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

A further element of the CHA's site selection intentions shows another concept that, in easy hindsight, can be viewed as flawed. Elizabeth Wood and her planners argued for large-scale projects amounting to hundreds if not thousands of units and disliked smaller, scattered developments. "Planning must be bold and comprehensive - or it is useless and wasted," she wrote in 1945. "If it is not bold, the result will be a series of small projects, islands in a wilderness of slums..."15 She proposed "extensions" to existing projects as a way to "protect" these smaller developments from surrounding slums.16 For instance, on the north side, the CHA selected the initial Cabrini Homes site in 1939, and then proposed additions in 1949 and 1953. The resulting Cabrini-Green complex totaled 3,600 units. Similarly, the CHA expanded the original Jane Addams Homes (1938) into another 3,650-unit complex through four additions.17 The 4,400-units Taylor complex, while larger than these previous conglomerations, was not a gross aberration in size by CHA standards. The choice to build large-scale developments proved to be problematic, as it helped concentrate, isolate, and stigmatize public housing residents, with the distinction between the "project" and the rest of the neighborhood clear and unmistakable.

But Elizabeth Wood did not select the site for the Robert Taylor Homes. After fighting courageously but in vain in 1950 for a portion of public housing on vacant land sites in white areas, Wood faced an unfriendly City Council unwilling to approve any new sites - black or white - for more public housing. She turned her efforts toward integrating several all-white projects, but after a year of white rioting over the introduction of a handful of African Americans to the Trumbull Park Homes on the south side, the Mayor and the CHA Commissioners engineered Wood's ouster in 1954.(18) Ironically, Wood's firing cleared the way for a public housing program to resume. Her successor, former General William B. Kean, repaired relations with the City Council in late 1954 and proceeded to select new sites for an additional 6,800 units as a step towards reaching Wood's 40,000-unit goal.19

In February 1956, Kean proposed two sites in the Federal Street slum as the core of the future Taylor Homes. The sites lay between 43rd and 51st Streets, separated only by an industrial site that would be purchased by the Park District for park space, and together they could hold 2,500 units at moderate densities.20 But the two sites were soon expanded with new additions. During City Council proceedings in March, Alderman William Harvey, representing the Taylor area, added a third tract to the north along State Street, while subtracting a different CHA site proposed elsewhere in his ward that was sought by urban renewal interests.21 Harvey, a protege of Congressman William Dawson, had not been denied the aldermanic veto power over sites offered to white Council members; he had removed one site proposed by Kean in 1955 after hearing objections from middle-class blacks. Had he desired, he might have been able to reject the Taylor site, but he did not. Harvey and Chicago's other black aldermen in the mid1950s embraced public housing as a positive redevelopment of their overcrowded and dilapidated black belt neighborhoods.22 Harvey told the Chicago American, "I favor the two projects proposed. And they're just a drop in the bucket of what's needed."23