What went wrong with public housing in Chicago? A history of the Robert Taylor homes

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Spring 2001 by Hunt, D Bradford

Hirsch's story focuses primarily on the City Council's rejection of outlying vacant land sites sought by the CHA's progressive leadership, but he downplays the CHA's stated post-war slum clearance intentions. From its founding in 1937, the CHA's primary mission centered on clearing and rebuilding the city's slums with large-scale public housing projects. Progressive housing reformers, including CHA Executive Director Elizabeth Wood (1937-1954) and CHA Chairman Robert Taylor (1943-1950), viewed most of Chicago's 19th century neighborhoods as disorganized, disease-ridden, delinquency-- prone areas that should be replaced with new environments of modem apartment complexes in park-like settings. Further, they understood the particularly difficult plight of African Americans, who had endured decades of overt discrimination, overcrowding, and generally poor housing conditions. In response, the CHA and the city marked off large swaths of the central city, including the entire black belt and some white ethnic neighborhoods as slum replacements.9

Included on planners' maps was the eventual site of the Robert Taylor Homes, which had been known for years as the "Federal Street Slum" (after the street one block west of State).10 As early as 1940, the area's Alderman, Earl Dickerson, suggested the site to city officials for clearance and redevelopment.11 City engineers soon after marked the neighborhood as the route for a superhighway, and until 1956, the Dan Ryan Expressway was planned to run right through the neighborhood and just east of the Illinois Central Tracks.12 Housing conditions in the area were among the city's worst, with the 1950 census finding "no private bath or dilapidation" at rates ranging from 80% to 46% among the five census tracts involved. Most of the buildings in the area consisted of two- and three-flat apartment buildings, three-quarters of which had been built before 1900. Roughly a third of the units were overcrowded by 1950 standards.13 Any effort to rid Chicago of its worst housing conditions would necessarily involve a clearing of the Federal Street Slum.

The CHA revealed its post-war slum clearance intentions in its 1949 plan for a massive expansion of public housing. The plan envisioned the building of 40,000 units of public housing in just six years, a quadrupling of the size of the CHA. Because of the city's severe housing shortage, Wood divided the plan into 25,000 units on slum sites and 15,000 units on vacant land. The vacant land units, she argued, were necessary to help quickly relocate residents so the primary mission of clearance and rebuilding could proceed in a timely fashion. But the plan amounted to a vast remaking of the black belt. Even if only half of the 25,000 units intended for slum areas were placed in black neighborhoods (where the bulk of dilapidated housing conditions existed), the task involved building roughly eight more projects the size of the 1,660-unit Ida B. Wells Homes, then the CHA's largest, covering 12 city blocks. Moreover, Wood envisioned the 40,000 total units in six years as only a start; the CHA estimated the city's need "at a bare minimum" to be 87,000 units.4 Had it been unobstructed in its plans, the CHA would arguably have built more high-density public housing within the old black belt than exists today. However, political battles, bureaucratic delays, and relocation difficulties prevented the completion of the CHA's post-war plans. Even with the opening of Taylor in 1962, post-war slum site construction amounted to just 14,800 units - well below Wood's goal of 25,000 - though nearly all of these were in black neighborhoods. In all, the CHA built less than 20,000 units of family public housing apartments after the war.