Cabrini Green

[bugo]

Did anybody actually go inside Cabrini Green, the housing projects in Chicago? I've seen pictures of it and it looks like somewhere I wouldn't want to go. What are your experiences with this living hell?

[J N Winkler]

Jane Byrne, then Chicago mayor, and her husband tried living in Cabrini-Green for three weeks in 1981.  It was rough going.  (BTW, she died last month, aged 81, of complications from a stroke.)

[Zeffy]

Did anybody actually go inside Cabrini Green, the housing projects in Chicago? I've seen pictures of it and it looks like somewhere I wouldn't want to go. What are your experiences with this living hell?

Does anyone want to live in housing projects? I'd hope not. Housing projects did one thing - concentrate poverty.

[NE2]

Housing projects did one thing - concentrate poverty.

Because it's better for poor people to live on the sidewalks. Idiot.

[golden eagle]

I had some family members live there. I don't remember not being safe, but I also didn't wander around by myself.

[Brandon]

I had some family members live there. I don't remember not being safe, but I also didn't wander around by myself.

In later years, it was well known for the snipers that would shoot from behind the chain link fencing up on the upper floors.

[spooky]

Only by watching "Good Times".

[realjd]

I had some family members live there. I don't remember not being safe, but I also didn't wander around by myself.

In later years, it was well known for the snipers that would shoot from behind the chain link fencing up on the upper floors.

[citation needed]. That sounds like a myth.

[Brandon]

I had some family members live there. I don't remember not being safe, but I also didn't wander around by myself.

In later years, it was well known for the snipers that would shoot from behind the chain link fencing up on the upper floors.

[citation needed]. That sounds like a myth.

Hardly a myth.  It's how people got killed there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green

http://www.odmp.org/officer/11330-patrolman-anthony-n-rizzato

Yes, it was a very dangerous place.  Folks there would even fire their guns up into the air in celebration of New Years Eve.

[lordsutch]

I think at the time that Cabrini-Green and Robert Taylor Homes and similar projects were being built around the country (and the world), well-meaning people believed they were improvements over the slums and tenement housing that they either indirectly or directly replaced. Clearly that wasn't borne out for a variety of reasons, some having to do with underinvestment in maintenance, some having to do with having a high concentration of people with low social capital and low socioeconomic status in one place which became easy prey for criminal activity from within and without, and some having to do with broader societal factors such as the relative decline in value of unskilled labor in society.

At least in terms of exterior appearance and crime rates, the mostly suburban-style affordable housing/mixed income developments that (along with the expansion of Section 8) have replaced projects seem to be more successful, but how much of that is due to just a more conscious effort to invest in capital improvements and a generally lower trend in criminal activity, and how much can be attributed to moving away from the brutalist-utopian vertical warehousing model, remains to be seen.