> To explain the troubling effect of strangers on the streets of city gray areas, I shall first point out, for purposes of analogy, the peculiarities of another and figurative kind of street - the corridors of high-rise public housing projects, those derivatives of Radiant City. The elevators and corridors of these projects are, in a sense, streets. They are streets piled up in the sky in order to eliminate streets on the ground and permit the ground to become deserted parks like the mall at Washington Houses where the tree was stolen.
Not only are these interior parts of the building streets in the sense that they serve the comings and goings of residents, most of whom may not know each other or recognize, necessarily, who is a resident and who is not. They are streets also in the sense of being accessible to the public. They have been designed in an imitation of upper-class standards for apartment living without upper-class cash for doormen and elevator men. Anyone at all can go into these buildings, unquestioned, and use the traveling street of the elevator and the sidewalks that are the corridors. These interior streets, although completely accessible to public use, are closed to public view and thus lack the checks and inhibitions exerted by eye-policed city streets.
From "The Death and Life of Great American Cities", Chapter 2: "The uses of sidewalks: safety", Jane Jacobs
Jane Jacob's book is an essential and phenomenal read for anyone who feels unease with how cities have not provided us with more inviting living spaces --due to many reasons, politics, economics, architects, residents, etc.
Sometimes I would like to see a comparison between Council Estates in the UK and Section 8 housing in the US. as well we the estates in Eastern Europe to see if the experiences are similar or, if there are differences, why/
I feel like since people in UK pride themselves on living in a house and not an apartment building, you end up with a similar segregation like in US along social strata.
I grew up in a concrete panel building in then Czechoslovakia and since the population was mixed, it was all fine. These days, some of these buildings have turned into ghettos due to failed/racist social policies[1].
Thanks, that's quite interesting. I think Brazil tried 'singaporising' some flavelas (move people into Singapore style high rises) but many of the people who moved in did not take well to the new environment --it was too removed from what they were used to.
Also failed housing projects in the outer sections of Paris (outer arrondissements). They also developed into segregated ghettoes.
But it's interesting to see that if everyone is in the same boat --i.e. that's the only kind of housing stock there is, then people can make it work, even if it kind of looks drab and unimaginative from the outside.
One of the nastier bits about the construction of America's old public housing stock was that when they built it in those neighborhoods which were considered slums, replacing a lot of small individual properties with big state-owned properties. Huddled masses yearning to breath free? Sure.
But in this transition, they mangled a lot of the informal economy -- good old-fashioned under-the-table businesses operating out of privately-rented homes, gleefully ignoring all regulations it feels like, and the source of livelihood for many urban poor. Obviously, this was no boon to the future of the community.
Absolutely. When I worked at Stateway Gardens in the 2000s, people would try to set up little businesses in the grassy spaces and were invariably shut down quickly by the police even while drugs were being sold openly 50 yards away.
Various access control projects were undertaken throughout the life of the housing projects - signing in with an attendant, punching codes, swiping cards, etc. In every case the residents objected vigorously and the systems were all either vandalized or removed. The housing authority eventually gave up.
I unfortunately don't have a published source for this, but it's from a family member who was a social work professor in Chicago during that period.
The article mentions that many of the people that "went missing" headed out to the suburbs. If you're curious about that, read up on Markham, Illinois, one of the towns that's picked up a lot of the public housing people.
In journalism school I was assigned to cover happenings at the Markham Courthouse, which often led me out to Markham proper.
As a middle class white guy raised in a white suburban small town, the 3 months I spent there were an eye-opening experience. Most people I talked to had a shooting story or knew someone who had one. There was also little confidence in local government as many believed that Markham was run by former criminals who'd managed to win office.
At the time, there were two reporters at a newspaper called the Southtown Daily Star who covered the numerous claims of police wrongdoing and general violence in Markham. The Star's parent company, the Chicago Sun-Times, hit the skids soon after and killed the Southtown. I don't know if anyone's reporting on Markham these days.
The story was good, but I was intrigued by the format of the "article". It really catered to today's attention deficit society, in a good way. It pulled me in and I read all the way through. Normally, I would be too impatient to do so. I hope this format evolves for long-form articles, we need a change on the web.
I agree with this as I had the same experience. Somehow the use of black-and-white photography with a single colour text highlight helps to focus on the story, piece by piece. Also the placing of text in a semi-transparent magenta box right in the middle of the screen, rather than to the side as one might expect in a magazine. All works really well. I'm also a fan of the side-scrolling aspect. Somehow that has more of a linear time dimension to it than vertical scrolling.
Thanks! I'm the author of the story. The NPR Visuals team works really hard to make stuff that is substantial but that people still want to read online. Obviously we're still learning and have a long way to go, but I share your hope and we'd love your feedback on how to make it better. A goal is to figure out how to do long form using some of these techniques.
I lived in Atrium Village, the mixed income development 2 blocks from Cabrini Green, from 2008-2012. It was designed to be transition housing for people working to get out of Cabrini Green.
The high rises were empty and coming down by the time i moved in, but the low-rises were still mostly inhabited. They were just awful places. Cinder block cells.
Cabrini Green was interesting to me as an armchair urban planner because it was surrounded by affluence. The main drag dumped right into a luxury car garage. And the whole thing was about 100 feet from Groupon's headquarters. When Groupon employees would step outside on smoke breaks, they faced a view directly down into Cabrini Green. Very bizarre to have all that wealth created so near a place without any.
Chicago is my home and this was a mixed blessing for the city. When we destroyed projects we created many small pockets of "section 8". This introduced danger into otherwise nice neighborhoods. I live in wicker park and I've had people try to rob me at gun/knife twice as a result of public housing. It's an unfair burden on the residents.
I remember living in an affluent suburb (in the top 20 income wise in the country) when I first graduated. There were section 8 folks peppered throughout the condos we lived in. We got to know a number of them personally. To get all of the benefits, they were required to follow a low probability of success lifestyle, such as refusing to work and having children out of wedlock.
We knew one young woman who had an affair with an older man, got pregnant, then moved out of moms house into a hotel. She then called up the gov't and went right to the top of their list (pregnant single woman with no means of support and no skills, and in temporary housing). The next week, she was living in a nicer condo than I could afford. She had free housing, food, medical, and legal.
We visited the old neighborhood a few years after we left and there were open air drug markets.
At the end of the day, you can't address urban poverty by creating ghettos. Such areas just become the breeding ground for the next generation of urban poor--kids who have no exposure to successful behaviors and attitudes, but do have a cultivated distrust of authority and social structure. It's not an "unfair" burden on residents. It's a burden that we have to bear in order to create integrated, successful communities.
I agree that it's hard to prove that conclusion. I lived in Humboldt Park next door, right next to Section 8 buildings, and didn't have any issues related to the Section 8 folks. I think a more likely explanation is that affluent, rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods attract certain kinds of crime.
When I worked at the Chicago Tribune, I covered crime extensively and saw some distinct patterns that coincided with gentrification in Wicker Park: an increased concentration of night time crime, specifically theft and muggings, along Milwaukee avenue. Because crime is down on average, crime definitely did not go up in Wicker Park, but theft, assault, and battery did not go down as quickly as the average in the night life zones. That said, it seems very likely some former public housing residents caused trouble in some of their new neighborhoods.
Similarly, I had a petty thief from the projects once tell me that on 35th street, he saw me as either a drug buyer or a do-gooder, but either way it wouldn't make a lot of sense to mess with me. But if he saw me in Hyde Park, where I lived at the time, he would have seen me as "prey". I think it's safe to say that to some degree, affluent neighborhoods are targeted by criminals because they are affluent.
There are parallels here to mass transit. Minor theft is very high at downtown CTA stations, places with tremendous foot traffic and jostling bodies. It's one of the few crime categories that has seen some increase/very little decrease and it seems to track with the widespread use of smartphones.
Your comment also gets at some of the really tough questions of social ethics around these issues. For example: is it better to have more petty crime or to incarcerate people at unprecedented rates?
None of this stuff is easy, but the ways it is often framed -- like making unsubstantiated causal links between Section 8 and crime -- make the conversation that much harder.
I lived on Leavitt for a number of years. In that time my home was broken into and I was robbed at gun / knife point multiple times. Every time this happened the police pointed out two buildings that were public housing as the likely source. I tend to believe them as well as the CAPS officers who agreed.
I am a Detroit native so I hate the idea of ghettos but I would prefer to live around people of similar means / financial ability. Public housing introduces inorganic problems with equality and perceived equality.
When I moved into that area (while the Atrium was still standing), I was told by some neighbors to expect to get robbed, sooner or later. Given the surrounding neighborhood (Humboldt Park, and various racially-segregated and ridiculously gerrymandered neighborhoods) and the historical presence of subsidized housing (Atrium, Cabrini Green), it is not fair to attribute violence to the demolition of one building.
There seem to be a a lot of people that think I'm talking about race -- let's be clear I am not. I am talking about economics, drug problems and desperation. Regardless of race people who are desperate will take desperate measures.
I feel like this comment was taken it a very strange way. This isn't about race, it's about economics. I pay a lot to live in a nice neighborhood so I don't have to carry a gun / shoot someone for trying to rob me. I shouldn't have to worry about tax dollars being used to physically & economically harm myself and those around me.
Cluster then in a single, easily avoided neighborhood. Its one thing to ask productive people to give up their income to support the unproductive - its another to ask them to be victims of violence.
The problem with this form of hyper-libertarianism is that a large percentage of the people your are consigning to your "unproductive" ghetto are children who are not productive in or out of these neighborhoods and who had no agency in the process that got them placed there.
So you've doubled down on the hardship these children have to overcome. Even if you are ok with this from a moral perspective (which is a pretty high bar to get over in my opinion) it seems like a pretty ineffective way to limit the number of "unproductive" in your society.
From what I see, a fixed number of people will be subject to the predatory behavior of the underclass. We are collectively unwilling to fix this. I don't see a compelling reason why it matters which children are victimized this way.
Now if you want to say that none should be, I agree. Find a way to stop crime. Spreading crime around is not that way.
(FYI my thinking on this issue draws far more from neo reactionaries than libertarians.)
There is also the idea that by separating out problem elements, that in the long term you decrease overall crime.
A child in a ghetto who knows not of the potential for escape will likely stay in that ghetto. A child who is surrounded by choices, options, and multiple role models has a choice to make.
If you have evidence that exposing everyone to criminals reduces crime, I'd love to see it.
Not knowing one can leave can be handled with direct communication. For example, billboards: "get a job and you can leave this place. Any adult is here by choice."
Other billboards we can put up in the ghetto to make sure people are fully informed and that experience tells us work just as well:
- Not having sex means no babies.
- Don't do drugs.
- Stay in your local, neighborhood school to perform as equally well as your similarly-aged peers in schools located in more affluent areas.
Well, maybe that last one not so much.
Your argument strikes me as a reason people raise in objection to mass transit: the "undesirables" might come to town. I'm actually somewhat sympathetic to your position. I live in an area of my city that, on paper, has a pretty high average household income but due to history also has a decent amount of petty crime. The answer isn't to redline those people off to somewhere else. There is a huge difference between being poor and committing crime, except that the poor tend to go to jail and the wealthy tend to pay a fine with no admittance of wrongdoing. And the latter also tend to screw over more people in one pop.
The answer is to make it socially unacceptable, in all areas, to commit crime and to demonstrate that the law and society won't tolerate it.
The billboards you describe work to help people understand their choices (an issue raised in the post I responded to). The fact that poor folks continue making bad choices in spite of this is a different issue.
If you scroll up, you'll see that I agree with you about stopping crime. I oppose our current system of anarcho tyranny (to borrow an excellent term).
But that's also my point: How do you stop crime or, more accurately, how do you break the cycle of crime and poverty unless people are given an equal opportunity? My last, fake billboard illustrates the problem with your concentrate-them-all-in-one-spot proposal. We fund everything locally. Schools, transportation, parks, the works. People in nice neighborhoods have opportunities that the ghetto literally does not because the folks in those other neighborhoods won't fund them, believing them to be a waste of time.
It's easy to say "just get a job and leave the slums." It's much, much more difficult to do that, especially when there is a bifurcated society.
When I started working at public housing in the early 2000s, I came with this notion that people my age didn't have jobs or didn't work hard enough. What helping friends with their resumes taught me was folks often pursue jobs doggedly -- but because of their race, background, and education, find themselves in dead end work.
It seems to me the classic economic arguments you're making need to be turned around: In an environment where the options in the mainstream economy are unstable, low-reward work and you lack the capital to secure credit to get an education or make serious investments, wouldn't you think about joining the drug economy?
Also both the gangs and community groups were entirely capable of self-governing.
No, and I really think you're either intentionally missing the point or you're just not willing to look at the reality around us. Either way, back to our respective neighborhoods.
Spreading it out just makes everyone feel the burden. I feel bad for the genuinely disadvantaged like everyone else. I dropped out of college and worked my ass off to live in a nice neighborhood. I'd prefer to live around people with a similar drive. I would also prefer to not have my tax dollars used to move possible criminals into my neighborhood.
Is it just received wisdom that Cluster then in a single, easily avoided neighborhood [that is apparently violent] is the best way to accomplish everyone in public housing to find a job and leave?
Somewhere they can afford to pay for without assistance. Putting people without means next to those with some (albeit limited, in my case) means creates an asymmetric problem.
I remember a different history, and I don't miss those awful towers a bit.
I remember being in military uniform in the early 90's and still being harassed by the locals as I walked down Division St the 3 miles to the train I had to get to. I remember everyone I knew, black, white, well off, poor.. all of them hating being around those things.
I remember the other set further up north (that still exist, and I'm not sure if they were "renovated") just two years ago when I lived nearby, and the crime that centered around it.
I also can't provide any sort of evidence to this, but I strongly remember an idea that these were only ever intended to be stopping points - temporary housing, and the problem being them becoming "homes" at all. No "Home" in this country should resemble a prison cell as much as those did. Complete with block wardens, cages to prevent violence or suicide on porches, etc.
To that end, is it really a bad statistic when you see that 44% that weren't in the system 10 years later? The single biggest bucket if you lumped "no longer qualified", "lost contact", and "private market" would be almost 30% ten years later don't need to be in there anymore. Add in the other 35% that are in mixed rentals (a la the questionably effective Wilson Yard development), or just accepting a subsidized rental, I'd say that the bulk of the community - those who lived there as well as those who lived around there, are doing better without those terrible towers.
If this article is trying to make me feel bad that Cabrini Green was shut down, I consider the author and the individuals who put it on the site completely lacking in any credibility.
I was there when it still existed. I'm also the author of the piece.
We're not trying to make you feel bad that the projects were shut down. We are trying to convey:
* The scale of the process (the equivalent of relocating my entire hometown over the course of a decade).
* Some of what was gained and what was lost for residents
* The housing authority's demonstrated inability to meet their projections or deliver what they told residents they would.
* The story of the photographer, who responded to an act of violence by trying to understand where that violence might come from, and in the process documented a historic moment in American urban life.
Like I said, I worked there and I'm not nostalgic about it. I saw some truly awful stuff. But that doesn't mean there wasn't a huge social and personal cost to residents in dismantling that system. If that cost had been honestly reckoned with during the Plan For Transformation, some of the more egregious problems could have been avoided.
The impression I got from the article was simply a sense of wistful remembrance, not that the buildings should not have been torn down. "This was here once. Now, it is gone. This is what I remember."
To me what's baffling about stories like this is that there are so many people that are blind to the fact that this even happens. This was 50k+ people, yet there are so many that think if you "just work hard" then you won't need to be given help or better opportunities. What's supposed to happen when these opportunities are taken away?
Providing legitimate services to people is a win for everyone not just the people that are utilizing them.
Funny how this kinds of housing works perfectly in Europe at least in 90% of cases when care is taken so that percentage of poor and criminal residents do not exceed some crtical value. The buildings themselves should also be kept small and hallways short to prevent them from becoming streets.
Lots of trees, paths, playgrounds and small commerce between buildings seem to help.
"Funny how this kinds of housing works perfectly in Europe..."
Does it? What's happened in Chicago has many parallels with public housing projects in (some) European countries. There was a boom in large scale public housing developments in many European countries in the 1950s and 1960s. Many of these housing developments were large monolitic blocks. Some random examples:
Many public housing developments were not stitched into the fabric of the city, but set apart from surrounding towns or city centres. The architects who built these blocks had the best of intentions (although some also had strong ideological views that influenced their designs). But today, we recognise that this style of overscaled, monolitic block design was a mistake. In the UK, the era of large scale mass public housing was largely over by the 1970s, but their effects linger on today in our attitudes to public housing and housing development.
Despite the run-down nature of many estates, strong social ties developed among residents. When estates are marked for regeneration, those ties are often broken as people are re-housed and dispersed. What does community even mean nowadays in cities when housing is snapped up by absentee investors and buy-to-let landlords with no interest in their neighbours or the neigbourhood?
Occasionally it goes bad but I feel I left plenty of padding by claiming 90% of time it works in Europe.
This kinds of buildings don't necessarily need to be public projects. There are a lot of private investments like that.
And it works. It provides plenty of green spaces that make living pleasent while providing extraordinary privacy. You can easily live there for a decade without as much as knowing a name of any of your thousand neighbours or faces of more than 5 of them. People comming from smaller communities often value this newfound privacy and freedom to pick people to interact with.
It allows for proximity to public transportation. You are never farther than 10 minutes walk from a vehicle that can take you anywhere in the city.
It really works. You just have to design it for working people and their families that keep to themselves. Don't build too large, leave plenty of space and set up the rates so that not too many troubling people can afford that.
Two issues : living in the south of France is rather different to living in the big cities of the east coast USA, or in northern Europe. Cold, dark and wet mean that life is really different for the apartment dwellers.
Second, small changes to the implementation, minor drops in quality, alteration to the spaces create deep problems with the practice of living in these buildings. Implementing the vision of Corbusier requires genius, and genius is something that is in short supply.
In college I lived in a mixed income development in Atlanta that replaced Techwood Homes, a notorious project. It was pretty cool. The two-rent-level system seemed to work well. http://www.centennialplaceapartments.com/
Techwood Homes, the first public housing of that type in the US, was still there when I was at Ga Tech. For the most part there was little interaction between the residents there and Tech students, even though it was literally just across the street. Guys selling weed or a mugging now and then on that side of North Ave. was about the most that ever happened.
There was also one old Tech dorm building on that side of the street, separated from campus. On paper it was the least appealing dorm - old, poor facilities and a proximity to crime. In practice, many of the student who lived there did so by choice, as kind of a mild misfit/artistic community. People were always doing interesting things in their dormrooms there.
My mom and stepdad owned a mechanical engineering firm that did a lot of work in Atlanta housing projects. Mostly replacing old metal gaslines with plastic ones. Me, my brother, and one of my stepbrothers all worked for them at various points, so we all got a fair amount of experience in the Atlanta projects. My stepdad always made sure each crew had a couple guys from whatever project we were at, which was a good practical step. Otherwise we'd have been a bunch of white guys (mostly really redneck construction dudes) in all-black projects. We rarely had much trouble, beyond some petty theft of our tools, and one doofus on the crew who followed someone into a basement to "buy a cheap TV" and got robbed at shotgun point as a result.
I didn't do the job at Techwood, but my brother did, and one day there was a gun fight in the street. The crew all ran and hid in doorways and behind steps. My brother said he saw one of the teens who was shooting crouched behind a car door, and the guy looked at him and grinned like he was having a great time, then went back to shooting.
In retrospect, it's kinda crazy our mom let us work there, but we never really told her those kind of stories. Heh.
This was part of a HUD program called HOPE VI, which replaced really bad housing projects with townhouse-style, privately-managed, mixed-income housing. At least here in Boston it seems to have been very successful.
When Cabrini Green came down, I remember seeing a bunch of articles about public housing, which portrayed these high-rise projects as an outgrowth of the optimistic attitude of the time. There's a strong cognitive dissonance there, because the projects were just as much an outgrowth of the powerful segregationist attitude that also characterized the era.
I'm quite excited to see the move to what will hopefully be more integrationist attempts at public housing. I really like the idea of Section 8 (we had Section 8 buildings in Streeterville where I lived in Chicago) and would love to see it extended to wealthy suburban neighborhoods.
Those stories were largely revisionist history. At the time the large Chicago high rise public housing were built (Cabrini and the Robert Taylor Homes) it was pretty common knowledge that it was a bad idea to build large segregated high rises for this purpose. There was lots of opposition to the plans by urban planners and housing experts.
These large homes, the Chicago interstate system, and the placement of UIC were all outgrowths of the segregationist and the cynical political climate of the time, much more so than any optimistic belief in the future.
[edit] Blueprint for Disaster was a pretty good book that covered this topic.
The interstate system in many cities had those harmful effects. Certainly, down the road in St. Louis, the placement of I-44 and I-70 destroyed neighborhoods and business districts in a fashion that was both completely avoidable and motivated by racism.
"Bauhaus blunders: architecture and public housing" is also worth reading [1]. I studied modern art history for a while and I always found it fascinating how designers could create something so horrible as the "projects".
Not only are these interior parts of the building streets in the sense that they serve the comings and goings of residents, most of whom may not know each other or recognize, necessarily, who is a resident and who is not. They are streets also in the sense of being accessible to the public. They have been designed in an imitation of upper-class standards for apartment living without upper-class cash for doormen and elevator men. Anyone at all can go into these buildings, unquestioned, and use the traveling street of the elevator and the sidewalks that are the corridors. These interior streets, although completely accessible to public use, are closed to public view and thus lack the checks and inhibitions exerted by eye-policed city streets.
From "The Death and Life of Great American Cities", Chapter 2: "The uses of sidewalks: safety", Jane Jacobs