Who wants the towers back?

Public housing towers along the freeway, southside of Chicago. source: demographia.com

In the 1990s, when US high-rise public housing projects were torn down, the demolitions were generally met with relief and celebration. News coverage in the 1980s and early 1990s, including The New York Times piece “What it’s like to be in hell,” about the Henry Horner Homes in Chicago, had seared the atrocious living conditions into the public consciousness.

It’s no exaggeration to say that, at the time, high-rise public housing projects were the most dangerous urban places since national crime records had been kept.

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US Housing and Urban Development’s HOPE VI program, launched in the 1990s, funded demolition and redevelopment. With help from new urbanist designers, the projects were replaced with “sensible, straightforward, sometimes even beautiful neighborhoods, the kind that used to be the basic fabric of American cities,” notes architect Dan Solomon in his book Global City Blues.

More recent backlash against HOPE VI, notably “Where have all the towers gone? The Dismantling of Public Housing in US Cities,” in the Journal of Urban Affairs, argues that the poor were evacuated to make way for gentrification. The author, University of Minnesota professor Edward Goetz, compares HOPE VI to 1950s urban renewal.

Certainly HOPE VI resulted in substantial displacement. According to the book From Despair to Hope, 72,000 residents of public housing were temporarily or permanently displaced. Only two-thirds of the demolished units were replaced under HOPE VI (instead, substantial market rate housing was built). Former residents who did not find a place in the HOPE VI neighborhoods were usually given Section 8 vouchers. 

Goetz argues that most residents ended up in poor neighborhoods with crime problems. Nevertheless, a survey of residents of the former projects found that 85 percent said their current home is equal to or better than their previous home. 

The evidence is strong that conditions have improved in the HOPE VI developments and surrounding neighborhoods for the long-term. Crime is down dramatically, housing values are way up, and education, employment, and rates of out-of-wedlock births are improved. “Net public welfare benefits over the thirty-year life of a HOPE VI project — the net aggregate wealth created for society — are estimated to be in the tens of millions of dollars” for each project, notes Margery Austin Turner of the Urban Institute. 

The notorious Chicago Projects 

Chicago removed by far the most public housing units under HOPE VI. “Chicago built some of the most sterile and dangerous public housing towers,” notes John Norquist, CEO of the Congress for the New Urbanism and former Milwaukee mayor. 

Henry Horner, Robert Taylor, Cabrini Green, Ida B. Wells,  Stateway Gardens, and other notorious Chicago projects were torn down. A recent analysis of crime in Chicago shows that the police districts that included Cabrini Green and Henry Horner Homes saw a 70 to 79 percent drop in crime. The district that had Robert Taylor Homes, Stateway Gardens, and Ida B. Wells benefited from a 40 to 49 percent drop in crime. 

There have been problems with HOPE VI in Chicago, notably long delays in the redevelopment of areas where the towers once stood — especially the State Street corridor with Taylor, Stateway Gardens, and Ida B. Wells. 

Unlike the 1950s urban renewal programs, HOPE VI demolished only publicly owned buildings, most at the end of whatever useful life they had. The public viewed the most severely distressed projects as unworthy of public financial support. Getting rid of those towers cleared the way for a great deal of revitalization — in some cases gentrification. The area around the former Cabrini Green is now one of the richest in Chicago, an outcome that would have been unimaginable two decades ago. 

“Overall I would say Hope VI has been a benefit to Chicago and its public housing population, but you could argue that in the case of Cabrini Green its greatest beneficiaries were adjacent property owners not the Cabrini tenants,” says Norquist.

Nevertheless, it would be hard to find anyone who would choose to rebuild the old Cabrini Green today. The warehousing of the poor in projects with indefensible public spaces was a historic policy mistake that cities are not likely to forget.

Robert Steuteville is editor of Better! Cities & Towns.