D. Bradford Hunt. Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing.

Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Diagnosis of Chicago’s public housing project (Chicago Housing Authority) by late 1980s: poor,
African-American, female-headed families, surrounded by gang violence, social disorder,
physical neglect, drug trafficking, non-functional urban infrastructure, etc. Psychological effects
on children growing up in the projects: destitution, violence, anxiety, and fear. Everything
resembled the worst of the slums that had replaced it in the 1950s. The leading question of the
book is how a promising project turned into this? Historians and critics have posed these answers:
unwelcoming architecture that stigmatized residents (monolithic high-rise buildings), location in
racially segregated ghettos (which lead to the formation of the “second ghetto”), inadequate
funding for shoddy construction and maintenance, conservative opposition that tag housing
projects as “socialist”, corrupt or incompetent managers that did not screen out “undesirable
families”, etc. Most of them, Hunt says, are implied, but not adequately explained. They have
failed to wonder when high-rise building became an option for poor housing, who determined
subsidies and why they were inadequate, racial segregation caused decline, or class segregation
did, why public housing turned from working class to the deeply impoverished, what cause
housing’s social disorder, and how public officials responded to public housing’s deterioration.

In order to answer these questions is critical to examine who made decisions and policies. It has
been commonly argued main decisions were taken at the federal level (coalition of reformers in
Congress), and then passed to local housing authorities, that interpreted the mandates according
to their context and experience, and from them power flowed to project managers that made on-
the-ground decisions. Finally, low-income tenants could join to force changes. To understand
public housing’s decline, then, requires understanding the interplay of these differences forces.

Hunt clarifies: “Policy decisions and their contexts are the central focus in this analysis; it is not a
social history of life in public housing. Others have produced richly detailed studies of public
housing communities in Chicago and other cities and demonstrated how residents fought for
reforms, carved out communities, and empowered themselves in the midst of often horrific
conditions” (p. 7). But tenants had little voice in final decisions.

For Hunt actors at the federal and local levels led public housing to its downfall in Chicago
through their decisions: large-scale slum clearance projects rather than smaller, less imposing
developments, rental policy contingent on tenant incomes and not apartment sizes,
accommodation of large families in multi-bedroom apartments, etc. Conflicts within
administrative body also complicated everything: white racism constrained site selection, but
union control also undermined maintenance, conflicts between local and federal powers, limited
policy evolution, bureaucratic knowledge not translated into reform, policy frozen since the
1950s despite the obvious failures of some strategies, etc. This pattern repeated across the
country: Newark, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit, St. Louis, New Orleans, etc. New York certainly
was the exception.
Hunt considers the context of “market failure” during the New Deal to explain when state
intervened in those sectors where private parts have failed to offer an affordable alternative.
Through the Social Security Act, the government helped those discarded by capitalism (the
worthy poor). In the case of housing, the state intervened to offer respectable housing at
affordable rents. The market failure warranted state’s intervention, but just until the limits of that
failure, so the state doesn’t turn out to be a competition for private enterprises. Limits were
redefined once and again to restrain program eligibility and project design.

Another context had to do the housing market itself. Before the WWII there was a huge demand
of affordable housing at affordable prices because of southern blacks and rural white migration.
But after WWII, thanks to three decades of economic growth and a building boom, demand for
public housing by working class decreased. Hunt analyzes both contexts to break the arbitrary
divided between “private” and “public”, and to consider the local housing market altogether. He
says: “Public housing changed from working-class housing to welfare housing by the early 1970s
because it could not match the offerings of private housing, even for African Americans facing a
discriminatory housing market” (p. 9). Working class basically didn’t look at public housing as
desirable alternative, despite the low rents.

Hunt analyzes two other contexts: a top-down, state centered strategy of slum clearance that over
emphasized environmental determinism, and the deep-seated antipathy of Chicago whites to
residential racial integration (as Arnold Hirsch expresses). Segregation caused deterioration of
housing stock, repressed attempts of African Americans to leave the ghetto, and helped to build a
second ghetto on top of the first one. Public housing was one of these strategies of racial
containment (intended to keep homogeneity of white neighborhoods). If public housing had been
built in white neighborhoods, this would have alleviated the growth of ghettos.

Hunt departs from the Hirsch’s theory of “the second ghetto”. On the one hand, he argues racially
liberal housing reformers actually tried to clear slums in order to improve urban black ghettos
(since Mayor Edward Kelly (1933-47). They proposed racially integrated neighborhoods to
relocate slum dwellers, while also proposed to build public housing in black ghettos. For Hunt
race and racism are not the only lens through which to analyze public housing history. Class also
matters. For him, public housing actually framed “their programs in class terms, with income,
family composition, and housing condition defined eligibility. When class-based policies and
market forces led to concentrations of poverty, local housing authorities lost the resources needed
to manage and maintain their properties. Removing race from the equation, then, would not have
addressed these deeper systematic problems related to class and poverty. Indeed, Chicago’s
projects that housed only whites were the first to concentrate the poor, fall into deficit, and suffer
from maintenance neglect. Race is obviously a key element of public housing’s history in
Chicago, but class-based policies are material to its downfall” (p. 12).

Theories of social disorder helped to explain how planning choices matter more than race and
class. “Social order, they asserted (sociologists from the 1960-70s), depends upon the daily
interaction of neighbors to police their shared space, and the design and planning choices that
shape that make the job harder or easier” (p. 12). The location of unprecedented proportions of
youths, he argues in chapter 6, made exertion of collective efficacy by adults, managers, and
police too complicated.

“Most historians have tended to view public housing as a good program sabotaged in its initial
phases by real estate interests, next hijacked by local politicians for racist purposes, and then
neglected by government because (p. 12) it housed the black poor. This book challenges these
views. It considers real estate interests lee powerful than assumed, suggests racial hijacking only
partly explains public housing locations, and finds neglect to be more systemic than racist in
origin. At its core, public housing, as conceived by reformers in 1937, was a blueprint for disaster
and could not have survived the postwar housing boom without fundamental changes. The need
for these changes was actually recognized early on, but they were never seriously pursued. The
crime was therefore not the effort to better house the poor but the failure by those in power to
alter course and to fix evident mistakes. Leadership at all governmental levels abandoned its
poverty-stricken residents in public housing-nowhere more than in Chicago”(p. 13).

Some thoughts from the conclusion:

In relation to works that stress public housing’s residents: “While these authors reveal the
complex coping mechanisms of residents, their works are less useful in explaining the multiple
forces that caused public housing to spiral downward. Policies developed over decades by
activists, legislators, federal administrators, and local housing authorities were critical to public
housing outcomes Tenant leaders had little influence over budgets, maintenance, and security
expenditures, and while they desperately tried to impose order on their environments, they were
rarely given the resources to do so. Moreover, a bottom-up perspective alone does not provide an
adequate picture of the sources of policy failure”(p. 289).

In answering the question what went wrong with public housing in Chicago, Hunt says:

1. A market-failure ideology and the belief that public housing shouldn’t compete with
private housing, as it was established since the 1937 Housing Act. By the 1950s, this
proved to be less effective thanks to the working class’ income growth. Federal
administrations of Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy demanded cost control when they
realized public housing couldn’t be built for less than private housing.
2. Income-based rents forged poverty concentration. Initially based on a progressive impulse
to provide aid based on need, allowed the very poor to stay, but the upwardly mobile to
leave. Changes in welfare policy, and social disorder pushed out the working class by the
late 1960s. Income-based rents also left housing authority budgets vulnerable, since the
very poor didn’t receive other support for housing expenses by the state.
3. Housing design (high-rise building) and overconcentration of youth caused social
disorder.
 4. A disconnection between federal and local authorities, expressed in the lack of check and
balance. Chicago’s mayors permitted inefficiency and incompetence, mainly because of
political expediency.
5. Although he conceals some tenants’ behaviors might have contributed to worsen the
situation of the projects: “the policies, not the tenants, caused the unsustainable
environments. Planners, housing authority commissioners and federal administrators built
large-scale, high rise projects, filled them with numerous children and few adults, then
struggled to manage the resulting chaos. The tenants did not make these decisions –
experts and political appointees did. Responsibility for Chicago’s public housing fiasco
lies with those in power who made unsound choices, failed to alter plans they knew were
flawed, and then tolerated incompetence” (p. 291).

In response to those who argue that there are some examples of successful public housing
projects (senior housing, rural housing), he insists large-scale housing by the 1990 had largely
become ghettoes of economic, social, and often racial isolation. Those specific cases do not make
public housing a “successful” program as a whole. All the contrary, large-scale urban projects
have proved to be a social failure. Why didn’t New York’s large scale high-rise housing project
fail? He cites Nicholas Bloom’s work to say that the success laid in the management policies they
implemented: aggressive police strategy to control youth and social disorder, fewer bedrooms per
room, autonomy from federal authorities, low proportions of welfare residents, screen out of
residents, it worked as a housing program rather than as a welfare agency, etc.

Alternative paths could’ve avoided the public housing’s disasters, like the late 1930’s discussions
on slum rehabilitation, spot clearance, and reinvestment. These proposals were crowded out by
the slum clearance consensus of progressives in the 1940s, in spite of its cost-effectiveness over
clearance. Some areas labeled as slums in the 1930s could’ve been rehabilitated (through housing
vouchers), etc.

Reviews:

“The book begins with an examination of the 1937 Housing Act, paying particular attention to
the specific actors and central ideological orientations (including tensions between progressive
reformers and modernist planners, the centrality of the market-failure rationale, the relative
emphasis on slum clearance versus vacant-land development, the shaping of federal policy, and a
division of labor between federal and local authorities) that would shape the nature of public
housing, and key policy debates around it, in the decades to follow. Subsequent chapters play out
the narrative of the emergence of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA); the choices surrounding
and nature of the early developments; the ongoing tensions around site selection; the early and
abandoned goals of racial integration in the face of fierce opposition; the local political jockeying
for power between the CHA, the mayor's office, and the city council; the dynamics of federal
policy choices and program management and their impact on local choices and possibilities; the
efforts to apply modernist design within strict constraints of budget, space allocations, and
density requirements; the emergence of social disorder in light of increasingly concentrated
poverty and extreme youth-to-adult ratios within the context of the "indefensible space" provided
by high-rise complex design; the response of tenants and public housing advocates to address
these problems; and, finally, the emergence of new policy orientations and contemporary efforts
to fundamentally reshape public housing in Chicago. It is a complex narrative. Clear lessons are
distilled regarding the genesis of failure (in particular, the details of policymaking and
implementation processes that contributed so centrally to it, in spite of recognized problems), and
although the implications for current efforts to address such failure or for the most fruitful
directions for future policy are less clear. Blueprint for Disaster provides a valuable and textured
analysis that will usefully contribute to central debates around public housing and poverty policy”

Robert Chaskin, Political Science Quarterly (Academy of Political Science). Fall 2010, Vol. 125
Issue 3, p 534-536. 3p.

“Modern housing planners, influenced by modernist architecture movements in 1920s Europe,

sought to build new communities on undeveloped land similar to the state-sponsored projects in
Germany and Great Britain. The compromise led to tearing down much of the city’s older poor
communities, particularly a once-vibrant African American neighborhood. The fi- nal bill
included a complex subsidy system, rent ceilings, and, in a nod to slum reformers and the private
real estate market, “equivalent elimination,” requiring clearance of one slum unit for each newly
built public housing unit. Each of these amendments would play a part in the failure of high-rise
public housing in Chicago. Ultimately, however, poor management of high-rise developments
combined with racial politics in Chicago contributed mightily to the tragedy. For example,
longtime CHA secretary Elizabeth Wood fought for integrated public housing in the 1940s and
1950s, only to be ignored and finally dismissed by public officials bowing to the racist demands
of white homeowners. Racial segregation left black Chicagoans with few housing options and
filled the public high-rises with impoverished black families. The book’s starkest portrait is of
Charles Swibel, the infamous CHA board chairman (appointed to the board in 1956 and its leader
for nineteen years) known for his “appalling stewardship” (p. 227). By 1975, one among many
studies found “numerous code violations, including exposed wiring, garbage in public areas,
pervasive rodent and vermin infestation, defective incinerators, missing banisters, and damaged
walls” (p. 220). The 1937 Housing Act placed too much faith in local control of public housing,
Hunt argues, but there is a difference between the reformers’ misguided faith and the rank racism
and corrupt management that pervaded the CHA in the 1960s and 1970s.

But in emphasizing policy, he downplays the impact of corrupt management, race politics,
deindustrialization, and a host of other mid-twentieth-century social forces. Moreover, the market
failure argument promoted by Edith Elmer Wood was, perhaps, more prescient that Hunt
believes. Wood, a housing reformer and Columbia Ph.D. in economics, contended that the private
market could not provide decent, affordable housing for all Americans. A force behind the 1937
Housing Act, she called for government construction of housing for the urban poor—a call that
remains urgent today.”
Margaret Garb, American Historical Review. Apr 2011, Vol. 116 Issue 2, p 482-483. 2p