NPR has put together an interesting site with photos and text that explores the demolition of Chicago’s public housing. Some of the more interesting lines:

Ironically, the [Robert Taylor Homes] were named for a Chicago Housing Authority board member who resigned in 1950 — in opposition to the city’s plans to concentrate public housing in historically poor, black neighborhoods…

The buildings became hulking symbols of urban dysfunction to the suburbanites who saw them from the expressway on their daily commute…

While some have described public housing as a tangle of failed policies and urban planning, to the people who lived there, it was home. But at the end of the 1990s, like the tenement residents before them, they were told that their world would be “transformed.” Many would not be able to live there anymore…

[After the demolitions:] People lost track of each other; the housing authority lost track of them.

A lot of lives were affected even as there really hasn’t been much public conversation about the fate of the public housing residents. Ironically, removing the high-rises may just have made the problems of housing in the Chicago region – and there is a lot of need for good affordable housing, evidenced by recent sign-ups for the public housing waiting lists – even more difficult to see.

See earlier posts about the demolitions of the last high-rises at Cabrini-Green here, here, and here.