The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) is a municipal corporation established by the State of Illinois in 1937 with jurisdiction for the administrative oversight of public housing within the City of Chicago. The agency's mission is guided by a Board of Commissioners appointed by the city's mayor, and has a budget independent from that of the City of Chicago.
It has built a number of public housing projects over the years. Cabrini-Green was started in 1942, ABLA is a complex of buildings started in 1943, Stateway Gardens was started in 1955, and Robert Taylor Homes was started in 1962.
In 1966, Dorothy Gautreaux and other CHA residents brought a suit against the CHA, in Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority. It was a long-running case that in 1996 resulted in the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) taking over the CHA and the Gautreaux Project in which public housing families were relocated to the suburbs. In 2000, the CHA began its Plan For Transformation[dead link], which called for the demolition of all of its gallery high-rise buildings because they failed HUD's viability test and proposed a renovated housing portfolio totaling 25,000 units.
Between 1950 and 1969, it built 11 high rise projects for public housing, which isolated the extreme poor in "superblocks" that were not easily patrolled by police vehicles. Most of the households were headed by females, and the developments were almost entirely African American. Cabrini Green, Henry Horner, Harold Ickes were just some of the developments. Robert Taylor Homes, constructed in 1962, was the largest public housing project in the United States, claiming more than 4,000 units.
See also
- Hills v. Gautreaux, a 1976 Supreme Court case
- Chicago Housing Authority Police Department
- Marshall Field Garden Apartments
Blueprint for Disaster (2009), a book by D. Bradford Hunt
"Understanding Chicago's High-Rise Public Housing Disaster," in Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, and Alternatives, edited by Charles Waldheim and Katerina Reudi Ray (University of Chicago Press, 2005).
"How Did Public Housing Survive the 1950s?", Journal of Policy History, 17:2, Spring 2005, 193-216.
References
- "Chicago Housing Authority". Encyclopedia of Chicago. http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/253.html.
- "Gautreaux". Business and Professional People for the Public Interest. http://www.bpichicago.org/pht/gautreaux.html.
- "Latest Decision on Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority". National Housing Law Project. http://www.nhlp.org/html/hlb/1097/1097gautreaux.htm.
External links
- Chicago Housing Authority official site
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