Appreciating What’s Good About Public Housing — It’s Physical Structure

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staff
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Street view of two storey brick townhouses, some boarded up and others occupied
Altgeld Gardens photo by Claire Pentecost is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
Altgeld Gardens, built between the Little Calumet River and polluting industries, has not experienced the same gentrification pressures as other large public housing sites in Chicago. It still shows the signs of public neglect.

Reaganism and Thatcherism (a.k.a neoliberalism) touted the theory that small government was essential to free enterprise. Within this mindset, social/public housing was an example of all that was wrong about government interference in the housing markets. Let free enterprise create truly affordable housing, not government hands-on housing construction.

But over several decades, free enterprise has not been any kind of source for truly affordable housing, where rents are pegged to income1.

In order to reinforce this free enterprise thinking, the baby needed to be thrown out with bathwater. Anything bad about social housing was amplified: the tenants were all bad, the management was all bad, and the buildings were all bad.

With a growing social/public housing renaissance today, it’s about time to admit that most public/social housing residents are no better or worse than the rest of society, that public housing management has been systematically crippled with insufficient funding, and finally, that not all public housing buildings are “bad.”

That final idea, that there may be some “goodness” to the physical structure of some social/public buildings, is the point of this post as well as some similar ones2. Where are the examples of earlier truly affordable housing construction? Could they be preserved to honour their architects and builders, and to learn for their possible influence on future public housing design?

Here’s one, or more properly, here’s another one, as some quality public housing has, against the odds, managed to achieve official recognition. Altgeld Gardens is a public housing community, which was built after World War II to house Black veterans returning to Chicago. It included amenities such as a shopping centre, schools, a community centre and library. Read more in the CHICAGO SUN*TIMES: Altgeld Gardens public housing deserves a spot on the National Register of Historic Places

Footnotes

  1. The past and indeed current free enterprise excuse — there’s still too much “big government” interference from health and safety regulations as well as unfriendly neighbourhood bylaws.
  2. Try: A Tour Of Social Housing Revival In North America, and North America: Why Not Public Housing Truly Affordable, AND Desirable?