American Project

The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto

Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9780674008304
  9780674003217
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674257337
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

High-rise public housing developments were signature features of the post–World War II city. A hopeful experiment in providing temporary, inexpensive housing for all Americans, the "projects" soon became synonymous with the black urban poor, with isolation and overcrowding, with drugs, gang violence, and neglect. As the wrecking ball brings down some of these concrete monoliths, Sudhir Venkatesh seeks to reexamine public housing from the inside out, and to salvage its troubled legacy. Based on nearly a decade of fieldwork in Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes, American Project is the first comprehensive story of daily life in an American public housing complex.

Venkatesh draws on his relationships with tenants, gang members, police officers, and local organizations to offer an intimate portrait of an inner-city community that journalists and the public have only viewed from a distance. Challenging the conventional notion of public housing as a failure, this startling book re-creates tenants' thirty-year effort to build a safe and secure neighborhood: their political battles for services from an indifferent city bureaucracy, their daily confrontation with entrenched poverty, their painful decisions about whether to work with or against the street gangs whose drug dealing both sustained and imperiled their lives.

American Project explores the fundamental question of what makes a community viable. In his chronicle of tenants' political and personal struggles to create a decent place to live, Venkatesh brings us to the heart of the matter.

1 | A Place to Call Home

From its inception, the Robert Taylor Homes was more than a residential complex. For the nation’s disenfranchised, the housing development would serve as a stop on the way to property ownership, Thomas Jefferson’s cradle of American democracy, as well as to an awareness of the rights that entailed. It signaled the commitment of federal, state, and local governments to addressing the needs of all citizens, black and white, rich and poor. For Chicago, Robert Taylor signified the city’s promise to remove its ghettos, and for the city’s black community, the housing development promised immediate relief from overcrowding, blight, and inadequate living conditions in the black belt. For the new tenants, Robert Taylor provided an opportunity to become citizens in another, perhaps unexpected, sense: they would have to work together, at times in an organized political capacity, to ensure that the “$70 million ghetto” remained a viable place to live.

With 4,500 apartments that were three-, four-, and five-bedroom units, the Robert Taylor Homes anticipated large households with many children and extended families. Those in need of housing were not just the poor and downtrodden of Chicago’s black community. Indeed, more than half of Robert Taylor’s initial occupants were employed families who could not find decent, affordable housing elsewhere in the city owing to racial segregation or prohibitive housing prices. Ideally, residence in public housing would give them time to find a private-market domicile. Meanwhile, they would live next door to their poorer brethren who were struggling to find jobs and to make their first step toward personal independence.

When the Robert Taylor Homes opened in 1962 and Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley welcomed the first tenant, James Weston, on March 5, faith in the power of public housing seemed justified. The construction of the housing development along South State St. had been a politically contentious process designed to invigorate an otherwise depressed slum neighborhood that was known only for its “junkyards and flophouses.”¹ The battles of the city leaders, as well as of black and white residents, over the design and placement of Robert Taylor brought to the fore the racism and patronage that characterized city politics and that had long kept blacks in a subordinate position. For a moment, anyway, the trees, gardens, and decorative flower beds interspersed amid the startling high-rises helped Chicagoans forget about this recent history. External galleries on the buildings gave thousands a remarkable view of the city’s South Side, a clear day revealing the downtown skyline. The gray and red concrete of the façades had not yet been beaten and dirtied by inclement weather or by pollution from the expressways and factories to the west. There were no haunting black oval burns around windows, the result of apartment fires. Indeed, there were only signs of life and vitality: throngs of children climbed on new playground equipment, men and women colonized parking lots and alleyways with music and festivities, and softball and basketball games filled the park areas.

The neighboring Greater Grand Boulevard ghetto was lined with abandoned and burned structures and garbage-strewn streets, but Robert Taylor’s bright high-rises and well-maintained grounds did not bear the mark of municipal neglect. The Housing Authority inundated tenants with mailings and communiqués that promised construction of parks, playgrounds, schools, free dental clinics, and recreational centers. In one letter to the incoming tenants, CHA Executive Director Alvin E. Rose personally thanked them for “making our communities the most beautiful in the whole city. I hope you are as proud as I am of your fine lawns and flower beds and the cleanliness of the buildings in which you reside.”²

Building a community in Robert Taylor did not end with the construction of the twenty-eight high-rises, the flower beds, and the laundry rooms. Having moved into the city’s densest residential neighborhood, tenants had no choice but to work cooperatively with one another and to learn to live as neighbors in close proximity. They did so from the outset, creatively developing an array of personal networks, informal groups and clubs, and formal organizations that could address the needs of households. Theirs was not a solitary task. They would work closely with their landlord, the Chicago Housing Authority, for which the maintenance of the twenty-seven-thousand-person housing development was also a formidable challenge. If the tenants’ responsibility, and that of the CHA, did not end with their move into apartments, then neither could Mayor Daley and the city simply hand over the keys and watch from afar. All of these parties found themselves at the start of a long journey to determine whether large high-rise public housing could be a viable project. If ever there was an American community that required the continuous and active involvement of its residential body, at the dawn of the 1960s it was Robert Taylor.

Building the Robert Taylor Homes

The Robert Taylor Homes were built in an effort to provide Chicago’s overcrowded black population with decent, affordable housing. It was a social engineering experiment of sizable proportion. Planners and politicians hoped that it would be a first step in turning miles of blighted South Side ghettos into equal members of the “city of neighborhoods.” The design of Robert Taylor bore witness to the reigning ideas of rational city planning in the mid-twentieth century that specified the optimal use of city landscape, one that promoted the health and welfare of all its citizens. However, the development’s placement in the heart of the ghetto signaled the presence of an equally powerful set of forces, namely, the racial ideologies of Chicago’s political leaders, which determined how (and to what degree) the city’s black population would be integrated into the larger city. As the idealism of architects and planners encountered the strength of the Chicago political machine, Chicago watched its newest community take form.

The Robert Taylor Homes were a testament to a legacy of struggle on the part of social reformers to make American urban communities livable. In the 1930s, the working class and the poor had mobilized in large numbers to protest their slum conditions, and politicians were forced to respond by developing government housing initiatives, ranging from direct construction to financial inducements for private-market developers and contractors.³ Progressive reformers also fought for improvements in housing design and neighborhood planning, crying for more expansive low-income settlements, free of pollution and filth and bathed in “air and light.” They tied the health and welfare of low-income urbanites to the “openness” of their habitats, an attribute that typically referred to residential places freed from the chaos of transit.

Similar debates on city planning were occurring farther away in Europe. The need for “openness” and the isolation of lived spaces from thoroughfares were incorporated into the architectural and urban design visions of European modernist artists. The best known of these figures was Le Corbusier, whose plans for cities shared the progressive-era belief that the built environment had a direct impact on the lifestyles of its inhabitants.⁴ Le Corbusier made vertical aggregation the centerpiece of his urban planning, its physical embodiment being the high-rise building. The high-rise was the solution to the twin prerogatives of urban planning, namely, adequate housing units and sufficient, bright open spaces for recreation and intercourse. Le Corbusier reduced the city to composites of steel and glass high-rises, vast isolated tracts of unused public spaces, and expressways that moved through the expanse to connect the physical structures with one another.

Architects and planners in Chicago imported reformist principles and European modernist aesthetics into their blueprints for public housing development. They did so through government agencies, most notably the Public Works Administration (PWA) and later the Federal Housing Authority, which devised regulations that standardized the design and construction process for public housing.⁵ These guidelines steered architects toward planning techniques in which form was to follow the functional dictates of the mass-produced, “rational” city. Government had redefined aesthetic creativity in architecture as largely a problem-solving task in which the architect must devise an appropriate use of space that would support the “inner logic” regulating how cities functioned.⁶ To offer only one example, PWA guidelines stated that housing designs should ensure sufficient “open areas” around buildings. Reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s writings, residential areas were to be “naturally separated into two parts—namely, the space required for circulation and that for uses other than traffic”; in addition, some open areas could be used, but others should be blank, nonutilized spaces of “passive recreation” that supported viewing and gazing from the building itself.⁷ Faced with such guidelines, public housing planners and architects used vertical aggregation, building up whenever possible, to leave sufficient open space. Thus was conceived the public housing “superblock,” that is, a collection of large high-rise structures surrounded by vast unused areas.⁸

The blending of European modernism, state governance, and progressive ideals could be seen in the work of architects and designers employed by the Chicago Housing Authority. Although they experimented in the 1940s with public housing designs that deviated from the monotony of mass-produced housing and from high-rises,⁹ from 1955 to 1963, CHA developments built to house African Americans were predominantly “dreary high rise blocks with their rows of uniform windows punched out of clifflike walls of brick.”¹⁰ “In fact, of the nearly 21,000 low-income family apartments built by the CHA from 1955 through 1968, all but about 2,000 were in high-rises.”¹¹ The designs for Robert Taylor exemplified this change. The earliest proposed design made creative use of the assigned two-mile-by-two-block corridor for Robert Taylor by incorporating eight-story high-rises and two-story apartment buildings. The plan set aside acreage for public spaces such as park areas and playgrounds, waterways and ponds, and winding pathways that moved through the natural landscapes. Federal officials at the Public Housing Authority rejected this variegated design because it exceeded cost guidelines, and so the CHA submitted another plan, with twenty-eight sixteen-story high-rise residential structures in uniform groups of two and three, which was eventually accepted. Physical structures covered only 7 percent of the ninety-six acres, and apart from two park areas, the remainder was nonutilizable or “dead” space, mostly of concrete and asphalt for which no use was intended or specified.

Critics charged that the use of twenty-eight high-rises was a poor design choice. The historian Devereaux Bowley argued that the CHA could still have mixed high- and low-rise structures when building Robert Taylor.¹² Catherine Bauer, a leading proponent of public housing in the New Deal era, issued the most trenchant criticism of the preference for high-rise development by the CHA and other public housing authorities across the country:

The public housing project therefore continues to be laid out as a “community unit” as large as possible and entirely divorced from its neighborhood surroundings, even though this only dramatizes the segregation of charity-case families. Standardization is emphasized rather than alleviated in project design, as a glorification of efficient production methods and an expression of the goal of decent, safe and sanitary housing for all. But the bleak symbols of productive efficiency and “minimum standards” are hardly an adequate or satisfactory expression of the values associated with American human life.¹³

The placement of Robert Taylor was an equally contentious process. The city had set aside an uninterrupted stretch of land in 1949–1950, and another in 1956 and 1957, for a large development, but it was also looking at vacant lands in predominantly white communities. Powerful white ethnic leaders on the City Council rejected the CHA’s proposed sites for lands in white neighborhoods, refusing to tolerate a large black presence in their wards. Together with the black politicians who wished to retain a black constituency in the ghetto, the Council approved only the sites in the existing ghetto.¹⁴ Addressing specifically the Robert Taylor site, the historian Brad Hunt suggests that discrimination played an important role, but that CHA officials and black aldermen were also complicit in their intention to place more than seven thousand public housing units in the existing, overcrowded ghetto:

CHA officials chose Robert Taylor’s site and a black alderman expanded it, while federal officials, eager to produce more housing, readily approved . . . Most scholars have treated these battles as defeats for the CHA, with the city council forcing bad sites on a reluctant agency. But, significantly, the CHA under progressive Elizabeth Wood had proposed or accepted sites similar in nature to Taylor’s. Even if Wood and the CHA had been allowed complete freedom to select sites, the agency would still have sought to rebuild the poor housing conditions of the black south side slums, including those along South State Street.¹⁵

Although the CHA was popularly thought to have been at the vanguard of the integration movement, its decision to erect continuous, predominantly high-rise public housing along State St. proved a clear example of the agency’s role in perpetuating metropolitan residential segregation.

The designated tract along State St. that would host the Robert Taylor Homes had been called the “largest contiguous slum in the U.S.”¹⁶ Nearly all the housing units lacked adequate water and sanitation facilities, and most had been designated “dilapidated” from the 1930s onward. Curiously, although the CHA’s plan for that corridor was inflected by the modernist belief in the transformative power of high-rise structures, its overall site usage did not obey other planning tenets. For example, it ignored precepts that large residential quarters be surrounded by lived spaces that promote interaction and daily commerce, social control, and neighborliness. Instead, Robert Taylor was situated along a truck route—with primarily industrial uses—that was set apart from civic life in the surrounding Black Metropolis. To make matters worse, Mayor Daley brazenly constructed a large expressway at taxpayer expense, effectively shielding the housing development from the predominantly white community of Bridgeport, where he lived. Thus, from the outset, Robert Taylor was on the periphery, separated from the resource-rich community of Bridgeport by an expressway, and removed from the single-family homes, commerce, and institutions of the ghetto that lay east of it.

The construction of the Robert Taylor Homes was an expedient operation. Having built the nearby McCormick Place convention center, the contractors, Newberg Construction Company, needed only to move their machinery and labor westward several blocks to the State St. corridor to begin construction. The bulk of the operation was completed in three years, eleven months ahead of schedule, at a cost of nearly $70 million. The housing development was an awesome sight. It towered over the surrounding residences, most of which were single-family homes and low-rise apartment buildings. Its concrete structures were either gray or brick red, and in the light, the steel windows shone brilliantly, while cloudy days cast a breathtaking gloom over the development. Neatly confined to a narrow stretch of land at the ghetto’s western edge, Robert Taylor was unmistakable to pedestrians as well as motorists who drove past on the newly constructed Dan Ryan Expressway that ran alongside the length of the complex.

Robert Taylor’s vastness and newness seemed to overshadow all of the earlier political debates regarding its design and site selection. Mayor Daley and the city’s black leaders heralded its November 1962 opening as a step toward the eradication of slum housing throughout Chicago. At the ribbon-cutting ceremony, political leaders and CHA directors beamed with optimism, and at successive news conferences they confidently rebuffed critics who charged that the agency was relocating black slum evictees within the ghetto. The CHA argued that Robert Taylor’s “mix” of working and poor families would help decrease the sense of social isolation of its poorer families because they would benefit from propinquity to their employed, two-parent neighbors. They spoke of plans to conduct watchful screening so that the development would always be a (class) heterogeneous place. They promised that tenants would be part of this process, with a voice in decisions that affected their buildings, and that they would eventually take the management reins in future years. In 1962, as apartments were filling up with new arrivals, the mood of the community reflected this optimism. There was little doubt that the Robert Taylor Homes would “be one of the most attractive and livable [communities] in Chicago.”¹⁷

“A Giant Black Playground”

A variety of families moved into the new apartments of the Robert Taylor Homes. There were single women, but more common were two-parent households with children, and in some cases three and four generations of kin. What the CHA defined as a “normal” household—one consisting of two parents and at least one child—represented two-thirds of the 4,500 apartments in the early years.¹⁸ Almost one-half of households received some form of public housing assistance, but nearly a third of these consisted of two parents (both unemployed). These families, however, were generally larger than their counterparts in Chicago: “The average family at Taylor Homes consists of 6.3 persons, including 4.3 minors. Compare this with the average of 1.2 minors for the city of Chicago.”¹⁹

The newness of the housing development stood in marked contrast to the squalor of the surrounding Greater Grand Boulevard community in the city’s South Side. Despite the flight of middle- and upper-class blacks,²⁰ the residential density in the larger South Side ghetto was twice as high as in the rest of the city, its overcrowding three times as great, and the housing conditions of the past four decades had not improved.²¹ By comparison, each apartment in Robert Taylor was furnished with its own cooking and bathroom facilities, amenities residents did not take lightly given that “conversions” and “...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 A Place to Call Home
• 2 Doing the Hustle
• 3 “What’s It Like to Be in Hell?”
• 4 Tenants Face Off with the Gang
• 5 Street-Gang Diplomacy
• 6 The Beginning of the End of a Modern Ghetto
• Author’s Note
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index