MODERNIST ARCHITECTURE FAILED PUBLIC HOUSING
D. Bradford Hunt
For many critics and the general public, the obvious explanation for public housing’s problems lies with its architecture. Large-scale projects designed in a stripped-down modernist style created a dreary aesthetic that stigmatized public housing residents rather than uplift them. Buildings that looked like institutional barracks symbolized society’s ambivalence, at best, toward its least fortunate members, and public housing inextricably linked architecture to social status. “Warehousing the poor” is an often-heard phrase that succinctly sums up the critique.1 Architects and politicians are blamed, in essence, for designing projects to serve as long-term storage for racial minorities rather than as functioning, wholesome communities. If only officials had gotten the architecture right and not built cheap-looking, dysfunctional projects—and especially not high-rise buildings—then public housing outcomes would have been far different. This myth, which posits that modernist architecture is to blame for public housing failure, has never actually accounted for the complex interaction between design and social outcomes.2
This critique also has a long history. In 1957, housing activist Catherine Bauer bemoaned the postwar turn to dreary high-rise public housing and the wholesale slum clearance that preceded it. Four years later, Jane Jacobs attacked the assumptions of postwar city planning and articulated a defense of neighborhood diversity, contrasting the organic interactions on the streets of her Greenwich Village neighborhood with the anonymity of public housing projects. Oscar Newman’s Defensible Space (1972) added social science heft to Jacobs’s observations by analyzing the designs of building entrances and the allocation of common space in New York projects that resulted in different rates of disorder and crime. Later scholars continued the dissection of architectural modernism as a soulless experience, while satirists like Tom Wolfe skewered it as a self-inflicted disaster abetted by institutions under the spell of avant-garde architects.3
Blaming architectural design choices, however, is too simple an explanation for public housing’s struggles in the United States.4 In every major city, privately owned projects of marginal architectural attraction still house countless numbers of people—even poor families—at relatively high population densities and without unusual difficulties. Furthermore, in New York City, as Nicholas Bloom argues, high-rise public housing continues to serve as viable housing for the poor.5 Pointing to modernist architecture, then, is not only insufficient but perhaps also misleading in any effort to understand public housing’s struggles.
The focus on architecture distracts from other more relevant policy and planning choices that more directly shaped public housing outcomes. This chapter explores only one of those choices in depth: the concentration of youth at historically unprecedented densities.6 High youth densities (measured as the ratio of youths to adults) destabilized many public housing communities, aggravated maintenance problems, decreased social order, and helped drive out working-class families. Nowhere was this more true than in Chicago, whose projects had extraordinary youth densities that contributed to dysfunction and led to the spectacular collapse of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA).
The argument here is not that youth density is all-determining in a project’s fate; nor is it that architectural design is irrelevant. As other chapters in this volume show, public housing’s decline is multicausal and the result of numerous forces and policy choices. Counterproductive rent incentives, ineffective property management, insufficient federal subsidies, and racially discriminatory site selection hamstrung projects in Chicago and around the country. But this chapter focuses on youth density because it has been neglected in the literature on public housing and because it exacerbated the crucial task of maintaining social order in a large-scale, low-income development. The youth density argument also shifts emphasis away from the aesthetics of public housing and toward an understanding of the planning parameters essential to sustain a reasonably healthy public housing community.
Chicago’s Public Housing
The literature on Chicago has centered on the egregious racism that pervaded the city’s site selection process. As early as 1955, Martin Meyerson and Edward Banfield published a detailed account of the politics of site selection, explaining how racist aldermen refused to allow the construction of projects outside of the black ghetto. In 1983, historian Arnold Hirsch elaborated on this past and articulated a “Second Ghetto” thesis that described how public action and private violence in the 1950s and 1960s created a domestic “containment policy” to prevent African Americans from residing in white neighborhoods. Public housing and urban renewal were tools that tore down the first black ghetto and built a second one—consisting of large-scale public and private projects—in its place. By the mid-1960s, Chicago’s second ghetto was complete, including a four-mile stretch of projects along State Street, with seventy-eight hundred apartments of public housing, all of it in repetitious blocks of elevator buildings that housed African Americans exclusively (Figure 2.1).7
Figure 2.1 Robert Taylor Homes, 4,400 public housing apartments stretching north along State Street toward Chicago’s downtown, 19 September 1996. Courtesy of Lawrence Okrent.
Major lawsuits challenged these racialized outcomes, though court action barely put a dent in the problem. In 1966, American Civil Liberties Union lawyers filed a class-action suit, charging the CHA and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) with racism in site selection and tenant selection practices. Known as the Gautreaux cases after lead plaintiff and tenant Dorothy Gautreaux, the tangled court rulings found the CHA guilty of discrimination and ordered it to build public housing in white areas. Little changed on the ground, however, as city officials dragged their feet; clearly, the courts proved a difficult arena in which to implement housing policy change.8
Nor could lawsuits turn around the increasingly dismal conditions in existing projects. In 1986, the Chicago Tribune ran a twelve-part series on public housing called “The Chicago Wall,” a reference not only to the physically imposing high-rise buildings along State Street but also to the “psychological barriers” created by projects that stand “as a perverse monument to decades of misdirected public policy and race-conscious political decision making.” More intimately, journalist Alex Kotlowitz profiled two young boys growing up in Chicago projects in his 1991 book There Are No Children Here, a heartrending story that drove home the human cost of lost childhoods.9 Both exposés, however, cemented the idea in the minds of Chicagoans that the buildings themselves, with their grim aesthetics, were to blame.
Momentum grew for radical change. Visits by President Bill Clinton and HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros to the city’s chaotic projects led to a belated federal takeover of the dysfunctional CHA in 1995.10 Four years later, with the housing authority back on solid managerial footing, the city began an ambitious Plan for Transformation to tear down nearly all of the CHA’s elevator buildings, disperse their residents into other (mainly poor) Chicago neighborhoods using housing vouchers, and rebuild or renovate only a portion of the public housing stock in order to avoid concentrations of poverty.11 The plan resulted in a massive displacement of roughly twenty thousand families, nearly all of them African American, most of whom ended up in other poor neighborhoods.12
Figure 2.2 New Urbanism at the mixed-income Villages at Westhaven, which replaced the former Henry Horner Extension (background), 1998. Chicago Housing Authority.
The lesson from public housing’s past, policymakers concluded, was that high-rise architecture and concentrated poverty had been the cause of its collapse. The solution, then, involved the opposite of modernism: low-rise, “new urbanist” architecture that mimicked nineteenth-century vernacular designs. Further, plans called for mixing affluent, market-rate buyers with public housing tenants in rebuilt developments as a way to limit the proportion of poor families and socially restrain them.13 In essence, the CHA’s new design and mixed-income strategies were meant to make public housing nearly invisible. “The projects,” with their ugly, hulking modernist structures, would be erased, and new “mixed-income communities” would blend in seamlessly with the urban fabric (Figure 2.2).
Designing Chicago’s High-Rises
This new strategy was a far cry from the 1950s, when the CHA built its mammoth high-rise projects in a stripped-down style. Still, even then the CHA was never enthralled with architectural modernism. But it did have two pressing needs: First, the CHA wanted to build large amounts of housing as quickly as possible to relieve postwar housing shortages and to ameliorate the dismal conditions experienced by African Americans in the city’s slums. Second, it had to build this housing with economy in mind, as federal officials—ever concerned about congressional support—worked to ensure that public housing cost less to construct than private housing (Figure 2.3).
The solution to both imperatives involved elevator buildings, following the lead of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). Taller buildings could produce more housing without sacrificing green space. Elizabeth Wood, the CHA’s progressive executive secretary, explained in 1945 that “elevator structures give us wide-open spaces, larger playgrounds, and a general effect of a park that will not be possible if the land were developed as three-story walk-ups.”14 Still, Wood was hesitant about the leap to new forms, calling them “experiments.” She encouraged efforts to “humanize” elevator buildings by using “gallery” arrangements that offered outdoor corridors as entryways to apartments. Known as “sidewalks in the air,” the gallery innovation is most clearly seen in Loomis Courts, a seven-story project singled out for praise by an architectural advisory board of the federal Public Housing Administration (PHA). Modernist plans had the added benefit of restraining costs by removing ornamentation and using space efficiently. From the perspective of public housing administrators, modernism was as much a budgetary choice as a stylistic one.15
Still, even as elevator projects were being developed, doubts about their efficacy grew in Washington and Chicago, and the concern had little to do with architectural styles. In 1950, a major policy bulletin from the PHA labeled high-rises the “least desirable” form of public housing because of “the grave and serious problems incident to the rearing of children in such [multistory] housing.” Without elaboration, the bulletin argued that the problems were “too well known to warrant any comment,” yet it cited no evidence for the claim.16 Moreover, despite its own warnings, the PHA soon issued revised rules on density and cost that made it nearly impossible to build anything but elevator buildings on land deemed “high-cost.” Such buildings would allow more units, thereby diluting fixed land costs in order to keep total development costs per unit within politically acceptable bounds. In response, housing authorities in twenty-three cities across the country began planning fifty-three thousand apartments in elevator buildings by mid-1951.17
Figure 2.3 Sidewalks in the Air at Loomis Courts, 1952. Photograph by Harry Callahan for the Chicago Housing Authority. Chicago Housing Authority.
The CHA’s Elizabeth Wood was among the first to publicly express reasoned doubts about elevator buildings and the difficulties of raising children in them. In a January 1952 Architectural Forum article, she argued:
The row-house solution is simple and natural. The indoor-outdoor activity takes place close to where the mother is at work. The child can keep in touch with her. . . . But in an apartment house project, where playgrounds are carefully arranged at some distance, vertical as well as horizontal, from the family supper table, there will be much less parent-child play.18
But Architectural Forum editor Douglas Haskell dismissed Wood’s family-centered thinking, contending that increased densities were the future of cities and that “a public not used to elevators or play corridors must learn to use them, just as new car owners must be taught to drive.”19 Modernism and high-rise forms held powerful sway over architects in the early postwar period.
Yet, the CHA’s early experience with its mid-rise buildings confirmed Wood’s concerns about their suitability for families. Crucial building systems proved vulnerable to large numbers of young people who played hard. Children were particularly rough on elevator systems, as rampant games of “elevator tag” led to frequent breakdowns (Figure 2.4). Trash chutes, mailboxes, doors, and hall lights also suffered, as did overall tenant quality of life.20
Figure 2.4 Youth at the elevators of Stateway Gardens, mid-1960s. Chicago Housing Authority.
CHA administrators in 1955 viewed the problem as being rooted in design, with elevators as a central weakness. In response, they proposed developing the CHA’s next wave of projects—which would include the Robert Taylor Homes and the William Green Homes (of Cabrini-Green)—as five-story walk-up buildings (Figure 2.5). But federal administrators rejected the walk-up plans as too expensive, as each apartment was projected to cost over $20,000 to build at a time when new single-family houses in the suburbs sold for around $15,000.21 After four years of bureaucratic wrangling, Chicago caved in 1959 and reluctantly moved forward with elevator projects, constructing nine thousand apartments between 1959 and 1962, each at a cost of around $16,000, and nearly all in buildings over fourteen stories tall.22 Chicago’s tallest and largest projects, then, had been shaped largely by cost considerations, not by architectural modernism.
Figure 2.5 Five-story plan for public housing, with “row-on-row” design, 1957. The five-story design featured a bottom story of apartments, a middle tier of two-story “duplexes” (second and third floors), with a staircase internal to each apartment, and then another tier of two-story “duplexes” on top (fourth and fifth floors). Residents in the top duplexes would walk up four flights to enter their apartments. The design was never built. Chicago Housing Authority.
Youth Density
Throughout the debate in the 1950s over public housing’s form, one assumption was never challenged: that Chicago’s public housing would serve families exclusively, and, in most cases, large families with many children. From the earliest days of the program, one of public housing’s main rationales had been to remove children from poor housing conditions so that their life chances might be altered for the better. The environmental determinism that pervaded the housing reform movement assumed that new housing—with its air, light, hot water, and space—would improve the lives of low-income households, especially for their children.23
By the 1950s, this mission had evolved in Chicago into a focus on large families with five or more children who had the most difficulty finding acceptable housing in the private market. Such families, a CHA monthly report in 1955 noted, “have been on CHA lists for five years or more.”24 In response, the authority programmed its late 1950s projects so that 72 percent of apartments contained three, four, and five bedrooms (at the Robert Taylor Homes, the figure was 80 percent). This was a significant increase over projects designed earlier in the decade, where only 32 percent of apartments had three or more bedrooms. Surprisingly, this major decision to dedicate public housing to large families received no scrutiny and no serious discussion.25
Yet, the choice had enormous implications. Building large apartments for large families meant that public housing communities, by design, would house unprecedented densities of youth. Chicago’s projects opened in the late 1950s and early 1960s were overwhelmed by children, resulting in debilitating social disorder that helped drive out the working class and send projects spiraling downward.26
The typical Chicago neighborhood in 1960 had a mix of family types so that the average census tract had slightly more than one youth for every two adults, amounting to a youth density (expressed as a ratio) of 0.58. Significantly, only a handful of Chicago tracts had more youths than adults, and even baby-boom suburb Park Forest, a planned community for families, had a youth density of 0.97.27
But in Chicago’s public housing, youth densities reached historically unprecedented levels. By 1965, after the completion of major projects, the CHA’s overall youth density was 2.11, or over two youths for every one adult, effectively inverting the ratio for the rest of the city. Some projects had even higher youth densities: when the Robert Taylor Homes opened in 1963, it housed twenty thousand youths and seven thousand adults—an astonishing 2.86 youth-adult ratio in a community that, had it been its own municipality, would have been the tenth largest in Illinois. In no sizeable residential community in modern history had so many youths been supervised by so few adults.28
These extraordinary youth densities were driven primarily by the choice to build multibedroom apartments and less by social factors. While increasing numbers of single-parent families during the late 1960s played a small part in rising youth density, declining average household size in the early 1970s kept youth-adult ratios generally stable. Between 1965 and 1975, the CHA’s overall youth density had risen only 6 percent, despite major upheavals in family structure.29 Planning and policy decisions, not the social choices of public housing residents, resulted in the enormous concentration of youth.
High youth densities created an untenable social environment in high-rise projects soon after they opened. The timing of this social disorder is significant. Projects initially housed primarily working-class, two-parent families. But even with these advantages of class and family structure, adults could not manage the massive number of youths in their midst. Within a year of opening, residents of the Robert Taylor Homes organized a Law and Order Committee in response to chaotic conditions. In a December 1963 letter to the Chicago Defender, an anonymous tenant leader at Taylor claimed that youths had taken over public spaces: “The stairways and laundry rooms [are] being used for card playing, dice shooting, and sex parties by teenagers. . . . [Youths tie] up our elevators, throw bottles over the galleries, pick pockets, and steal groceries.” Within two months of the letter’s publication, an eleven-year-old boy fell from a broken eighth-floor railing, a ten-year-old boy died after being hit by a nine-pound drain cover thrown off a “sidewalk in the air,” and a seventy-two-year-old resident was stabbed to death by a seventeen-year-old neighbor. Shaken mothers began picketing the CHA’s management offices, demanding twenty-four-hour police protection, twenty-four-hour elevator attendants, and more responsive elevator repairs. In a display of public theater to draw attention to their plight, Taylor mothers placed a coffin in front of the CHA’s management offices (Figure 2.6). The Defender called the protest “The Battle of the Robert Taylor Homes,” but neither residents nor the newspapers identified the extreme number of youth as a key problem.30
Youth density is an overlooked factor contributing to a community’s capacity for what sociologists call “collective efficacy,” namely, the ability of residents to intervene and informally police their communities.31 When that capacity is weakened—by poverty, lack of trust, barriers to community action, or excessive youth density—then communities struggle to resolve disputes, defend against disruptive outsiders, and minimize petty crimes like vandalism and theft. In public housing, residents faced many collective efficacy challenges. The large scale of projects made restricting outsiders difficult. Turnover reduced neighborly connections. Bureaucratic management practices undermined a sense of ownership. Deindustrialization eroded economic security. But enormous youth density also strained collective efficacy beyond repair.
Figure 2.6 Protest at CHA offices over conditions at the Robert Taylor Homes after the death of an eleven-year-old boy who fell from a broken balcony, 26 February 1964. Courtesy of the Chicago Tribune.
It would be a mistake to see public housing tenants as passive in their efforts to foster collective efficacy. As with the 1963–1964 protests at the Robert Taylor Homes, residents living in numerous projects in the 1960s organized day care centers, Boy Scout troops, marching bands, sports teams, church groups, and other activities to channel youth energy (Figure 2.7). Mothers in some projects created their own elevator staffing system during “rush hours,” generally when kids were going to and from school. They formed laundry co-ops to protect their laundry rooms. Social service agencies created Head Start centers and after-school programs for youth (Figure 2.8).32 A tremendous amount of tenant energy was devoted to enhancing collective efficacy, but adults faced an uphill battle against enormous densities of youth.
For its part, the CHA was unwilling to confront the demographic disaster it had created in its projects. Demands by tenants for more security, more playground equipment, and new fieldhouses were fulfilled only partially or, in some cases, unmet entirely. Nor did other government agencies step up efforts to ameliorate the situation. The Chicago School Board willfully underestimated the number of children in public housing in order to limit school construction, leading to massive overcrowding in existing schools in the 1960s. Pools built by the Chicago Park District were woefully inadequate to the size of the youth population. The police viewed projects as alternative zones immune to typical policing. Government at all levels lacked the capacity, creativity, or interest to address the social chaos of public housing.33
Figure 2.7 Youth cleanup crew, Robert Taylor Homes, Summer 1970. Chicago Housing Authority.
Figure 2.8 Rockwell Gardens Day Care Center, n.d. Chicago Housing Authority.
The inability of residents, managers, and the state to impose social order soon led to a downward spiral. Working-class families—whose income gave them the option to move—steadily left public housing between 1965 and 1974 and were replaced by the non-wage-earning poor. This had serious repercussions. The CHA’s maintenance budget was funded largely by tenant rents, and those rents, in turn, were set at 25 percent of a family’s income. As its tenants grew poorer, the CHA’s rent receipts declined, giving it fewer resources to maintain projects. The slip in maintenance prompted those with options to leave, further impoverishing projects. The federal government belatedly created new subsidies to fill gaping budget holes, but funding never matched housing authority requests. By the late 1970s, Chicago’s projects had descended into disrepair, becoming the city’s housing of last resort.34
It is important to remember that many public housing youth were not delinquent or destructive, and many grew up to join the middle class. Public housing residents reject the stereotypes that label them as “underclass,” and numerous accounts, ranging from scholarly to self-published, attest to the desire of residents to impose social order in the face of extraordinary odds.35 Put another way, high youth densities did not determine individual outcomes, but it did create a community problem of social control. The residents didn’t create this problem; public housing planners did by raising the bar for achieving collective efficacy to such daunting heights. The concept of youth density helps deflect attention away from tenants themselves and toward the policy choices that set the stage for decline.
The point is not to see youth density as a one-dimensional explanation for public housing’s struggles. This would only repeat earlier fixations on modernist architecture as the main source of its woes. Instead, youth density is an overlooked explanation, one that combined with other policies to hobble public housing. Charging rent as a proportion of income pushed out upwardly mobile families and attracted the very poor. Construction cost limits imposed by federal officials pushed high-rise buildings despite concerns for families. Court rulings after 1967 made it difficult to evict problem residents. Housing authorities and HUD constantly fought over adequate subsidies. All of these policies contributed to the difficult in managing and maintaining a viable public housing stock. Still, youth density was a crucial element that undermined the social order essential to sustaining a viable community, especially in vulnerable high-rise buildings dependent upon fragile elevator systems.
Other Cities
Chicago was not alone in building projects with enormous youth density. St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe Homes, completed in 1954, had a youth-adult ratio of 2.63 in 1968. After experiencing profound social disorder, St. Louis demolished the project in 1973. NYCHA’s projects, on the other hand, had far lower youth densities. Its federally subsidized developments had an average youth density of 1.04 in 1968, with a peak density of 1.73 at the Woodrow Wilson Homes, a four-hundred-unit high-rise project.36 NYCHA’s youth density was well below the national public housing average of 1.94, based on a large sample in 1968.37 Table 2.1 shows youth density in selected cities that year.
Table 2.1 Youth densities in selected cities, 1968*
Source: Chicago Housing Authority, “Annual Statistical Report, 1968,” table 5; New York City Housing Authority, Project Data, Characteristics of Tenants as of January 1, 1968,” in NYCHA Archives, LaGuardia Community College; Housing Authority of New Orleans, Annual Report, 1968, p. 12; Housing Authority of City of Newark, “Annual Report and Statistical Data Pertaining to Public Housing,” 1968, table 24; U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 1968 HUD Statistical Yearbook (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1968), table 31.
Note: Data from Family Projects only; excludes Seniors Projects.
* “Youth” defined as under age 21.
** “Reexamined families for continued occupancy,” a sample of 179,604 families.
These data need to be considered carefully. High youth density can indicate that a community faced a challenge in maintaining order, and that maintenance costs were likely higher than expected.38 But youth density was not a precise predictor of disorder measures like crime.39 Nor can youth density alone incorporate the numerous variables that entered into project quality of life. For example, former residents of public housing suggest that crime and disorder varied from building to building, depending on the collective efficacy of inhabitants and other variables like management competence, relations with police, and concentrations of poverty. More research is needed to better understand the role of youth density in the history of public housing projects that were (and remain) not only large but also small, not only tower blocks but also garden apartments, and not only for low-income but also working-class residents.
Conclusion
In some ways, a major problem facing public housing may be summed up by inverting the title of Alex Kotlowitz’s book: there were too many children here. Undoubtedly, numerous variables influenced public housing residents’ ability to exert collective efficacy, but the timing of social disorder in public housing is significant. Widespread problems emerged in Chicago’s high-rise projects shortly after they opened in the 1950s and early 1960s, which is before poverty became entrenched, before jobs disappeared in black ghettos, before the CHA’s finances collapsed, before deferred maintenance meant physical disorder, and before the drug scourge ravaged tenants. These structural forces later deepened problems in the 1970s, but social disorder was present in high-rises with large numbers of youth right from the start.
Blaming public housing failure on its architecture, then, misses the planning choices that created exceptional demographic burdens on projects. Administrators gave plenty of thought to cost, layout, and architecture but rarely examined the fundamental age structure of the communities being constructed. The lesson of public housing in the 1950s and 1960s is that community building is a delicate process, and attention to collective efficacy and social order is more important than total development cost. Architecture is one element that can encourage or impede collective efficacy, as Jane Jacobs and Oscar Newman have noted.40 But architecture is hardly determining. Instead, social order is a finely tuned state, one not easily created or sustained. Only by understanding the complexity of social order in public housing and the planning parameters that foster it can planners, developers, and government officials ensure that future communities produce better results.