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  • Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-Cleared Communities by Lawrence J. Vale
  • Jennifer Hock (bio)
Lawrence J. Vale
Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-Cleared Communities
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
xvi + 428 pages, 55 black-and-white illustrations, 8 maps, 4 charts.
ISBN: 978-022-601231-5, $91.00 HB
ISBN: 978-022-601245-2, $30.00 PB
ISBN: 978-022-601259-9, $7.00–$30.00
EB (various formats)
Kindle, $16.50

Lawrence J. Vale’s goals for Purging the Poorest are set out clearly in the book’s first pages. Much of the literature on public housing, he argues, has conceived of it as a single, failed building program that consolidated the poorest urban residents in segregated, poorly designed, ill-maintained “projects.” A broader, [End Page 106] more compelling approach, he writes, would describe public housing as a succession of distinct social experiments, encompassing clearance as well as construction and governed by policies favoring the dispersal of the poor as well as their concentration in isolated projects. Over eight decades public housing has adapted to respond to the changing ambitions—and prejudices—of urban elites and has addressed the needs of very different segments of the low-income population. One theme remains constant: the United States has always been ambivalent about its responsibility for those unable to afford decent housing in the private market. Nowhere is that ambivalence more evident than in the long history of the “twice-cleared” communities that are Vale’s focus in this book.1

Purging the Poorest documents the transformation of two urban neighborhoods: Atlanta’s Techwood Flats, which became the Techwood/Clark Howell public housing project and more recently the mixed-income Centennial Place, and Chicago’s “Little Hell,” which became the Cabrini-Green public housing project and is today a part of the gentrifying Near North Side. Their stories run parallel. In the early 1930s, both sites were impoverished but adjacent to more valuable real estate; Techwood Flats was near the Georgia Institute of Technology and Coca-Cola’s headquarters, and Little Hell was just west of Chicago’s wealthy Gold Coast. During the early days of the public housing program, both places were targeted for clearance by an interested elite of social reformers, businessmen, and political leaders intent on using federal money to build low-cost housing.

The modern housing projects constructed on both sites transformed these neighborhoods physically and socially. Hundreds of poor families were displaced, and housing officials made few provisions for their return. Instead, projects like Atlanta’s low-rise Techwood Homes (which opened as the nation’s first public housing project in 1936) and Clark Howell (opened in 1941) and Chicago’s low-rise Frances Cabrini Homes (1942) and high-rise Cabrini Extension (1957) and William Green Homes (1962), in accordance with federal priorities, were tenanted primarily by upwardly mobile working-class white families, many of whom saw their time in public housing as a stepping stone to better apartments or homeownership.

By the 1950s and 1960s, however, the public housing population was changing. Desegregation of public housing and expanded housing opportunities for whites in the suburbs transformed the racial composition of most projects. Federal reforms and pressure from civil rights leaders also opened public housing to new constituencies, including single mothers and welfare recipients. The effects of these new policies were profound; household income at Cabrini-Green, for example, dropped from approximately 70 percent of the Chicago area median in the early 1940s to only 20 percent of the area median by the end of the 1970s. Few housing authorities were prepared to offer the services these new tenant populations would need or to address the long-term effects of declining operating budgets and structural unemployment.

By the 1980s and 1990s, these public housing projects housed each city’s poorest and least advantaged, and urban elites viewed Techwood/Clark Howell and Cabrini-Green with the same fear and disdain they had reserved for Techwood Flats and Little Hell fifty years earlier. In Atlanta the promise of international attention during the 1996 Olympic Games sparked a series of proposals for the demolition...

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