Since 1995, the city has been gradually demolishing the ten major public housing projects managed by the Chicago Housing Authority, which provided homes to 200,000 people at their peak. As the displaced residents are reassigned to mixed-income developments, move out on their own, or disappear from the CHA’s records, a new volume looks back at what life was like for the millions of Chicagoans who made their lives in the projects.
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High Rise Stories is the 11th collection published in the Voice of Witness series, which aims to illuminate human rights crises through oral history. Previous books focused on Sudanese refugees, women’s prison inmates, and undocumented immigrants. For this one, University of Illinois professor Audrey Petty and a team of interviewers spent two and half years talking to 26 current and former residents of Chicago public housing and then working with those interviewees to shape their transcripts into the narratives published here.
Six appendices—including a “Timeline of Housing and Civil Rights in Chicago,” a glossary, and several articles and reports on the legacy of public housing—constitute the book’s final 60 pages. Depending on the reader’s familiarity with public housing, they may serve better as a primer to be read before the narratives.
Ed. Audrey Petty (McSweeney’s Books) Petty discusses the book with WBEZ reporter Natalie Moore Tue 9/24, 7 PM Jane Addams Hull-House Museum 800 S. Halsteduic.edu/jaddams/hull
