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Larry Bennett 22 Transforming Public Housing DURING THE GLORY days of Richard J. Daley’s mayoralty, his admirers characterized Chicago as “the city that works.” The expression carried a double meaning. As late as the mid 1960s Chicago’s economic might and reputation for sustaining a well-tended social fabric remained unquestioned propositions. And, more pragmatically , Chicago’s municipal government was presumed to provide basic services—garbage collection, street cleaning, and the like—of a quality that was unmatched by other American metropolises. Political scientist Ester Fuchs (1992, 200), in her analysis of fiscal politics in New York City and Chicago, Mayors and Money, offers this observationregardingpoliticalleadershipandgov ernmental structure in Chicago: “Chicago mayors . . . effectivelyremovespecialdistrictservices from citywide policy debates, politically isolating their constituencies. Political accountability is weak in this type of system, but fiscal control is enhanced because interest groups simply have less influence over the budget.” By the 1970s, Richard J. Daley’s stewardship of municipal finances was aided immeasurably by the fact of local jurisdictional fragmentation. Chicago’s public schools were overseen by an appointed Board of Education and superintendent, who managed a budget separate from the city government ’s and derived from independent taxing authority. Similar arrangements also structured the operations of the city’s mass transit system, the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), as well as its huge public housing program, administered by the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA). At the end of the Richard J. Daley era, Chicago—“the city that works”—with the possible exception of the municipal government, was empty rhetoric. The city’s public schools were racially segregated and on the brink of financial crisis. The CTA was the proprietor of a badlydecayedtransportationinfrastructureand capable of providing, at best, erratic service. But of these three independent agencies providing crucial city services, the CHA’s circumstances were the most harrowing. Extreme racial segregation was the order of the day in developments such as the Cabrini-Green, Henry Horner, and Robert Taylor Homes, and across the CHA’s properties, buildings and grounds were starved of basic maintenance expenditures. For Richard J. Daley’s successors, the CHA’s state of affairs produced a striking political paradox. Conditions at CHA developments were too inhumane to be ignored, but for any public official possessing a grain of career ambition, wading into the CHA mess looked like a shortcut to political retirement. Sincethelate1980s,theCHAhasexperienced akaleidoscopicsequenceofpolicyrealignments. In part, these have reflected the sheer scale of the policy challenge involved in bringing CHA housing back to reasonable standards of habitability . But in addition, as a new national policy consensus has emerged with regard to New Deal-era initiatives such as welfare and public housing, and as Chicago’s municipal and civic leadership has worked to recast the city’s position in the global economy, transforming the CHA has become a key element in forging a new Chicago. 270 Larry Bennett FROM PROGRESSIVE SOCIAL ENGINEERING TO HYPER-SEGREGATION TheChicagoHousingAuthoritywastheproduct of state legislation passed in response to Congressional authorization of the public housing program in 1937 (Hirsch 1983). During its first decade the CHA built residential developments in various sections of Chicago, while also taking over the management of a few complexes that had been previously built by the federal Public Works Administration (Bowly 1978, 17–54). Duringthisperiod,manyCHAapartmentswere occupied by the families of workers engaged in war-related production. The CHA was headed by Elizabeth Wood, a social progressive who supported the racial integration of the agency’s properties. At the grassroots level, this policy encountered stiff resistance—and occasionally, physical violence—from the white population of residential areas adjoining CHA developments (Hirsch 1983). By the end of the 1940s, public esteem for the CHA had dropped to the point that, when the Illinois General Assembly drafted legislation to enable local implementation of the 1949 federal urban redevelopment legislation , the CHA was bypassed as the local governmental entity in charge of this new program. Elizabeth Wood was removed as CHA executive director in 1954, and the CHA’s new leadership reached an accommodation with the Chicago City Council permitting individual aldermen to block the siting of public housing within their wards. From the mid 1950s until the mid 1960s, the CHA embarked on a mammoth building program, with nearly all of its construction in African American neighborhoods on the city’s South and West Sides. By the late 1960s, the population of the CHA’s “family developments” (multiple-bedroom apartment complexes) was almost entirely African American. In 1966, a group of African...

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