled and edited High Rise Stories and has written the introduction, which is descriptive and evocative. Petty explains that the impetus for this book was the demolition of several housing projects and, within this context, discusses the public face and personal nature of the destruction, as amateur footage from the demolition received a significant amount of media attention. Petty was raised near a public housing project and describes how she treated this complex as the other during her youth. She also provides historical context by discussing the Great Migration, the origin of public housing in Chicago, segregation, and how such neighborhoods (and buildings) suffered from neglect. Her goal is to illustrate that “in so many critical ways, place matters in Chicago” (21). She sets up the twelve narratives and explains why this topic is politically relevant by providing anecdotes from several featured narrators.

Mimi Lok, the executive director of the Voice of Witness and the executive editor for this series, writes the final introductory section. Here she explains the book’s methodology: the featured narratives came from oral history interviews with twenty-six men and women who lived in Chicago public housing—Cabrini-Green, the Robert Taylor Homes, Rockwell Gardens, the ABLA Homes, Ogden Courts, and Stateway Gardens—for a period of their lives. There is, however, no mention of how narrators were selected nor how interviews were conducted, and Lok notes that “[w]ith every narrative, we aim for a novelistic level of detail and a birth-to-now chronologized scope,” alluding to the fact that the narratives were highly edited (25). She acknowledges that this collection is not a comprehensive history of the Chicago public housing crisis but allows that each narrative has been carefully fact-checked. Lok says that the additional fourteen interviews that did not make it into the volume are available online, although I could not find them on the Voice of Witness website.

Like other issues related to Chicago’s South Side, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) projects were made famous by national media coverage about physical violence that plagued housing complexes. Although each of the twelve featured narratives engage with experiences of physical violence, they also unpack themes of community, stability, choice, family, neglect, belonging, love, and, prominently, structural violence. For example, the first few narratives are effective in illustrating the sense of community, or lack thereof, that residents...