Cabrini-Green, Public Housing as Policy Failure

The land where Cabrini-Green stood was on Chicago's Near North Side, close enough to the Gold Coast and Lincoln Park that you could walk from the towers to some of the most expensive real estate in the Midwest in fifteen minutes. That proximity was not coincidental to the project's fate, but it was not the beginning of the story.

The Francis Cabrini Row Houses were built in nineteen forty-two, the William Green Homes between nineteen fifty-five and nineteen sixty-two. Together they eventually housed approximately fifteen thousand people, nearly all of them Black families who had been displaced by urban renewal clearance of other neighborhoods, primarily the Bronzeville corridor to the south. The city had demolished their previous neighborhoods in the name of progress and built them towers instead.

From the beginning, the complex was managed with less than what it needed to function. Elevators broke and were not repaired for months. Stairwells were not lit. Maintenance requests accumulated without response. The Chicago Housing Authority operated on a budget that made adequate maintenance structurally impossible. Gang territories organized around the buildings because the buildings were where people lived, and where people live, power structures follow. A nineteen eighty-one Chicago Tribune investigation documented that the Authority and the city government had been aware of conditions inside the towers for years and had not acted.

Demolition began in nineteen ninety-five, the last building fell in twenty eleven. The city and federal Department of Housing and Urban Development replaced the towers with a mixed-income development that researchers studying affordable housing outcomes have consistently found serves significantly fewer low-income families than the original project served, while the surrounding neighborhood's property values have risen substantially.

Fifteen thousand people lived at Cabrini-Green. Where they went when the towers came down is a question the redevelopment plans did not fully answer.