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Hunt spent six months mucking around in a warehouse at 115th and Halsted, identifying everything that was stashed there—including at least 250 linear feet of files important enough for preservation—and produced a 65-page report for which the CHA paid him $2,350. That became the starting point for his dissertation, “What Went Wrong With Public Housing in Chicago?,” which morphed into a book called Blueprint for Disaster, published last month by the University of Chicago Press.
Chicago’s public housing system is rooted in social and health concerns raised in the early 20th century, when many tenements lacked heat and running water and the city was dotted with pit latrines. A consensus for government intervention developed during the New Deal, but concrete action was stalled by World War II. When efforts resumed in earnest in the late 40s, there was a struggle between old guard reformers who wanted to clear the slums and a younger group of planners who wanted to put new public housing on larger sites at the city’s fringes. The latter idea was squelched by the City Council, Hunt says: the aldermen didn’t want blacks moving out of their historical ghettos. More than 90 percent of postwar public housing went into densely populated, tightly constrained neighborhoods that were already solidly black.
Amid all the unemployment, poverty, and broken families, the institutional racism, political corruption, and bureaucratic incompetence, Hunt believes he’s found a relatively simple answer to the question of what went wrong with public housing in Chicago: too many kids. Taking into account all the other influences, he says, that was the single most important factor. The decisions that put multibedroom apartments filled with youngsters into hard-to-access towers were the CHA’s blueprint for disaster.
Tue 10/6, 6 PM, Harold Washington Library Center, auditorium, 400 S. State, 312-747-4050, chipublib.org.
