The PoorhouseThe Poorhouse
The first major study of subsidized housing in any American city, this history of the Chicago experience shows that decisions about the future of public housing to be made in the next few years will if not made in the context of past programs achievements and failures inevitably lead to more “poorhouses” for the indigent and elderly.
Chicago, city of big shoulders, of Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan, seems an ideal environment for public housing because of the city’s youth among major cities and well-deserved reputation for technology, innovation, and architecture. Yet, as this seminal new work shows, Chicago’s experience on the whole has been a negative one, raising serious questions about the nature of subsidized housing—about whether we should have it and, if so, in what form.
Devereux Bowly, Jr., is uniquely qualified to write this perceptive account. For Bowly, a lawyer at a community law office in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago, a native of the city, active in landmark preservation organizations, and interested in urban and architectural history, “subsidized housing is an area where my poverty law practice, interest in the history of the city and architecture all came together.”
Bowly’s detailed examination of subsidized housing, though specifically that of Chicago, no doubt will have implications for establishing new national policy. The achievements of Chicago, especially in architecture, slum clearance, and sound, safe, and sanitary housing for poor people, and the deeply disturbing corollary matters of unbearable costs, population losses, high and increasing default and foreclosure figures, and the large-scale abandonment of housing by owners—the phenomenon of the late 1960s and the 1970s—illuminate a national problem of staggering proportion and thus far unfathomable dilemma from which we must learn if only to survive, this unusually interesting book suggests.
Chicago seems an ideal environment for public housing because of the city’s relatively young age among major cities and well-deserved reputation for technology, innovation, and architecture. YetThe Poorhouse: Subsidized Housing in Chicago shows that the city’s experience on the whole has been a negative one, raising serious questions about the nature of subsidized housing and whether we should have it and, if so, in what form.
Bowly, a native of the city, provides a detailed examination of subsidized housing in the nation’s third-largest city. Now in its second edition,The Poorhouse looks at the history of public housing and subsidized housing in Chicago from 1895 to the present day. Five new chapters that cover the decline and federal takeover of the Chicago Housing Authority, and its more recent “transformation,” which involved the demolition of the CHA family high-rise buildings and in some cases their replacement with low-risemixed income housing on the same sites. Fifty new photos supplement this edition.
Certificate of Excellence from the Illinois State Historical Society, 2013
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- Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, Ă2012.
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