Robert Taylor Homes

The Robert Taylor Homes have had a short and tragic history. Conceived in the mid-1950s as part of an effort to clear Chicago's slums and house the city's lowincome African American population, Taylor opened in 1962 as the largest public housing project in the country, with 28 identical 16-story buildings containing 4,400 apartments. But Taylor quickly spiraled downward under the weight of its oppressive high-rise design and crushing concentration of low-income residents. By the mid-1970s, Taylor, along with other Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) developments like Cabrini-Green, became well-known symbols of public housing's failure in the United States. In the late 1990s, the CHA set in motion plans to demolish the entire Taylor project; by the end of 2004, demolition was completed and its former population dispersed to other poor neighborhoods. Taylor's history suggests that misguided policy making and inadequate resources doomed public housing in Chicago. Tens of thousands of Taylor's residents suffered the daily indignities and long-term consequences of these mistakes.

Taylor was located on Chicago's south side, firmly within the boundaries of the city's existing African American ghetto. Taylor's site had been long known as the Federal Street Slum. City engineers in the 1940s planned a highway for the area, but when the highway shifted to the west in 1955, the site was offered to the CHA. Originally conceived as 2,500 units in 1956, Taylor nearly doubled in size because white aldermen blocked the CHA from using other sites in white areas, the CHA wanted to take advantage of available federal funds, and black aldermen embraced redevelopment of the area. The expanded Taylor anchored the “State Street Corridor” as the largest of four public housing projects stretching along State from 22nd to 54th Streets, encompassing more than 9,000 units, all of them in Chicago's “black belt.” Ironically, the project was named after the CHA's first African American chair, Robert R. Taylor, who along with progressive Elizabeth Wood had tried to win outlying sites in white areas for a portion of the city's public housing.

A major battle unfolded in the late 1950s over the design of Taylor. The CHA was eager to build low-rise structures after earlier experiences with highrises revealed difficulties in managing elevator buildings. Beginning in 1955, the CHA proposed four-story designs for future projects, including Taylor, but [Page 688]per-unit cost estimates (including land and clearance) exceeded what federal officials were willing to approve. Heated bureaucratic exchanges followed; Mayor Daley traveled to Washington in July 1959 to testify before Congress in favor of the CHA's low-rise designs. But federal officials held firm, and with sites already cleared, the CHA reluctantly redesigned Taylor as less costly (on a per-unit basis) high-rise buildings. Most important, Taylor's design called for 80 percent of the apartments to be three or more bedrooms to accommodate large, low-income African American families who had the most difficulty finding housing in the city's discriminatory market.

The resulting density of youth at Taylor was unprecedented in the 20th-century American urban experience. The average Chicago census tract in 1960 had 1.9 adults for each person under age 21. At Taylor, the ratio was inverted: the project (which covered six census tracts) had only 0.37 adults for every youth. The enormous numbers of youth immediately strained project life when the first buildings opened in October 1962. The CHA reported that children overwhelmed grassy areas, playgrounds, laundry rooms, and library facilities. Games of “elevator tag” caused chronic elevator breakdowns and several deaths. Children threw objects from Taylor's open-air galleries, injuring those below and forcing the CHA to fence in the galleries in 1969, contributing to a prisonlike atmosphere. Meanwhile, the Chicago School Board dragged its feet in building new schools and refused to integrate underutilized white schools nearby. In April 1965, the Chicago Daily News ran a series explaining in graphic detail the chaos that had taken hold at Taylor.

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