Public housing
Fuerst, J. S.
multiple embryos are implanted to insure a pregnancy, there might be significant intensive-care-unit expenses incurred, a cost which wilI again be passed along to members of the plan. Such social...
...Rather, they speak of safe communities in which working families helped one another achieve their dreams...
...To do that we will need both time and discernment...
...The technology of cloning can further refine that product helping to market it better...
...J. S. Fuerst PUBLIC HOUSING Remembering Chicago's success hough it's a place they'd never dare go, millions of Americans must now feel intimately acquainted with Chicago's Ida B. Wells Homes, the public housing complex featured in Frederick Wiseman's recent three-and-a-half-hour documentary on PBS...
...Virtually all of the residents we interviewed--and most are now solidly middle class--consider the CHA to have been a profoundly nurturing environment...
...Reviewers lavished praise on "Public Housing," calling it a groundbreaking look at poverty in America...
...He is preparin~ an oral history of Chicago public housiny...
...And public housing did not serve only black Chicagoans...
...These are exactly the people that the early CHA served...
...Though conditions in today's CHA are shameful, Chicago's public housing wasn't always this way...
...That should come as no surprise since many are now doctors, lawyers, executives, or engineers...
...Delinquency was rare, vandalism unheard of...
...Eggs and sperm are currently available for sale (though the price of eggs has just snore than doubled to $5,000), as are custom-designed embryos...
...Nevertheless, Wood carefully screened incoming residents...
...Such social costs render private choices less private and more open to social evaluation...
...She made sure to include a healthy mix of working, albeit poor, families...
...Cabrini-Green, now a much-maligned project, was thoroughly, and successfully, integrated throughout the 1940s and '50s, as were many other CHA developments...
...They are exactly the people that a revitalized public housing program should be serving once again...
...A third argument is that as in so many other aspects of American life, the market should rule...
...Today, children who grew up in CHA projects hold annual reunions that bear more than a passing resemblance to college reunions...
...For if we market ourselves in such a manner--even to fulfill a noble wish, such as the desire to have a child--and place a quantifiable price on the transaction, we have made ourselves into objects whose price is known but whose value has been forgotten...
...But the nation's private housing industry has never met the needs of low-income Americans...
...Though it Commonweal | | April 10, 1998 may be good television, "Public Housing" is hardly original...
...It once worked remarkably well...
...Over the last several years, colleagues and I have interviewed more than a hundred former CHA residents, most of whom grew up in public housing between 1940 and 1960...
...Many described the developments as "extended families...
...in Chicago alone, more than 100,000 working families-not welfare recipients, but working families--live in substandard dwellings...
...Only after Wood was gone did the CHA devolve into a corrupt and uncaring agency, one expert at providing patronage jobs but unable to maintain the remarkable communities that Wood had built...
...Today, we scorn public housing as a breeding ground for gangs...
...Commonweal | 2 April 10, 1998...
...Thomas A. Shannon is professor of reli~ion and social ethics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts...
...Insuring that we take the time and expend the effort to think hard about these scientific developments constitutes the most critical phase of the ongoing cloning debate...
...By now, bleak portraits of life in the CHA have become almost a genre unto themselves...
...The critical question before us, therefore, is whether we can apply the developments in cloning to reproductive technology in such a way as to assure the larger good of human dignity and individuality in a moral manner...
...But once again a deeper question has been avoided...
...But these former residents form the backbone of Chicago's black middle class...
...In so doing, we risk diminishing the value of human life...
...Even now, as the United States enjoys record rates of homeownership, Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies reports that there is a critical shortage of low-income housing, and that the crisis is only growing worse...
...By looking at its neglected history, one can learn what went wrong with public housing, and how to fix it...
...They do not talk about public housing as a place where bullets capered across barren courtyards or drug deals offered the only signs of commerce...
...Wells residents stand grimly in line before a fortified brick blockhouse that turns out to be--a supermarket...
...Though there were ugly incidents at a few projects, they almost always involved people from outside the development and were clearly exceptional cases...
...Perhaps the best known of these works is Alex Kotlowitz's 1992 book, There Are No Children Here, a harrowing chronicle of the trials two brothers face while growing up in a West Side CHA project...
...Under the leadership of the CHA's visionary founding director, Elizabeth Wood, the CHA built and managed some of the best public housing in the nation...
...The nation's first comprehensive public-housing law, enacted in 1937, contained all sorts of provisions meant to placate private realtors who feared that the government would steal their middle-class clientele...
...They produced two radio documentaries, the last of which focused on the 1994 murder of five-year-old Eric Morse, who was thrown from a fourteen-story CHA high-rise by two pre-teens...
...A crack addict applies, without apparent success, to a court-ordered treatment program...
...Wood faced many of the same challenges that confront today's public-housing managers...
...In fact, Ida B. Wells was a widely admired haven for two generations of Chicagoans...
...Wiseman's new film, like his previous documentaries, bears a humble moniker--in this case, "Public Housing"--and imposes no plot or narration, giving audiences the eerie impression that they're experiencing unmediated reality...
...And though decidedly liberal, Wood made sure that her managers moved swiftly to evict any troublesome tenants...
...While these works may serve as a salutary prick to the nation's conscience, they tend to promote some unfortunate ideas about public housing...
...And the reality here is often unpleasant...
...And the only hope for salvation amidst this squalor comes from an official of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) who, with all the sincerity of a circus barker, boasts about a vague $300 million jobs program...
...Its decline did not come about through bureaucratic sclerosis, but through a concerted attack on the CHA by aldermen who feared that it would breach the city's racial boundaries...
...The 1937 law included a strict income limit that effectively excluded all but the poor from public housing...
...And soon after Kotlowitz's book came out, National Public Radio turned over a tape recorder to two boys from the Wells neighborhood...
...Usually, the audience comes away with the impression that life in public housing is--and always has been--uniquely depraved...
...Nevertheless, the controversy generated by those incidents would eventually imperil the CHA...
...Beginning in the late 1940s, the City Council began blocking CHA efforts to build new projects in white neighborhoods, and in 1954 Wood's aldermanic antagonists finally forced her from the CHA...
...In today's age of ascendant markets, many argue that the only remedy for the ills of public housing is privatization...
...In fact, under Wood, the CHA aggressively promoted racial integration...
...J.S...
...Fuerst, an emeritus professor in urban studies at Loyola University, was CHA research director until 1952...
Vol. 125 • April 1998 • No. 7
