Overview

Blueprint for Disaster traces public housing’s history in Chicago from its New Deal roots through current mayor Richard M. Daley’s Plan for Transformation. In the process, D. Bradford Hunt chronicles the Chicago Housing Authority’s own transformation from the city’s most progressive government agency to its largest slumlord.             Challenging explanations that attribute the projects’ decline primarily to racial discrimination and real estate interests, Hunt argues that well-intentioned but misguided policy decisions—ranging from design choices to maintenance contracts—also paved the road to failure. Moreover, administrators who fully understood the potential drawbacks did not try to halt such deeply flawed projects as Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes. The resulting combination of fiscal crisis, managerial incompetence, and social unrest plunged the CHA into a quagmire from which it is still struggling to emerge. Blueprint for Disaster, then,is an urgent reminder of the havoc poorly conceived policy can wreak on our most vulnerable citizens.

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9780226360867

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Blueprint for Disaster adds a new dimension to the [public housing] debate.... Hunt locates the problems less with a poisonous mixture of political and real estate interests, governmental neglect and racism than the fact that there was no realistic financial plan for public housing and that residents were not engaged in the process. -Chicago Tribune

Author Information

D. Bradford Hunt is associate dean and associate professor of social science at Roosevelt University in Chicago.

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