Cabrini-Green

Cabrini-Green is a complex of illfated public housing projects on Chicago's nearnorth side comprising the Frances Cabrini Homes (completed in 1942), Cabrini Extension (1958), and the William Green Homes (1962). At its peak, the complex included 3,600 lowincome apartments, mostly in highrise buildings. Begun with the best of intentions, Cabrini-Green spiraled downward in the 1960s under the weight of concentrated poverty, social isolation, and mismanagement. In its early years, the lowrise, racially integrated Cabrini Homes showed promise, but the addition of largescale highrises created an oppressive aesthetic that stifled community. The project's proximity to the city's most affluent neighborhood, however, made its problems a magnet for media attention and its location increasingly valuable. Beginning in the mid-1990s, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) began to tear down, redevelop, and reconfigure the Cabrini community in ways both dramatic and controversial.

Cabrini-Green cleared a slum once known as “Little Sicily,” populated largely by Italian Americans and a growing African American minority. The site lay only a mile west of the city's Gold Coast neighborhood, a juxtaposition described in 1929 by Harvey Warren Zorbaugh in his book The Gold Coast and the Slum. The area had been targeted for clearance by reformers and the federal Public Works Administration's Housing Division in 1934, but the resistance of numerous owneroccupants convinced federal officials that the cost of assembling land in the area would be too high. In 1939, the CHA, under the leadership of progressive Elizabeth Wood, returned to the area and chose a smaller site to clear as part of its broader agenda of slum clearance.

The resulting 586-unit, lowrise Mother Frances Cabrini Homes row houses opened in 1942 amid controversy surrounding the project's tenant selection practices. Local Italian American leaders wanted the project to enforce residential segregation and exclude African Americans; Wood and CHA leaders followed existing federal guidelines and chose not to disrupt preexisting racial patterns on the site. Before clearance, 20 percent of the site's residents had been African American, so the CHA reserved the same percentage for the new project. As a result, Italian Americans shunned the new apartments, and vacancies existed until war workers were given priority. Despite this rocky start, Cabrini recovered and served as a model of carefully managed racial integration through the late 1940s and early 1950s, with an active sense of community fostered by Wood and local settlement houses.

In 1949 the CHA proposed a vast expansion of Cabrini by clearing neighboring slums to the north and east. Wood wanted to protect the CHA's original investment and argued that larger projects offered greater economies of scale. Furthermore, Wood and other city planners believed that large swaths of the city needed redevelopment; clearing the rest of Little Sicily would begin this process. Importantly, the decision to expand Cabrini was not driven by the city's racist aldermen; Wood wanted the site, and it met with approval from city progressives. Like the original Cabrini, however, clearance removed a racially integrated, if not wellhoused, lowincome community with a surprisingly high number of owneroccupants.

[Page 116]Wood's plans for Cabrini Extension called for a series of midrise elevator buildings in a parklike setting. Truman Administration housing officials, however, demanded cost savings that required reducing the number of buildings while increasing the height of those remaining, thereby reducing perunit costs. When completed in 1958 at a cost of $26 million, Cabrini Extension included 1,921 units designed by A. Epstein and Sons in a series of seven-, ten-, and nineteenstory buildings faced in red brick. In 1955 an additional parcel to the north was selected (again, to protect Cabrini and clear slums) for the William Green Homes. This third project, designed by Pace Associates, consisted of 1,099 units laid out in eight monolithic 16-story buildings fabricated largely from concrete. Residents quickly took to calling Cabriniextension “the reds,” the William Green Homes “the whites,” and the original Cabrini Homes “the row houses.”

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