When Public Housing was Paradise Building Community in Chicago

Subjects:

• Political Science » Public Policy
• Sociology » Urban Studies
• Multicultural Studies » Black Studies
• History » American History -- 1946 to Present

Reviews:

• The promise and demise of public housing in Chicago is explored in this insightful book. The book's main substance comes from in-depth interviews with past and present residents of several Chicago public housing projects. The residents' recollections provide a roadmap for what makes a good housing policy....Recommended. General readers and upper-division undergraduates and above.
  —Choice May 2004
• [O]ptimistic in view as well as an easy read. One can enjoy reading it while finding out a great deal about the link between the contextual and the community levels: the way various factors on the macro-level tend to turn everything upside down in a neighbourhood and ruin the vision of many.
  —Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 2005
• [I]n the beginning, public housing was paradise. Inept management is to blame for the fall, and now it is the time for a resurrection....The problem is not the building or even the architecture, argues Fuerst, it is bad managers....The conversations in Fuerst's book remind us of the possibility of a brighter future-even in Chigago public housing.
  —Hyde Park Herald February 2004
• Fuerst is on a mission. He wants to show how public housing helped lift thousands of families out of poverty, that there is nothing inherently wrong with high-rise public housing living....If only we could peek ahead 50 yearws, to the nest oral histories. Will they also call it paradise? Only time will tell.
  —Chicago Sun Times January 2004
• Having jettisoned its social mission, public housing stands today as a bulwark for segregation and the shelter of last resort for improverished minorities. If that accounts for why the projects are coming down, Fuerst can still, at the least, help us catch a glimpse of why they went up.
  —Chicago Tribune January 2004

• Endorsement From John Hope Franklin,
  James B. Duke Professor of History Emeritus, Duke University: Fuerst lets inhabitants and former-inhabitants of public housing tell their story, and much of it is a positive story about which we do not often hear or read. This deserves telling; and I can think of no one better prepared to tell it, through personal experience and interest, than Jim Fuerst.
• Endorsement From M.W. Neumann, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Chicago Daily News, Chicago Sun-Times, and Chicago Tribune: Jim Fuerst's exploration amounts to a journey of recovery, unearthing basic truths lost, strayed, or stolen. The very good news he brings is that well-designed, well-managed low-rent housing works. Indeed, it is essential in creating, building, and sustaining community life in this country. The people in this book grew up with each other in the 'projects' and built their lives there. Their vivid first-person accounts add up to a book of revelations, a text for American democracy.
• Endorsement From Studs Terkel,
  Author & Pulitzer Prize recipient: Jim Fuerst, who was there at the moment of creation, has put together a marvelous book. It is a collage of memories of those who recall the beauty that was there and the something bleak that has been manufactured. This work is full of heroes. It should be must-reading, especially for young journalists who would seek the truth of what we patronizingly call 'the inner city.'

Table of Contents:

• Preface
• Introduction
• The Vision and its Implementers: The Staff of the CHA
• Laboratories for Leadership
• Gateway to the American Dream
• Reflections on Integration, Segregation, and Choice
• Investments in the Mind: The Importance of Education
• The Building of Character: Religion, Sports, and Music
• And the Band Played On and On...and then Off Key: Residents who Stayed in CHA
• Conclusion