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 factor contributing to high costs for the CHA's designs was its decision to build a high proportion of large apartments with three, four, and five bedrooms. Substituting smaller one-- bedroom apartments for the larger ones could have lowered costs per unit. But families with many children presented the most difficult housing problems; the private market offered few affordable, standard apartments to such families. Elizabeth Wood recognized this problem in the early 1950s, as large families faced the longest waits but the greatest needs. During Kean's tenure the trend worsened; meanwhile, the CHA struggled to fill its existing one-bedroom units.44 As a result, the CHA's plans called for 79% of units at Taylor to have three or more bedrooms. By contrast, older projects like Ida B. Wells (1941) had only 11% of its units with three bedrooms, and even at Cabrini Extension (1958), a high-rise project planned by Wood, the equivalent figure was only 40%.(45) Unwilling to build smaller apartments it would struggle to rent, the CHA continued to hold out for large apartments, despite the added cost.

Following the Senate hearings and Daley's public criticism, PHA head Slusser invited the Mayor and the CHA's board to Washington to settle the controversy. The Chicago delegates entered the September 3, 1959, meeting still hoping to convince the PHA to accept higher costs so that the four-story, row-on-row design might be used. But Slusser would not budge, and only agreed that the PHA would refrain from meddling in CHA's design choices so long as the CHA would find a way to produce plans whose bids came in at less than $17,000 per unit. Faced with PHA recalcitrance, the CHA again reluctantly surrendered and now had no choice but to build highrises at six future projects, amounting to nearly 10,000 units, including 4,400 units for Taylor.46 In February 1960, the CHA presented federal officials with a slightly modified version of its earlier gallery high-rise design, a plan CHA miraculously projected to cost $16,905 per unit.47 The PHA gave its approval, bids came in under $17,000, and construction of a string of disastrous projects began in 1960.11

The high-rise design of the Robert Taylor Homes was not purely a product of modernist architecture theories, and the design cannot be blamed entirely on Mayor Daley's desire to "warehouse" the poor. Instead, Chicago's insistence on using expensive black belt slum sites and the PHA's shortsighted political concern with costs led to the use of high-rises. Daley did nothing to challenge public housing's black belt locations, nor did he provide leadership that might have opened up vacant land sites in white areas for more low-rise, row house projects. But his efforts on behalf of low-rise alternatives for Chicago's slum clearance projects have gone unnoticed. Tragically, Daley, the CHA, and the PHA all understood that low-rise rowhouses were far superior for large families with children.

Tenant Selection

When the Robert Taylor Homes opened in the fall of 1962, the CHA had little doubt that its residents would be entirely African American. The project's location in the black belt meant that few low-income whites would move in; nor did the CHA encourage them, having largely given up attempts to sustain integration at other projects in the mid-1950s.(49) But the intense concentration of poverty that characterized Taylor residents by the mid-1970s was not a planned or intended outcome. How the project slid from "lowincome housing" in the 1960s to "housing of last resort" by the late 1970s is a complex and previously under-studied story. The decline can be attributed in part to CHA's internal weaknesses, but external economic and market changes played a larger role in undermining the possibility of sustaining a viable working-class community.