Apartment buildings were seen as futuristic living spaces when designed by architects like Le Corbusier for European cities. People appear happy and efficient living in tiny compartmentalized spaces in Tokyo. But in America, high rise apartment buildings were conscripted for future purposes also, but in the sense of state-run reservations where the working class and poor people were regarded.
The high rise apartment building uses a minimum development of acreage. This confined border is supposed to save on facility maintenance. In regard to Chicago’s public housing, a court case proved that even more money on development was saved by using sub-par construction materials. The fact that Cabrini-Green stood for as long as it did was a testament to the experienced contractors who built those towers with the crappy materials they were provided.
As poverty overcame the public housing communities in Chicago the crime rate rose exponentially. Cabrini-Green closely resembled a dilapidated prison bloc before it was finally razed by the Chicago Housing Authority. Unemployment and poverty still dominate the rolls of public housing residents in the Windy City. In an attempt to reduce the crime rate within it’s properties the Chicago Housing Authority is implementing a controversial program for it’s residents.
Chicago Housing Authority Wants to Require Drug Testing for Residents
This new policy is said to give reassurance that the new mixed-income developments the CHA is building won’t have the same culture that plagued the previous projects. But as long as poverty remains and the housing authority specifies shoddy construction materials then we’ll witness another reservation in the sky.
…or plantation, depending upon how one looks at it. Drug laws and compartmentalized living are both tools that have kept Black people somewhat enslaved, ever since the so called abolishment of slavery & Civil Rights. Cars, jewelry, homes, material shit all costs money, but knowledge is free.
NYCHA kicks out people convicted of certain crimes if the are on the lease.
If the city owns the property, they can make the rules for the property. If you own a house, same deal. You dont like the rules of the landlord, you can move
but digs, a plantation was– above all else– a (usually) very efficient use of labor/economic resources. (I’m not defending that in the least, obviously.)
the current worst of public housing + prisons produces little but dependency, despondency etc so maybe we need another metaphor?
otherwise I’m torn on this.
1) While I don’t condone bad design (which is arguable), and especially shoddy construction (which is immoral), I refuse to believe FOLKS can’t live well within those parameters, if not forever than a while.
2) There’s tendency to confuse design for the overwhelming systemic racism & economic discrimination that put disproportionate % of black folks into this position.
I don’t know about Chicago but in NYC candy-ass (mostly white) liberals still blame Robert Moses for… everything, in ways that in fact reveal more about their own white liberal guilt/racism than anything about Moses’ housing design aesthetics. (The highway issue is different and still debatable.)
There was NOT huge outcry about construction of most NYC public housing because, for the most part, the tenements/slums/shanty towns etc were a fucking disaster, if livable in an NYC- pre-‘Mad Max’ sort of way.
MORE public/affordable housing for all– and more economic opportunity, and manic insistence on EDUCATION EDUCATION EDUCATION (not always “in” school though you gotta know how to work that system too) is our best hope, I think.
Publicly subsidized housing works EVERYWHERE on the planet except here in America and possibly in Brixton, but the failings of public housing is singularly the economic trap called poverty.
And public housing should never be modeled after privately owned homes with that simple simon mindset of landlord dictating tenant cooperation. Chicago’s public housing was under-maintained as a form of PUBLIC POLICY. The landlord purposefully an d systematically left the properties to decay while the building’s were fully occupied in effect creating a tomb/prison for residents.
Enough to make people WANT to drink and take drugs you might say. Now they want to legislate the occupants of the working class portions while exempting the middle class buyers from the same standards? I don’t think you understand how this won’t resolve urban decay. It will just mask it for a generation or two.