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    Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing
    Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing
    Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing
    Ebook373 pages9 hours

    Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing

    By D. Bradford Hunt

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    About this ebook

    Now considered a dysfunctional mess, Chicago’s public housing projects once had long waiting lists of would-be residents hoping to leave the slums behind. So what went wrong? To answer this complicated question, D. Bradford Hunt traces public housing’s history in Chicago from its New Deal roots through current mayor Richard M. Daley’s Plan for Transformation. In the process, he chronicles the Chicago Housing Authority’s own transformation from the city’s most progressive government agency to its largest slumlord.

                Challenging explanations that attribute the projects’ decline primarily to racial discrimination and real estate interests, Hunt argues that well-intentioned but misguided policy decisions—ranging from design choices to maintenance contracts—also paved the road to failure. Moreover, administrators who fully understood the potential drawbacks did not try to halt such deeply flawed projects as Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes. These massive high-rise complexes housed unprecedented numbers of children but relatively few adults, engendering disorder that pushed out the working class and, consequently, the rents needed to maintain the buildings. The resulting combination of fiscal crisis, managerial incompetence, and social unrest plunged the CHA into a quagmire from which it is still struggling to emerge.

               Blueprint for Disaster, then,is an urgent reminder of the havoc poorly conceived policy can wreak on our most vulnerable citizens.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateAug 1, 2009
    ISBN9780226360874
    Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing
    Author

    D. Bradford Hunt

    D. Bradford Hunt is an associate professor of social science and history at Roosevelt University in Chicago.

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    • 4/5
      Why now: self-assigned homework for work.I came into this looking for a good history of Chicago public housing in particular but was happy with how well Hunt tied the specific topic into the national story. This is not a riveting text - it is very academic and heavy on public policy and political battles. However, it was very informative and did a good job of balancing a combined chronological and thematic narrative. He does a great job in looking at all angles of the formation, large growth, and subsequent structural problems and dismantling of the Chicago Housing Authority. The public discourse around public housing in the US has generally revolved around oversimplified generalizations of what went wrong. This does a good job of going over all the complex and interwoven issues that combined to be particularly devastating to public housing in Chicago - institutionalized racism and corrupt politics that resulted in limited site selection which forced building locations into racial minority neighborhoods, piss poor management that led to huge budget shortfalls and delayed maintenance of building stock, prioritization of the lowest income applicants resulting in concentrations of poverty, high youth to adult ratios in the largest projects which strained community policing, and many more.Overall I can’t say I recommend this to any but those with a large interest in Chicago history and/or public housing in general. But if you are one of those people, it is required reading.

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