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In his apartment on the near West Side of Chicago, Elijah Hatch\u2019s black overcoat and bowler hat rest on a peg on the inside of the front door. On a nearby coat rack mounted against the living room wall, a row of winter jackets hang in a line, descending in size from an adult\u2019s houndstooth peacoat (presumably that of his wife, Helen Holmes Jackson) all the way down to toddler-size knits.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A local news broadcast plays from a black-and-white TV, which sits on the floor beneath a small crucifixion painting hung in a light-up frame. The room is uncluttered, but filled with the ephemera of daily life\u2014an embroidered handkerchief; a pile of old Jet <\/em>magazines; a pair of boxing gloves lying on the bookshelf.<\/p>\n Next door, in the Turovitz home, the kitchen table is set with glassware, colorful napkins, and two small boxes filled with recipe cards and Swee-Touch-Nee<\/a> tea. A portrait stands on the stove beside a double sink and a counter littered with cookbooks, cleaning supplies, and a box of Wittenberg matzohs. The shelf directly above the sink\u2014prime storage space in the small kitchen\u2014is conspicuously empty: This is where the family usually stores the gefilte fish bowl, which is now in use for their Passover seder.<\/p>\n Viewed side-by-side, both apartments\u2014units in a public housing project<\/a> called the James Addams Homes\u2014exude comfort and familiarity. But in other ways, they seem to belong to different worlds, and for good reason: The Turovitzes, a family of recent Russian-Jewish immigrants, lived at Jane Addams shortly after its completion in 1938, while the Hatches, a Black Baptist family, lived there through the 1960s and early 1970s. The models of their apartments\u2014painstakingly recreated from photographs and interviews with living family members\u2014are part of the National Public Housing Museum<\/a>, which now occupies the only remaining building of the once-sprawling Jane Addams Homes.\u00a0<\/p>\n This museum, which celebrated its opening day on April 4, has been in the making for nearly two decades<\/a>. Since its incorporation in 2007, the museum has operated without a permanent site, mounting pop-up exhibitions in various locations throughout Chicago with the ultimate goal of moving into what remains of the Jane Addams Homes. At its ribbon-cutting ceremony on April 4, several speakers\u2014including the museum\u2019s executive director Lisa Yun Lee, members of the board, and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson\u2014referenced the project\u2019s long road to permanency. But they also spoke of its ambitious and unabashedly political objective: to rebuke the mainstream narrative of American public housing, past and present.<\/p>\n When the James Addams Homes\u2014named<\/a> for the late peace and women\u2019s suffrage activist\u2014opened its doors in 1938, the United States had only recently begun its first major endeavor to build public housing for working class families. What began as a New Deal initiative<\/a> under President Franklin D. Roosevelt was later expanded by President Harry Truman\u2019s Housing Act of 1949, which granted<\/a> cities federal funds to purchase and redevelop \u201cblighted\u201d areas.\u00a0<\/p>\n By 1960, the government had completed 135,000 units of public housing nationwide. In Chicago, as in many parts of the country, public housing projects were often vast in scale, with the largest projects\u2014including Cabrini-Green<\/a> to the North, the Robert Taylor Homes to the South, and the Addams, Brooks, Loomis, and Abbott projects (known collectively as ABLA<\/a>) to the West\u2014each containing several thousand units at their peaks.<\/p>\n But in the 1950s and 1960s, discriminatory housing policies deepened race and class inequities that had already been present in the projects. As Black residents moved into public housing, white residents moved out<\/a>, often with the help of federal assistance programs that were frequently denied to Black people. And as the makeup of public housing became predominantly Black and increasingly impoverished, the federal government failed to limit rents and maintain its public housing stock, causing the conditions at many large public housing projects to deteriorate.\u00a0<\/p>\n During the 1980s, Chicago\u2019s high-rise projects, particularly Cabrini-Green, became national symbols<\/a> of public housing\u2019s decline, as residents faced severe overcrowding, pest infestations, failing utilities, and the rise of gang activity and violence, including murder and sexual assault. Those scenes of violence captured the public imagination, as even ostensibly sympathetic media coverage often veered into sensationalism in recounting them. In one 1987 Chicago Reader <\/em>article<\/a> about the murder of ABLA resident Ruthie Mae McCoy by burglars who broke into her apartment through a hole behind her bathroom mirror, reporter Steve Bogira wrote that \u201cin [Chicago Housing Authority] towers, babies have been tossed out of windows and teenagers shoved down elevator chutes; intruders sometimes bust right through apartment walls to rape and murder tenants.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Cultural representations such as the television program Good Times<\/em>\u2014a 1970s family sitcom set in a fictionalized Cabrini-Green\u2014were replaced by the likes of Candyman, <\/em>a 1992 horror film also set in Cabrini-Green and inspired in part<\/a> by McCoy\u2019s murder. Over time, the devastating effects of government neglect were cynically used to blame and dehumanize its victims\u2014so much so that the very idea of public housing came to be widely regarded as a failure.<\/p>\n This is the public perception which the National Public Housing Museum seeks to counter\u2014and one that its team, which includes several former public housing residents, is all too familiar with. (During the museum\u2019s opening day events, multiple speakers referenced the film Candyman<\/em> as shorthand for damaging stereotypes of public housing and its residents.)\u00a0<\/p>\n To begin constructing a different narrative, Lisa Yun Lee says, the museum team turned to current and former public housing residents in Chicago and across the country, assembling a massive archive of oral histories that formed the basis for its curation. The team took inspiration from New York City\u2019s Tenement Museum<\/a>, whose curatorial approach, Lee says, is based in recognition of the fact that \u201cthe objects and artifacts of people living in poverty, people living on the margins, are just not saved by museums in the traditional way.\u201d<\/p>\n Where mainstream depictions of public housing mine residents\u2019 stories for the lurid and sensational, the museum instead combines oral history with meticulous artifact curation and recreation in a way that treats the minutiae of everyday life as the site of historical and political importance.\u00a0<\/p>\n In an exhibit titled \u201cHistory Lesson: Everyday Objects<\/a>,\u201d common items collected from former public housing residents around the country\u2014a hand mixer, a pair of glasses, a dog collar\u2014are displayed alongside transcripts of their stories. Their anecdotes form a captivatingly specific portrait of everyday life: In a label printed beneath a bright yellow rotary phone, former New York public housing resident Marie Stephens describes hanging the phone on a wall in the center of their apartment, so that she and her husband could take it from room to room.\u00a0<\/p>\n Across other exhibits, the museum finds other creative angles for immersion. In an installation titled \u201cFeeling at Home<\/a>,\u201d a series of captioned photos taken in the homes of former New York public housing residents are displayed on a wall beside a tiered sitting area lined with a number of cushions\u2014each one made from a precise recreation of a piece of fabric or upholstery visible in one of the photos. In guided tours of the model apartments, visitors are invited to sit on the Turovitzes\u2019 couch in the living room, or to sample peanut brittle<\/a> made from Helen Holmes Jackson\u2019s recipe.\u00a0<\/p>\n Alongside its portals into the everyday lives of former public housing residents, the museum showcases the art and culture they have gone on to create. In the \u201cREC room<\/a>,\u201d curated by former Salt-N-Pepa group member DJ Spinderella, visitors can rifle through stacks of records by former public housing residents, including Elvis Presley, Curtis Mayfield, and Eminem. (A separate nook is dedicated to Open Mike Eagle\u2019s Brick Body Kids Still Daydream, <\/em>an album inspired by his experience growing up in the Robert Taylor Homes during the 1980s and early 1990s.) An upstairs gallery features work by visual artists including Tracey Christmas, a textile artist whose wool tapestry Afro-topographical Explorations <\/em>features jagged red branches that evoke redlining.\u00a0<\/p>\n According to Lee, the inclusion of artists who have lived in public housing has been a central pillar of the museum\u2019s vision since its founding. \u201cSlowly over this last century, the work of artists and the work of culture has come to be seen as separate from public policy,\u201d she says. \u201cFor us, art is a way of unleashing people\u2019s radical imaginations and asking people to open up their minds, to see this history differently, to understand this history, and to see these stories in a different way.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Though it explicitly positions itself as a project designed to offer an alternative story about public housing, the museum doesn\u2019t hesitate to acknowledge the brutal conditions and violence that residents endured\u2014one display includes a recovered bathroom medicine cabinet from the Jane Addams Homes, its mirror rusted but still intact, alongside a text panel describing Ruthie Mae McCoy\u2019s murder.\u00a0<\/p>\n But the museum also contains a display of federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) housing posters, with slogans like \u201cELIMINATE CRIME IN THE SLUMS THROUGH SOCIAL HOUSING,\u201d \u201cREDUCE FIRE HAZARD THRU PLANNED HOUSING,\u201d \u201cBETTER HOUSING: THE SOLUTION TO INFANT MORTALITY IN THE SLUMS,\u201d and \u201cPLANNED HOUSING FIGHTS DISEASE.\u201d The original vision of public housing and the realities forced upon it by public disinvestment are not presented as mutually exclusive\u2014they sit side by side as components of the same narrative.<\/p>\n In the twenty-first century, the construction and maintenance of public housing has ground to a halt; now, housing assistance is most commonly given in the form of Section 8 rental assistance vouchers and other government subsidies for market rate housing. In 2000, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) began demolishing<\/a> many of its dilapidated public housing projects with the stated intention of building or renovating a total of 25,000 units of new mixed-income housing by the end of the decade. The vast majority of that housing was never constructed; the land has either sat vacant or been sold off to a variety of buyers, including Target, which opened a store<\/a> on the former site of Cabrini-Green in 2013.\u00a0<\/p>\n As of 2023, there were more than 200,000 families<\/a> on the waitlist to receive assistance from the CHA. Waiting times can add up to years or even decades\u2014in 2022, South Side Chicago Alderperson Jeanette Taylor revealed that she had recently reached the top<\/a> of the waitlist, twenty-nine years after submitting her application.\u00a0<\/p>\n The story of public housing is only one part of a larger narrative about housing in the United States, where nearly half<\/a> of renter households are cost-burdened and homelessness has reached a record high<\/a>. The housing crisis has gone on for so long and grown so severe that it can be difficult to even imagine its end, even as housing activists fight tirelessly for rent regulations<\/a> and the development of new affordable housing.\u00a0<\/p>\n But through its attention to detail and deep investment the stories of former public housing residents, the National Public Housing Museum shifts into clear focus what proponents of austerity policies have spent decades trying to obfuscate: that the housing crisis is not a tragic inevitability, but rather, a political reality that is deeply entrenched but not irreversible. The WPA\u2019s vision for public housing was worth fighting for in 1938, and it is still worth fighting for now.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In his apartment on the near West Side of Chicago, Elijah Hatch\u2019s black overcoat and bowler hat rest on a peg on the inside of the front door. On a nearby coat rack mounted against the living room wall, a row of winter jackets hang in a line, descending in size from an adult\u2019s houndstooth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":189112,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12022],"tags":[57808,12846,16930,13350,31727,5294,73971,45595],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-189111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-activist","tag-affordable-housing","tag-chicago","tag-dispatches","tag-housing","tag-narrative","tag-public","tag-rachel-e-hawley","tag-rewriting"],"yoast_head":"\n