In the late 1950s and early 1960s the Chicago Housing
Project (1937) began to build large high rise buildings in order to provide
affordable housing to replace some of the city’s slums. The houses were named Robert Taylor buildings
after a civil rights activist and CHA member who resigned over the board’s
refusal to endorse a racial integration project in 1950. The project planned to build twenty-eight
sixteen story buildings that housed a total of 11, 000 residents. What started as a well- meaning project to
create safer and better housing for the city’s poor turned into nothing short
of disaster.
In reality the project packed up to 27,000 people into its
4,415 units. It took the poorest and
most crime-ridden sector of the population and stacked them on top of each
other in a hot concrete box. At one
point the unemployment rate in the Robert Taylor buildings was as high as
ninety five percent (statistic includes children). Gang violence was prominent. In a single weekend there were 300 incidents
of shootings and twenty-eight deaths in the buildings. My grandfather worked on relocation for
residents of the buildings in the 1960’s and told my mother that he encountered
several young children who had never stepped foot outside of the building in
their lifetime.
In 1993 the project was scrapped and residents began to move
out of the buildings into new low- rise mixed income communities. In March of 2007 the last of the twenty-eight
buildings was demolished.
While researching this topic I found a lot of “hard” culture
about the Robert Taylor buildings.
Setting aside demographics and statistical data I would like to hear
about the lifestyle of residents of the buildings. Although ridden with drugs, crime, and
poverty I am sure that a culture unlike any other arose from these projects
that had a huge impact on thousands of Chicagoans. Sudhir Venkatesh takes a look at individual
stories and community culture within the Robert Taylor buildings in his book American Project: Rise and Fall of the
Modern Ghetto.
Sources:
Picture (The homes)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=105x6419982
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