D. Bradford Hunt

Why now: self-assigned homework for work.

I came into this looking for a good history of Chicago public housing in particular but was happy with how well Hunt tied the specific topic into the national story. This is not a riveting text - it is very academic and heavy on public policy and political battles. However, it was very informative and did a good job of balancing a combined chronological and thematic narrative. He does a great job in looking at all angles of the formation, large growth, and subsequent structural problems and dismantling of the Chicago Housing Authority.

The public discourse around public housing in the US has generally revolved around oversimplified generalizations of what went wrong. This does a good job of going over all the complex and interwoven issues that combined to be particularly devastating to public housing in Chicago - institutionalized racism and corrupt politics that resulted in limited site selection which forced building locations into racial minority neighborhoods, piss poor management that led to huge budget shortfalls and delayed maintenance of building stock, prioritization of the lowest income applicants resulting in concentrations of poverty, high youth to adult ratios in the largest projects which strained community policing, and many more.

Overall I can’t say I recommend this to any but those with a large interest in Chicago history and/or public housing in general. But if you are one of those people, it is required reading.… (meer)