Eve Ewing Schools Us

Chicago-based poet and professor Eve Ewing, whose Twitter handle is some version of wikipedia brown, had an interesting thread yesterday about the history of public housing in Chicago. She was moved to write, of course, because of Mafia Mulligan's vile, racist tweet about protecting their "Suburban Lifestyle Dream" by precluding low-income housing.

I just wanna talk real quick about how we get to "public housing" as a highly stigmatized, not-so-subtle dog whistle for "low-income Black people," instead of what it could be -- a public good benefiting people of all backgrounds -- in the context of Chicago history.

In 1937 the Housing Act provided federal support to locally established housing authorities. In Chicago we got the Chicago Housing Authority, CHA. It was headed by an ambitious woman, Elizabeth Wood, who thought public housing could help people of all races who needed assistance.

If you think about this premise, it's a powerful, radical idea. Housing for all who are down on their luck! Not vouchers. An actual place to live. Not only that, but this had the possibility of promoting racial integration. Because anyone can be down on their luck!

Many people don't know that the first three public housing projects in Chicago were for ~White people.~ The Lathrop Homes, Jane Addams, and Trumbull Park.

The Ida B. Wells Homes were the first to be built in a Black community and didn't come along until 1941.

Some people at the CHA were like "hey we could use this public housing thing to promote integration! everybody needs housing!"

let's guess how that worked out!

1953, Betty Howard, a lightskin Black woman, goes to the CHA to apply for housing. The clerk mistakes her for White and puts her in Trumbull Park. When their White neighbors saw them, they set fires and threw bricks at people for several days. The family was trapped in the house.

Policy also played a role too, to be sure. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes* established the "neighborhood composition rule" that said the racial makeup of public housing had to match its surrounding neighborhood, reifying segregation.

*Chicagoans will find this ironic

Throughout the 1950s, whenever the CHA presented proposed construction sites for new public housing, the City Council nixed the ones that would have been in White neighborhoods. In the ruling in the 1966 Gautreaux case, the judge said: “It is incredible that this dismal prospect of an all-Negro public housing system in all-Negro areas came about without the persistent application of a deliberate policy to confine public housing to all Negro or immediately adjacent changing areas…. No criterion, other than race, can plausibly explain the veto of over 99 1/2% of the housing units located on the White sites, which were initially selected on the basis of CHA's expert judgment, and at the same time the rejection of only 10% or so of the units on Negro sites.”

The Gautreaux case was a class action lawsuit claiming that the CHA was racially discriminating, which it clearly was. The idea was to get them to go back to building public housing everywhere, for everyone.

In a consent decree after Gautreaux, instead of bringing back the idea of using public housing to maybe desegregate the city and provide a public good for *everyone* the remediation was that some Black CHA families got vouchers to go live in the suburbs or in nice apartments.

People's current attitudes toward public housing, which carry a racial and class stigma, hurt everyone.

They hurt the mostly low-income Black people (often elderly and/or disabled) who live in public housing, who deserve dignity and respect (why does this need to be said?!).

Beyond harming the people who live in public housing -- racism, contempt, and stigma toward public housing hurt our whole society, because people turn their noses up at something that WOULD BE VERY HELPFUL RIGHT ABOUT NOW if we valued it more highly

[looks around at pandemic?!]

If you want to learn more about this history, you can read it in my book Ghosts in the Schoolyard, or I highly recommend the book Blueprint for Disaster by Bradford Hunt.

[could write a subthread about how the Gautreaux consent decree, by giving individual families the chance to "win" vouchers for the private market rather than providing high-quality housing for all, is an important benchmark for the neoliberal era to follow. but, bedtime!]

...Moving to the voucher system where low-income people have to find housing on their own in the private market leaves them subject to widespread discrimination that usually goes unpunished.

In theory vouchers could erode Chicago's housing segregation by providing low-income Black people the means to move into majority White neighborhoods, but it doesn't work that way because landlords discriminate, as Natalie Moore writes. "It's a stigma attached to Section 8 that we don't want to work, we're nasty, we're not educated, we don't take care of ourselves, our children are just reckless."

imho this kind of stigma is sadly often internalized by Black people as well, even other low-income Black people.

k i'm done now, goodnight for real, let's all try not to be disrespectful racist classist jerks

As with all things, "just add racism" — especially when it comes to housing — is a quick way to hell in a handbasket.