Public housing failed miserably in Chicago. Why is the city now opening a housing museum?

USA Today

30-05-2025

Public housing failed miserably in Chicago. Why is the city now opening a housing museum? The National Museum of Public Housing puts visitors in the shoes of former tenants through recreated apartments. Residents hope people see there's more to life in the projects than the news shows.
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Jen Hampton named among USA TODAY's Women of the Year for North Carolina
Following Hurricane Helene, Jen Hampton visited each of Asheville's public housing communities to ensure residents knew how to get help. She's one of USA TODAY's Women of the Year.
CHICAGO – A 7-year-old boy walking to school dies under sniper fire. A 13-year-old girl taking the elevator is assaulted when a man slips in behind her. Conditions in hallways are hardly fit for rats.
Public housing in the U.S. invokes images so horrible it begs the question why Chicago – where America's grand housing experiment arguably went more wrong than anywhere else – built the country's first museum of public housing and turned a spotlight on a past many people would prefer to forget.
Chicago's National Public Housing Museum opened in April in the last remaining building of a public housing complex, located some two miles from the city's iconic downtown.
The opening comes decades after former residents called for a museum in response to the city destroying much of Chicago's public housing in the early 2000s. America had soured on public housing then and was on a nationwide demolition derby, blowing up decrepit high rises from Philadelphia to San Francisco.
Museum leaders say the questions the exhibits ask are more urgent than ever as President Donald Trump enacts sweeping cuts to Housing and Urban Development, the federal agency that handles public housing. Budget cuts are already expected to result in the loss of 32,000 housing vouchers.
'Ultimately, the big question the museum asks is what is the responsibility of government to its people,' museum Executive Director Lisa Yun Lee told USA TODAY. And about public housing, 'what were the successes that got drowned out by its loudest failures?'
The institution is the first public housing museum of its kind, experts told USA TODAY. General admission is free. Admission to the historic apartments costs up to $25. The over $16 million museum was built with public and private funding, including $4.5 million from a city Community Development Grant.
Federal officials began building public housing in the 1930s. Over the course of a century, 10 million people lived in public developments, according to the museum. They became synonymous with urban life. TV shows including Good Times celebrated residents striving for a better life but the image that endures in series like The Wire show people caught instead in an American nightmare.
Chicago's new museum aims to broaden the debate through guided tours of three apartments: one belonging to a Jewish family in the 1930s, a Polish and an Italian family in the '50s and a Black family in the '60s.
Visitors can take a gefilte fish recipe from the Turovitz apartment or see the apartment that a Chicago pastor credits for his development into a prominent voice for peace in the city.
Other exhibitions highlight everyday objects from former public housing residents, including Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor; historic government posters that promoted public housing; and the impact of public housing residents on American music. Stars from Elvis Presley to Jimi Hendrix and Barbra Streisand all lived in public housing.
But the uncelebrated life of everyday people is at the heart of the museum. For them, the museum stands as a witness to the stories of resilience and community that filled their days.
'These housing developments were not always bad,' The Reverend Marshall Hatch told USA TODAY. Hatch is the prominent West Side pastor who grew up in the Jane Addams Homes complex, where the museum is today. 'Even in the worst of times, people had community, had love, they had friendship, they had celebration, they were thoroughly human.'
'New, different and demonstratively better': Early public housing
Public housing in America has always been for the nation's poor and working class.
The earliest projects date back to the Great Depression and the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt who declared in horror during his second inaugural address in 1937: 'I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.'
Already the progressive icon was building public housing projects around the country.
Laborers lived in slums then and federal 'planned housing' was pitched as a panacea for everything from diseases associated with unsanitary conditions to juvenile delinquency and deaths from house fires, according to federal promotional posters at the museum in Chicago.
'It was built to be new, different and demonstratively better,' said Lawrence Vale, a scholar of public housing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
But the projects weren't for everyone. Entry requirements were so strict, applicants had a better chance of getting into Harvard, according to Vale.
Early projects accepted people who could cover rent; lived in tight nuclear families instead of large extended families; and had the 'right racial composition for the neighborhood' which usually meant being White, Vale said.
Getting accepted for them was a sure step towards achieving the American dream.
'If you got a spot in public housing it was like a seal of approval of your prospects,' said Vale.
Growth of public housing
Federal housing programs became popular and soon cities and towns around the nation had started housing authorities aimed at helping more Americans enjoy a better life.
In Chicago they sprang up with names that matched their utopian visions, including Jane Addams, the social reformer known for launching a movement in the U.S. to improve the lives of the poor, and Ida B. Wells, the Black journalist born into slavery whose reporting on lynching propelled the Civil Rights Movement.
A total of nearly 1.4 million public housing units were built nationwide. Decades of demolitions have reduced the number to 877,000 units but still federal maps of public housing show towns from Glasgow, Montana, – population 3,000 – to Itta Bena, Mississippi, – population 1,700 – have agencies overseeing public housing.
They even exist in U.S. territories. According to federal data, there are over 300 public housing developments in Puerto Rico alone, the largest of any single housing authority, although New York City has more total units at 180,000 to the island's 54,000.
The vast majority of sites are low-rise complexes, according to experts. 1.6 million people live in public housing and 2.3 million households use housing vouchers, according to federal data.
'Grandest place to live,' says former resident
Public housing aims to give people a chance at the American dream, according to Crystal Palmer, a former public housing resident in Chicago who works for the city's housing agency.
Palmer, who is Black, moved into Chicago's Henry Horner Homes – a sprawling network of high-rises once located near the stadium where the Chicago Bulls play – in 1968 when she was nine years old. The high rises were destroyed by 2008.
The complex was among several built in the '50s and '60s when Chicago's Black population was booming, growing from 230,000 people in 1930 to 810,000 in 1960.
Martin Luther King Jr. blasted the slums that Black migrants were confined to before the Civil Rights era. King moved into a tenement in solidarity with residents in 1966 and told the Chicago Tribune: "We don't have wall-to-wall carpeting, but we have wall-to-wall rats and roaches."
Palmer's family then was among Black West Siders taken from slums into the city's newest housing projects. It felt like no less a seal of approval.
'It was the grandest place to live,' said Palmer, adding there was green grass, fences around the yards and flower beds as well as a ballfield and candy stand.
The buildings represented a chance to go from a house that often had problems with water and electricity and where rodents had the run of the place to instead a 'decent, safe, sanitary environment,' she said.
Pleasant conditions gave way to years when the building fell into disrepair, gangs took over and police were afraid to come or brutalized people if they did, according to Palmer. But 'The Hornets,' as they became known, still offered her a place to fall back upon and save to become the homeowner she is today.
'I know what it is to leave home when I could and come back when I really needed it,' she said. 'It's important because it gives people a leg up to do better, it gives their family an opportunity to do better.'
'Most notorious' housing project in the nation
Public housing around Chicago and the nation fell into despair in the '80s and '90s when federal funding dropped precipitously. The country went from funding the federal public housing agency with $83 billion in 1978 to just $18 billion in 1983, as measured in 2004 dollars.
Buildings became exactly what they were built to replace — slums. And the decline was perhaps most horrific of all in Chicago.
A USA TODAY cover story from Oct. 21, 1992, titled 'Life, death in 'Little Hell'' called one Chicago housing project – the Cabrini-Green Homes – 'arguably the nation's most-notorious.' The complex was located just blocks away from Chicago's Gold Coast neighborhood, one of the ritziest in the nation, but it stood a world apart.
The story was written in response to the death of 7-year-old Dantrell Davis who died by sniper fire while walking to school with his mother.
'No name invokes a grimmer image of urban blight, violence and poverty than this 70-acre, 7,000 person 'city' of isolation and dead-end despair,' the paper reported. 'Three children dead in eight months, a rubble-strewn, graffiti covered war zone just blocks from some of the richest downtown real estate in the USA.'
Davis' story created a lasting image for the complex. It came to national attention in the '70s as the setting of the popular sitcom Good Times.
Cabrini-Green became a symbol of the failures of public housing nationwide even though it represented just .5% of the 3.8 million people living at that time in public housing nationwide.
Data from the period shows public housing residents in New York City were even safer than other New Yorkers, according to USA TODAY reporting at the time.
Stepping over bodies to get to school
The failures were awful.
Francine Washington survived a decades-long horror show at a high rise on the South Side she moved into in the mid-1970s.
Washington lived through the police beat covering Stateway Gardens, the complex where she lived until they were demolished in 2006, becoming among the most dangerous in Chicago.
People overdosed in the buildings, women Washington knew were raped and wayward bullets killed children in their apartments. Some flew into Washington's apartment, hitting where her husband usually sat.
'Ping, ping,' she said, recalling the sound to a USA TODAY reporter recently. 'The bullets came through the window, if he had still been there, he would have been dead.'
In 1990, no city police beat saw more murders or sexual assaults than the 7,400 residents living at Stateway, the Chicago Tribune reported. The 20 homicides in the 16-block area were more than in Montana, Delaware, Alaska, New Hampshire, Maine, the Dakotas, Vermont, Wyoming and Idaho, according to the Tribune.
Washington was left to raise two sons under the conditions.
One son wanted to skip school one day after finding a body in the hallway outside the apartment. 'Step over that damn body and get your ass to school,' she remembers telling him.
A teacher called asking her how she could send her son to school after such a scare and Washington replied, 'he's gonna see that more than one time, he might as well get used to it.'
Community despite odds
Nearly 20 years after leaving the demolished high rise apartment building, Washington can recall terrible moments in detail but she also becomes sentimental in speaking about her neighbors.
'Even though we had all the problems and all the ills, it was still a community, everyone knew your name,' she says. 'You always had somewhere to go and somebody to visit. You weren't lonely.'
Washington moved to another public housing site after her building was destroyed in 2006 but hasn't formed close relationships with her neighbors who aren't public housing residents.
'I do miss it because it was family,' she said of her old high rise.
Faith in public housing shaken
The buildings where Hatch, Palmer and Washington spent formative years were all destroyed as officials slammed high rise buildings themselves as the reason for the desperate conditions in public housing.
They came down amid a wave of highly publicized demolitions that dated back to the razing of the 33 buildings of Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis in the mid-70s.
The complex of 11-story high rises designed by Minoru Yamasaki, the architect behind the original World Trade Center towers in New York City, was celebrated at its opening for its utopian vision. But that vision to landed on its face in less than 20 years.
Famed American composer Philip Glass memorialized the rise and fall of the complex in 'Pruitt-Igoe,' a piece of music for an art film about the empty promises of modern life.
Chicago officials called the policy of destroying high rises the 'Plan for Transformation.'
Images celebrating the destruction of public housing came to typify how Americans felt about the project even as millions of people still relied on federal programs.
'It remains vivid in the public imagination because it is a major visible public failure,' said Akira Drake Rodriguez, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania's Weitzman School of Design. 'It's meant to say we solved the problem.'
A litany of failures so bad that the sites had to be blown up left America's faith in public housing forever shaken.
Chicago pastor aims to restore public housing village
People who lived in the buildings officials destroyed or at uneventful public housing sites wish the rest of America knew there was more to the story.
Hatch, the West Side pastor who grew up in the complex where the museum sits today, remembers a crowded, joyful household. The family moved in 1960 when he was 2 years old and stayed until he was 16. He slept on the couch so his parents could have a room and his seven sisters could have the other. And for him they were some of the best years of his life.
'During my childhood it was a beautiful little village,' said Hatch, 'almost like a dream.'
The apartment was so crowded they spent their days outside with other children. Life was playing baseball in the complex courtyard where Art Deco statues of animals served as the basepath. It was about developing friendships that last a lifetime. And it was about developing pride in community that turned Hatch into a prominent voice for peace in a city often rocked by gun violence.
Decades later, Hatch is still trying to recreate the feeling he had when he lived in public housing.
The New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church pastor helps head a group that's aiming to build a similar community in West Side neighborhoods that have still never fully recovered from the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.
They hope to transform the area into a 'walkable village' with grocery stores, a health care clinic, an art center and credit union — everyday things that are out of reach for many in Chicago. The group was awarded $10 million for the project in 2023.
For Hatch, the inspiration lies in his experience of public housing and the figures the projects were named after to begin with, who offer a different vision of the nation.
'These social reformers had this incredible vision of America being a place of inclusion and being able to support these immigrant and migrant families with what I call 'family-friendly public policies,'' Hatch said. 'And once we get through this current season that is almost embarrassingly amoral, I think these social reformers will offer a sense of what a more positive and spiritual vision of America looks like.'