Many a tough Chicago writer has delivered a critical whack at this town, which is as it should be.
Ever since Upton Sinclair penned his stomach-churning expose of conditions around the old stockyards, journalists here have raced against each other to unmask all manner of official corruption and civic disgrace.
In recent years this newspaper has published several alarming looks at urban problems, from the plight of the black underclass to the epidemic of gun violence that claims so many of our children.
So chilling has been the reportage that one can ask whether the horror stories–by scaring readers away from the city–do more harm than good. But that’s grist for another column.
Today’s sermon asks this question: Where does The New York Times get the nerve, or, more precisely, the hypocritical gall, to blame Chicago’s late Mayor Richard J. Daley for the dismal condition of public housing here.
With luck you may have missed the self-righteous editorial in last Wednesday’s Times. It was headlined “Boss Daley’s Legacy” and it cheered the federal takeover of “Chicago’s man-made centers of poverty.” The editorial repeated the popular, and largely inaccurate, wisdom about how “Boss Daley” deliberately concentrated poor blacks into the Chicago Housing Authority’s “islands of poverty” along South State Street. There they could easily be exploited by ward heelers and “maintenance contractors who siphoned off federal funds while permitting the buildings to fall into horrific decay.”
Sure, there’s some truth behind what The Times had to say. There was no effort back in the 1950s, when many of the CHA high-rises were built, to disperse poor blacks away from the South and West Side ghettos in which they lived. Under the federally-funded “slum clearance” technique widely used in Chicago and other northern cities, including New York, block upon block of ramshackle firetraps were cleared to make room for modern apartment buildings into which the people were resettled.
In retrospect, this reconcentration of poor blacks–especially into the high-rise elevator buildings favored by the CHA–was an enormous social mistake. That goes without saying.
But a nefarious plot by the Mayor Richard J. Daley it was not.
Edward Marciniak, the Loyola University urban affairs professor who has spent much of his career studying the failings of CHA, points out that a third of the agency’s infamous high-rises were already standing by the time Hizzoner took office in 1955. Another quarter of them were in advanced stages of planning.
One could argue that Daley-the-elder should have known these nondescript 16-story buildings would become poverty-traps. But one would be terribly unfair.
According to Marciniak, those high-rises were considered at the time to be superior to any other mid- and low-rise alternative. Chicago’s top planners and social welfare experts–all heavily influenced by such “modern” designers as Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, were convinced that high-rises, with their clean lines and surrounding open spaces, were the way to go. CHA pioneer Elizabeth Wood enthused that the new “vertical communities” would allow public housing to “compete with the suburbs for social desirability.”
The next 30 years would prove her wrong, of course. And yes, the failure of the buildings themselves would be compounded, as The Times editorial points out, by racism and political venality.
But it wasn’t all Daley’s fault; nor the fault of his successors; and most certainly not that of his namesake son, the current mayor, who is only too happy to let U.S. Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros take over. Daley-the-Younger knows the federal government is as much to blame as anyone for the mess at CHA. It was the know-it-alls in Washington who chased middle-class families out of public housing with their hare-brained rule that jacks up rents on tenants who earn non-welfare income. It was the Potomac bureaucrats who told CHA to put recovering drug addicts in senior citizen buildings, and who, at every turn, threw money at problems that money can’t solve.
None of which gave pause to the editorial writers at The New York Times, who blame it all on “Boss Daley.”
They run a world-class newspaper at The Times. Their foreign and national coverage is second to none. Their reporting on New York City’s problems has been getting better, though that was not always the case.
Twenty years ago an independent writer-investigator named Robert Caro won the Pulitzer Prize for an 1,162-page biography of New York’s great builder-boss, Robert Moses. Caro went into great detail about how Gotham’s long-time public works czar handled slum clearance during the 1950s. Only a fraction of those displaced ever made it into public housing.
“The public housing Moses was building had, with its lack of apartments for large families or single people, little relationship to the needs of the displaced people,” Caro wrote. “What was available–for most of the people who had lived on the (slum clearance) site–was a single piece of advice: Get out–and get out fast.”
Caro also points out that the mass displacement of poor blacks went largely uncovered by the New York press, and was virtually ignored by The New York Times, whose editors treated Moses like a civic god.
Then again, that was 45 years ago. Back then a lot of smart people who loved their cities made mistakes they would later regret.
But not all of them, it now turns out, have the decency to refrain from judging others.
