John McCarron makes two good points (Op-Ed, June 12) in rebutting the New York Times’ editorial that lambasted “Boss Daley’s legacy” for public housing in Chicago.
The first is that many of the key decisions regarding the siting, tenancy and construction of Chicago’s high-rise projects antedated Richard J. Daley’s tenure. It was, in fact, during the “reform” administration of Martin H. Kennelly that those crucial choices were made, and they repudiated the rather more promising start made under “boss” Ed Kelly.
Second, the Times unquestionably failed to turn the same cold eye on its own backyard when doing so might have made a difference. But the Times’ willingness to give Robert Moses a free ride does not mean we must conclude that the CHA’s plight represents nothing more than good intentions gone bad.
If Daley does not belong at the center of a “nefarious plot” to segregate African-Americans, McCarron’s bland acknowledgment that there was “no effort . . . to disperse poor blacks” is disingenuous at best. The desire to segregate by race lay at the heart of the site-selection and tenant-selection policies foisted on the CHA by the dominant ward barons in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the need to contain thousands of blacks uprooted by redevelopment contributed to the acceptance of high-rise designs on expensive inner-city land.
Assuming the chairmanship of the local Democratic Party organization at this time, Daley had no qualms about pursuing those policies and used his parliamentary skill to end the ugly public disputes that once erupted over such issues. Moreover, it was during the Daley years that the CHA found its new mission as a primary source of patronage and began to earn a reputation for venality and corruption.
In casting about for villains, McCarron rounds up the usual suspects. “Social welfare experts” and “Potomac bureaucrats” simply made an “enormous social mistake,” he contends. Certainly, there is folly enough in Washington and among academics, but the cliched attempt to lay the CHA’s problems at the feet of presumed soft-hearted, soft-headed liberal reform is dangerously misleading.
The CHA’s current plight reflects hard, conscious decisions made at the local and state level that were filtered through reigning political authorities. And the errors made were not those of misguided compassion.
