WHERE ARE POOR PEOPLE TO LIVE? TRANSFORMING PUBLIC HOUSING COMMUNITIES LARRY BENNETT, JANET L. SMITH, AND PATRICIA A. WRIGHT, EDS. (M.E. SHARPE)
“Policymakers,” writes Wright, “continue to make the same major mistake of the urban renewal plan in the 1950s and 1960s–the presumption that experts know what’s best for public housing residents.” But Carol Steele, a longtime resident of Cabrini-Green, cofounder of the Coalition to Protect Public Housing, and one of the few nonacademic contributors to the collection, didn’t trust the CHA to make decisions for her. She and the CPPH have fought since 1996 to have the high-rises fixed up instead of torn down. “They were proposing for my people to be evicted and become homeless,” she says. “That is why I am in this fight.”
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Over half a century, many things have changed: Chicago’s mayor has a different middle initial. The old ghettos were vertical, the new ones are horizontal. In the days of urban renewal, the great sociologist Herbert Gans lived in Boston’s East End and wrote sympathetically about that city’s displaced residents; today Venkatesh fills that role for Chicago’s south side. But one thing is just the same now as it was in 1956: middle-class policymakers decide what poor people need and give it to them hard.
