The road to hell is usually paved with good intentions.
There was an Italian slum neighborhood known as ”Little Hell” that grew up on the Near North Side after the Great Fire of 1871. Consisting of frame houses and shacks that were often built illegally on pole foundations,
”Little Hell” was a series of almost nightly fires threatening to erupt in one huge conflagration. Immigrants and their sons and daughters were crammed into these flimsy boxes, dreading the blazes that could wipe out a family or a generation of dreams. It was just downwind of the glitter of the Gold Coast, but it was in another world.
The city got into the business of building housing for poor families in the late 1930s, using money from the Roosevelt administration. Among the first of these housing units were the Jane Addams Houses, at Taylor and Loomis Streets; the Julia Lathrop Homes, at Diversey Parkway and Leavitt Street; the Trumbull Park Homes, on East 106th Street; and the Ida B. Wells Homes, 36th to 39th Streets, between Cottage Grove Avenue and Martin Luther King Drive.
Some of these structures still exist, including the Ida B. Wells Homes-two stories high, row upon row, sharing common walls. The downstairs was typically a living room in front, a kitchen in back; the upstairs, bedrooms and a bath. They were built on a human scale because they were for poor people who happened to be human beings.
In 1942 the city took more federal money to build the Mother Frances Cabrini Homes on the north side of Chicago Avenue. The homes replaced the rickety firetraps of ”Little Hell.”
Elizabeth Wood was the first director of what became the Chicago Housing Authority, which came into being in 1937. She was a liberal in every political sense and followed a racially based quota system for allocating housing to the poor. When the Cabrini homes opened, 586 families were moved in. Seventy-five percent were white, the rest black. The quotas followed the racial census of the city at the time.
After World War II, hundreds of thousands of poor, working-class blacks moved from rural areas of the South to cities in the North. The migration greatly changed the demographics of Northern cities-and the politics of public housing.
Essentially, the City Council saw federal public housing money as a means to achieve two goals: create new jobs for the city`s construction workers and provide housing for blacks in areas set apart from affluent (though not necessarily well-off) white neighborhoods.
When Congress passed a new public housing act in 1949, part of the law`s intent was to earmark money to provide housing for the millions of GIs returning from abroad and setting up families.
Wood, already pressured by the anti-black element that formed the majority of the City Council, proposed taking $500 million of the federal money to build 40,000 low-rent units over six years.
In the first phase, Wood proposed tearing down more slum sructures and building 10,400 living units in those slum neighborhoods and another 2,112 units in vacant lots in largely white areas.
Forty-three of the 50 aldermen voted against her proposal, but the city took the federal money anyway. There would be white public housing and black public housing. That was the way it was going to be. She fought her bureaucratic battles because she was a bureaucrat. Against those odds, Wood did what she could to give more than lip service to the idea of providing decent public housing for the poor, be they black or white.
But in 1953, when Wood decided to let a black mailman and his family move into ”designated” white public housing in Trumbull Park on the Far South Side, a riot erupted, and the fires and the terror that resulted exposed the city`s public housing operations as the racist system it had become.
The following year Wood publicly accused the City Council of racism. She was fired the same day.
The year after that, the new mayor of the city, Richard J. Daley, broke ground on the first high-rises north of the original townhomes of Mother Cabrini Homes. (The high-rise buildings were named for labor leader William Green, making the new name of the sprawling project Cabrini-Green.)
These were not very good buildings. Elevators were subject to frequent breakdowns because the motors were housed on the outside of the buildings. Security for the occupants was non-existent because the buildings were so vast and labyrinthine. The buildings themselves kept breaking down, year after year.
Meanwhile, other public-housing high-rises rose all over the black areas of the city, towering over the low-rise models of the original Ida B. Wells and Mother Frances Cabrini Homes.
The road to hell had been paved.
Incidentally, Mother Frances Cabrini, a nun who worked among the immigrant poor in this country, became the first U.S. citizen to be named a saint of the Catholic Church.
