Economic mobility in Chicago's projects

Sylvester Monroe, via a kind reader's email:

They're nearly all gone now. Those towering concrete monuments to a flawed public housing experiment called the "projects." They had names like Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, Fort Greene in Brooklyn, Desire in New Orleans and Cabrini Green in Chicago. The social architects sold them as stepping stones to a better life for the mostly poor black people who inhabited them. But decades after they were built in the years following the Second World War, they've been mostly blown up or bulldozed. And many of the people who once lived in high-rise public housing projects, and their children, are no better off than their parents were. Some are even worse off.

When the Robert Taylor Homes opened in 1962, then Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley channeled the high hopes of a new urban generation.

"This project represents the future of a great city, it represents vision," Daley said at the opening. "We know that this community needs a better environment in which the future generation of a great city will be raised."

Posted by Jim Zellmer at August 18, 2012 3:38 AM
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