Cabrini-Green

Cabrini-Green, public housing development in Chicago, Illinois. Cabrini-Green was once a model of successful public housing, but poor planning, physical deterioration, and managerial neglect, coupled with gang violence, drugs, and chronic unemployment, turned it into a national symbol of urban blight and failed housing policy. In 2000 the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) began demolishing Cabrini-Green buildings as part of an ambitious and controversial plan to transform all of the city’s public housing projects; the last of the buildings was torn down in 2011.

The first part of what would become the vast Cabrini-Green complex was the Frances Cabrini Homes, completed by the CHA in 1942 to house an influx of war-industry workers as well as veterans returning to Chicago during World War II. The Frances Cabrini Homes consisted of 55 two- and three-story buildings in the Near North Side area of Chicago. Those apartment houses were, like the city’s other public housing during that era, considered well-built, attractive alternatives to the slums that traditionally housed low-income families.

A turning point for Chicago’s public housing occurred in 1950. By that time, those most in need of affordable housing in Chicago were African Americans, whose numbers were rapidly expanding, primarily because of the northward migration of Southern blacks. The CHA and Chicago’s city council needed to decide where to build new public housing. The CHA proposed a variety of sites, including many vacant areas bordering white neighbourhoods. The city council insisted primarily on clearing already existing slums in African American neighbourhoods to provide space for new higher-capacity buildings. After a lengthy, racially charged public debate, the city council’s vision won out, an outcome that would have a dramatic impact on public housing in Chicago for the rest of the 20th century.

Most of the new public housing that followed, built in the 1950s and ’60s under Mayor Richard J. Daley, came in the form of massive superblocks of high-rise apartments. In 1958, next to the Frances Cabrini Homes, construction was completed on the Cabrini Extension—known as the “Reds,” partly because of the buildings’ red brick exteriors. The Reds consisted of 15 buildings of 7, 10, or 19 stories. In 1962 the William Green Homes—called the “Whites”—were completed. Located north and west of the Cabrini Extension, they consisted of eight white concrete buildings 15 or 16 stories tall.

The superblocks left many areas of Chicago with row after row of monolithic concrete towers—artificially constructed communities cut off from the neighbourhoods around them, forming dense geographic concentrations of poverty. The results would generally prove disastrous. The buildings themselves were often poorly built and difficult to maintain. The massive size of the apartment complexes and the large number of residents made a sense of social order and community much harder to sustain.

Cabrini-Green—as the entire housing project came to be known—became a national symbol of the deteriorating state of public housing in Chicago when, in 1970, two police officers were killed by a sniper in one of the buildings. In the decades that followed, despite a variety of efforts to increase security, Cabrini-Green became notorious for gangs, drugs, and sensational crimes. Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne moved into Cabrini-Green for a few weeks in 1981 to show her determination to reduce crime, but it had little effect other than to draw further attention to the problem.

In 1995, after years of controversy and in light of financial and management scandals, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development took over the CHA. Mayor Richard M. Daley regained control of the CHA in 1999, and the agency announced what it called its “Plan for Transformation” for the city’s public housing, which entailed the destruction of all of the CHA’s high-rise buildings—including those in the Cabrini-Green complex—and their replacement with mixed-income developments. Demolition of buildings in Cabrini-Green began in 2000. The last residents of the development departed at the end of 2010, and the final demolitions took place soon afterward.