Chicago Housing Authority Research Articles

Second chances in the second city: Public housing and prisoner reentry in Chicago

In November 2014, the Chicago Housing Authority approved a pilot program to allow a limited number of individuals with criminal records to live in their housing programs. In this article, I contend that the pilot provides an important opportunity to institutionally recognize and extend material benefits to formerly incarcerated individuals for whom housing is both especially difficult to secure and especially important to find. Drawing on Wacquant, I argue that the pilot also offers an opening for key institutions of urban governance, such as housing authorities, to acknowledge their own role in perpetuating a pervasive “carceral continuum” that disciplines the urban poor and feeds mass incarceration. However, drawing on interviews with pilot organizers and participants, I show how the pilot responds to and replicates pervasive fears of crime that link poverty and criminality in particular. As a result, its cautious experimental design relegates participants to the status of test cases and exceptions, rather than normalizing their presence in public housing. The pilot further relies on a problematic and paradoxical understanding of “return” that obscures public housing’s historical role in the carceral continuum. In all of these ways, the logics of this pilot and others like it remain limited, thus undermining their potential to disrupt such carceral continuities.

Working with Financial data as a Critical Geographer

In this article I discuss a methodological approach I refer to as “critical financial analysis,” which blends critical theory with public finance tools. As geographers and other scholars have documented, there have been profound shifts in urban governance over the last three decades (Harvey 1989; Brenner and Theodore 2005; Hackworth 2007; Whiteside 2018). The squeezing of public budgets and tax restrictions, compounded by the 2007–2009 recession, have pushed municipal governments to look for cost-saving measures, seek out creative financial resources, and engage in entrepreneurial activities (Sbragia 1996; Weber 2010; Ashton, Doussard, and Weber 2014; Beswick and Penny 2018). While a robust and growing body of work on financialization exists, the state’s role in financialization (as an initiator and innovator, not just passive facilitator) is an emerging area with fewer studies to date (Aalbers 2017; Beswick and Penny 2018). Critical financial analysis is one approach that can be used to help fill gaps in the literature in light of these shifts. Critical financial analysis operates from the premise that financial data is a “field site” through which contested spaces, practices, and power relations can be explored.I illustrate my approach and its potential using a case study of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA). The CHA example highlights the type of rich information that can be obtained by conducting detailed financial analysis. It demonstrates how empirical data combined with critical theory can be used to probe how public finance functions as a technology of power, and how particular finance logics can orient public institutions away from their social missions. Such work can help deepen our understanding of urban governance, and illuminate how macro processes intertwine with locally specific histories, political-economic conditions, and material realities.

Where the Other 1 Percent Live: An Examination of Changes in the Spatial Concentration of the Formerly Incarcerated

Traditionally, prisoner reentry has been regarded as an urban phenomenon, with most returning prisoners concentrating into a select few disadvantaged urban neighborhoods. However, metropolitan-area changes—including the demolition of public housing, the suburbanization of poverty, and desegregation—may have altered the prevailing spatial distribution of returning prisoners, thereby spreading the challenges of prisoner reintegration to new geographic domains. Accordingly, I examine the extent to which the geographic distribution of formerly incarcerated individuals in Chicago and Illinois has changed since the late 1990s, including both the causes and consequences of changes, drawing on sixteen years of prisoner release data from the Illinois Department of Corrections, combined with data from the U.S. Census, the American Community Survey, the Chicago Police Department, and the Chicago Housing Authority.

The organizational challenges of mixed-income development: privatizing public housing through cross-sector collaboration

One of the largely undocumented dimensions of public housing transformation in the United States is the multi-sector, multi-organizational collaborations whose charge is to manage the local implementation of mixed-income developments. In Chicago, private real estate developers entered into partnerships with the Chicago Housing Authority to finance, design, build, and manage the new developments. Key topics considered in this paper include the structures and processes of new organizational working relationships that have been established, how they are evolving over time, and the key operational challenges confronted in creating and sustaining them. We argue that these cross-sector collaborations within the context of the privatization of public housing generate complex organizational roles and dynamics that would benefit from far greater intentionality, clarity, and support to promote effectiveness and accountability.

Integrating the inner city: the promise and perils of mixed-income public housing transformation

For many years Chicago's looming large-scale housing projects defined the city, and their demolition and redevelopment via the Chicago Housing Authority's Plan for Transformation has been perhaps the most startling change in the city's urban landscape in the last twenty years. The Plan, which reflects a broader policy effort to remake public housing in cities across the country, seeks to deconcentrate poverty by transforming high-poverty public housing complexes into mixed-income developments and thereby integrating once-isolated public housing residents into the social and economic fabric of the city. But is the Plan an ambitious example of urban regeneration or a not-so-veiled effort at gentrification? In the most thorough examination of mixed-income public housing redevelopment to date, Robert J. Chaskin and Mark L. Joseph draw on five years of field research, in-depth interviews, and volumes of data to demonstrate that while considerable progress has been made in transforming the complexes physically, the integrationist goals of the policy have not been met. They provide a highly textured investigation into what it takes to design, finance, build, and populate a mixed-income development, and they illuminate the many challenges and limitations of the policy as a solution to urban poverty. Timely and relevant, Chaskin and Joseph's findings raise concerns about the increased privatization of housing for the poor while providing a wide range of recommendations for a better way forward.

The Right to the City

The Right to the City Jamie Kalven (bio) The symbolic launch of Chicago’s Plan for Transformation, the City’s sweeping overhaul of its public housing, took place on December 12, 1998, more than a year before it was formalized as policy and christened with its Orwellian name. On that day, amid pomp and circumstance, the city demolished four vacant public housing high-rises by imploding them. The event received massive attention. As the day approached, media coverage was akin to that for the St. Patrick’s Day Parade or the Chicago Marathon. On the eve of the implosion, the Chicago Tribune published an article that provided a schedule, a map of the “spectator area,” and a diagram showing how the buildings had been wired with explosives. The article included an interview with a demolition specialist who explained that the explosives were placed and timed so the structure would fall straight down, with each floor landing like a pancake on those below. “We do not blow buildings up,” he said. “We let gravity tear buildings down.” Whatever the technical complexities involved in the implosions, the reporter had no doubt about their meaning. They “will serve,” he wrote, “as a symbolic funeral” for the Chicago Housing Authority’s “policy of warehousing the poor in high-rises.” The Tribune editorial page underscored the point, hailing the event as “a televised tribute to the repeal of old mistakes and the laying of new foundations.” Known as the Lakefront Properties, the doomed buildings were located on the South Side at the edge of Lake Shore Drive. Each was 16 stories tall and contained 150 apartments. The plan was to replace them with a “mixed income community.” The implosion was scheduled to begin shortly after 8:00 am. The day was bright and clear; unseasonably mild for mid-December, with a brisk wind from the west. The best vantage point was a sliver of parkland along the lakefront east of the Drive directly across from the buildings. People approached this spot from the north and from the south. [End Page 16] Click for larger view View full resolution The first building to be demolished at Stateway Gardens with the downtown Chicago skyline in the background. PHOTO BY PATRICIA EVANS They came on foot, having left their cars some distance away, for there was little parking nearby. Many had cameras and camcorders. Some had children in tow or on their shoulders. Estimated to be about 1,200, the crowd was largely composed of spectators from elsewhere in the city and the suburbs, most of them white, who would never have come to this part of the South Side under normal circumstances. Mixed among them were some former residents: people for whom the buildings had been home. The dominant note of the gathering was celebratory. It was hard to place at first. A pilgrimage? A sporting event? It occurred to me later that what it most resembled was a public execution. In preparation for the implosion, agile Bobcat bulldozers had pushed down the interior walls of the high-rises. The eviscerated structures had then been wired with explosives. A big yellow banner reading “Brandenburg Demolition” was strung across the front of one of the buildings. Carefully choreographed by the City, the meaning of the spectacle was encapsulated in a simple equation: public housing high-rises = multiple urban ills ergo: demolition = progress The press was present in force, with cameras poised and at the ready to broadcast that message far and wide. A viewing stand had been erected for dignitaries. They included HUD officials, local politicians and representatives of Chicago philanthropy. In a brief ceremony, several spoke of the significance of the event. “This is the beginning of a new era,” said a HUD spokesperson. “We look forward,” declared a MacArthur Foundation executive, “to a triumphant future.” The crowd chanted a countdown—“three, two, one, zero!”—and the explosives were detonated. The noise was surprisingly loud. [End Page 17] Ten seconds passed. Three buildings gave way and collapsed, then a few seconds later the fourth. Their structural integrity was undone in an instant, yet the materials that composed them hung suspended in the air like someone mortally wounded...

Review: Marina City: Bertrand Goldberg’s Urban Vision, by Igor Marjanović and Katerina Rüedi Ray and Bertrand Goldberg: Architecture of Invention, by Zoë Ryan, ed.

Marina City: Bertrand Goldberg’s Urban Vision New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010, 176 pp., 105 b/w illus. $35, ISBN 9781568988634, by Igor Marjanovic and Katerina Ruedi Ray. Bertrand Goldberg: Architecture of Invention New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press and the Art Institute of Chicago, 2011, 192 pp., 140 color and 75 b/w illus. $60, ISBN 9780300167047, by Zoe Ryan, ed.. In 1967 a group of five buildings bearing the name Marina City opened for business on the north bank of the Chicago River. The city greeted the addition enthusiastically, and on two levels—cultural and social. The arts community recognized the pair of sixty-story towers that dominated the new complex as architecturally unprecedented in Chicago. Unlike most of the city’s tall buildings, they were cylindrical, not rectilinear. They were constructed of concrete, not steel. Forty-two stories of residences with balconies above were served by fourteen stories of parking ramps immediately below, and the edges of both were curved. The designers did not intend the resemblance, but the public could not help likening the elevations to a pair of giant corncobs and enjoying the comparison. So much for Chicago’s early, fascinated response to the vision newly materialized on the river. No less important, especially to the city’s movers and shakers, was the probable demographic impact of Marina City on the inner city. Chicago had recently witnessed a major population shift, with downtown steadily losing numbers, and economic and political clout, to the suburbs. For a variety of reasons Marina City promised a reversal of these fortunes. In 1959 William McFetridge, head of the Chicago Janitors’ Union, approached local architect Bertrand Goldberg with a request that Goldberg design a new headquarters for the union in downtown Chicago; the union would provide the financing. Conversations led to the proposal for a building that would combine commercial and residential facilities, with the understanding that housing would be made available to office workers in the downtown area, thus bringing new life to that section of the city. The result would be, in Goldberg’s words, “a 24-hour environment” (Ryan, 34). With the passage of time, the building became five buildings, consisting of apartments, an office building, retail …

Planning Note: The Chicago Housing Authority's Plan for Transformation: Assessing the First Ten Years

While many U.S. cities have rehabilitated their public housing over the last two decades, the scholarly community has rarely developed comprehensive assessments of these efforts. Research focused o...

The Influence of Gentrification on Gang Homicides in Chicago Neighborhoods, 1994 to 2005

In this study, the author examines the effects of three forms of gentrification—demographic shifts, private investment, and state intervention—on gang-motivated homicides in Chicago from 1994 to 2005 using data from the U.S. Census, the Chicago Police Department, business directories, and the Chicago Housing Authority. The findings suggest that demographic shifts have a strong negative effect on gang homicide. Private investment gentrification, measured here as the proliferation of coffee shops, has a marginally significant and negative effect on gang homicide. In contrast, state-based gentrification, operationalized as the demolition of public housing, has a positive effect on gang homicide.

Moving to Integration? The Origins of Chicago’s Gautreaux Program and the Limits of Voucher-Based Housing Mobility

This article explores the origins and implementation of Chicago’s Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program, which used federal vouchers to move poor African American families to majority-white neighborhoods in the Chicago suburbs between 1976 and 1997. The program grew out of discrimination lawsuits by public housing tenants against the Chicago Housing Authority and Department of Housing and Urban Development. The plaintiffs originally sought the construction of new suburban public housing, but changes in federal policy, including the creation of vouchers, and shifts in civil rights jurisprudence confined them to the use of privately owned, existing housing. As a result, the remedy for state-sponsored segregation sent poor black families into a historically segregated housing market that remained largely unaltered by civil rights legislation. In addition, the program’s use of tenant screening and counseling services transformed the litigation from an attempt to reorganize metropolitan housing markets into a program of uplift and racial pioneering in white neighborhoods. This article underscores the ways in which market-based solutions, and the unspoken resistance to integration they sometimes fostered, are important to understanding not only the fate of the Gautreaux program but also the obstacles to civil rights litigation and suburban integration that emerged in the 1970s and beyond.

Martin Meyerson

Martin Meyerson’s career demonstrates the range and variety of achievement that is possible in the world of planning. Beginning as a practitioner in the Chicago Housing Authority, he went on to become one of the most important planning theorists and academics of the 1950s. However, the major part of his career was devoted to institution building as a university president. At the University of California, Berkeley, during the tumultuous early 1960s, he steered the university through a great crisis but did not receive recognition. At the State University of New York, in the 1970s, he took on the task of a huge expansion, which resulted in great strain and conflict. However, his major achievement was as president of the University of Pennsylvania, which was rejuvenated academically, financially, and physically under his leadership.

From Pathways to Portals: Getting to the Root of a Public Housing Community

The Chicago Housing Authority is currently in the late stages of a controversial ten-year urban renewal initiative that will see the city’s public housing projects replaced with mixed-income accommodations. Ordered to pack up and leave not only their homes but also lifelong friends and support networks, many project residents have, quite literally, had their roots yanked from beneath their feet. In this essay I employ the iconographic uses of natural imagery present in Kerry James Marshall’s Garden Project paintings (1993-1994) and Daniel Roth’s installation Cabrini Green Forest (2004) to, first, explore the “rooted” attachment of public housing dwellers to their living environment and, second, to consider the desire of many residents to safeguard community landmarks against the threat of demolition.

MR. SECRETARY, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL

AbstractRacial segregation has been a persistent feature of the American social landscape and a longstanding contributor to racial inequality, particularly between Blacks and Whites. Affirmative action policies have been used to address the systemic discrimination and attendant socioeconomic consequences to which African Americans have been subjected. Yet affirmative action has not been widely used in all domains in which segregation and systemic discrimination occurred. Although such policies have been adopted in the domains of employment and postsecondary education, few federal affirmative action programs have been used in housing. This is surprising given high levels of segregation across the metropolitan United States, as well as the stated integrative objectives of the U.S. Congress when it passed theFair Housing Act of1968. To understand this puzzle, we use the Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program, a housing mobility effort of the Federal government and the Chicago Housing Authority that used explicit racial criteria, as a surrogate for affirmative action in housing more broadly. We conduct a comparative analysis of Gautreaux and affirmative action in college admissions using insights from applied political philosophy and sociology. By confronting Gautreaux with a more traditional affirmative action program, we are able to identify and compare the judicial, moral, and instrumental justifications for each, enabling us to draw conclusions about whether and how affirmative action can justifiably be used on a large scale to reduce neighborhood segregation, the possible forms it could take, and the difficulties it would face. We close with a discussion of the recent shift toward integration taken by the Department of Housing and Urban Development under the Obama administration, its relationship to affirmative action, and its implications for declines in residential segregation in the United States.

Is subsidized housing in sustainable neighborhoods? Evidence from Chicago

This article explores the connection between subsidized housing and sustainable urban form. Given the general disconnect between new market-rate housing in sustainable, walkable neighborhoods and affordable housing opportunities, we expect affordable housing to be located in less sustainable locations in terms of proximity to amenities, walkability, street connectivity, density, and diversity of urban form. A rich set of parcel and planning data for the city of Chicago was used to correlate sustainability indicators with the locations of both project- and tenant-based affordable housing programs. Difference-in-means tests and other descriptive statistical analysis suggest that project-based locations (with the exception of Chicago Housing Authority family units) actually score above average, especially in terms of accessibility and walkability, albeit it at the cost of concentrated poverty, racial segregation, and crime. In contrast, vouchers are located in less sustainable locations when it comes to accessibility and walkability, although they are in neighborhoods with more diversity and less poverty – and, at lower voucher concentrations, with less segregation and crime – than project units.

Functional and social neighborhood integration of leaseholders relocated into public and private housing by the Chicago Housing Authority's Plan for Transformation

Sociologists have theorized that one of the reasons why concentrated poverty has a negative effect on people living in such circumstances is because it limits social capital. We examine the extent to which different forms of social capital are utilized by leaseholders relocated during the early stages of the Chicago Housing Authority's (CHA) Plan for Transformation. We use data from a survey of CHA leaseholders who have relocated back into public housing or into the private housing market as part of the Plan for Transformation. The analyses showed that use of neighborhood amenities did not vary by housing status. Generally, the level of social interaction was less for those who moved into the private sector when compared to those who had relocated to the public sector. However, social interaction improved as tenure in the private sector increased.

A glass half empty? New evidence from the HOPE VI Panel Study

The Chicago Housing Authority is midway through its ambitious Plan for Transformation. This paper presents new evidence about how residents have fared since the transformation began. Questions remain about where they are living, the circumstances of their new housing, and how relocation has affected their overall well-being. This paper presents new evidence on resident outcomes from the HOPE VI Panel Study, a national study that includes Chicago. The findings show that those residents who received vouchers are living in better housing in dramatically safer neighborhoods; many report improved mental health; and their children are having fewer behavior problems. But there are also very real reasons for concern. Voucher holders are experiencing economic hardship that may place them at risk for housing instability and the most troubled families are at risk for being left behind in traditional public housing, little better off than they were when the Plan began.

Blueprint for disaster: the unraveling of Chicago public housing

Blueprint for Disaster traces public housing's history in Chicago from its New Deal roots through current mayor Richard M. Daley's Plan for Transformation. In the process, D. Bradford Hunt chronicles the Chicago Housing Authority's own transformation from the city's most progressive government agency to its largest slumlord. Challenging explanations that attribute the projects' decline primarily to racial discrimination and real estate interests, Hunt argues that well-intentioned but misguided policy decisions - ranging from design choices to maintenance contracts - also paved the road to failure. Moreover, administrators who fully understood the potential drawbacks did not try to halt such deeply flawed projects as Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes. The resulting combination of fiscal crisis, managerial incompetence, and social unrest plunged the CHA into a quagmire from which it is still struggling to emerge. Blueprint for Disaster, then, is an urgent reminder of the havoc poorly conceived policy can wreak on our most vulnerable citizens.

HIV Knowledge and Attitudes toward HIV Testing of South Side Chicago Housing Authority Residents

High HIV infection rates in the United States are increasingly due to heterosexual risk behaviors, with increased rates in blacks and women. A survey of HIV knowledge and attitudes about HIV testing was conducted in an inner-city public housing population that included a convenience sample of residents of South Side Chicago Housing Authority facilities. The questionnaire addressed knowledge about HIV transmission and disease, health care options, condom use, prior HIV testing, and preferred places for HIV testing and education. Five hundred residents, ages 13-50 years completed the survey, during the period from November 2002 until April 2003. Eighty-three percent of the respondents were female and 50% of those surveyed were from 18-30 years of age. Race/ethnicity was not questioned in order to improve response rate. A comparable sample conducted earlier showed that population was 99% black race. Most respondents were knowledgeable about HIV transmission risk factors, although misinformation about transmission, treatment and prevention existed. Knowledge that HIV therapy is available was high (71%), while 25% thought an HIV vaccine was available and 13% thought there was a cure for HIV. Two thirds of sexually active respondents reported condom use in the past year. Three quarters reported previous testing for HIV and 90% of those tested returned for results. Most respondents wanted to learn more about HIV risk factors, testing and treatment but preferred primary care clinics to specialized places for HIV testing. Targeted HIV education interventions in the public housing facilities or primary care clinics are warranted.

Sight for seniors: A summary of findings and challenges to providing community-based eye care to low-income seniors

Purpose The Sight for Seniors (SFS) program was developed to provide eye care and eyeglasses to low-income seniors. Methods Residents from a Chicago Housing Authority senior development participated in SFS. A community liaison promoted SFS and enrolled residents. Patients received transportation, eye care that took place at the Illinois Eye Institute, and spectacles at no out-of-pocket cost. Results Eighty-nine patients were seen. The mean age was 71.8 years (standard deviation, 7.2). Fifty-six (62.9%) patients were women, and 73 (82.0%) were black. The last eye examination was reported within a year by 16 (18.0%), and 44 reported that their last medical examination was within 1 year. All patients required and received eyeglasses. Seventy-four (83.1%) improved Snellen distance visual acuity by 1 line or more and 26 (29.2%) by 3 lines or more. Twenty (22.5%) had glaucoma, and 9 had diabetic retinopathy. Sixty-three (70.8%) reported a history of hypertension (HTN) and 33 (37.1%) type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM). HTN was controlled in 4 (15%) of those with HTN and DM and 12 (34.3%) of those with HTN but not DM. Conclusions Last reported eye examination, medical history, and examination findings support the need for eye care in this population. These findings are applicable to similar populations.

American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto

In American Project, the sociologist Sudhir Al ladi Venkatesh recounts the history of one of the nation's most infamous public housing projects, Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes, and pierces the veil of racial and class stereotypes that obscures the way such places function. Employing the somewhat unfashionable method of participant observation, Venkatesh interviewed residents, gang members, police officers, and managers of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA). A sympathetic yet objective listener, Venkatesh differentiates among the residents and their viewpoints. He shows that, despite danger and poverty, the tenants of Robert Taylor Homes were able to construct a community that for a time held together. When it opened in November 1962, Robert Taylor Homes—twentyeight sixteenstory buildings containing 4,300 units on Chicago's South Side—was considered the world's largest public housing project. The managers of the CHA at first tried to work with the tenants but were quickly overwhelmed by the task of maintaining the enormous physical plant inhabited by thousands of children. The tenant applicant screening committees of managers and tenants eventually stopped meeting, the population grew steadily poorer, and by the 1970s single mothers on welfare made up the majority of the adult residents. The young men of Robert Taylor joined gangs, which the adult residents tolerated as an understandable response to their environment. Over time the CHA and the police department largely forsook the project as unmanageable and dangerous.