Last Project Standing: Civics and Sympathy in Post-Welfare Chicago 081669737X, 9780816697373

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Introduction
1. Across Damen
Part I. Sympathy
“Toward a Better Life”
2. The Many Harms of Staying Here
3. Project Heat and Sensory Politics
Part II. Civics
Radio Rumors
4. Experiments in Vulnerability
5. The City, the Grassroots, the Poverty Pimps
Part III. Publics
Resurrections
6. The Museum of Resilience
Epilogue: Raising Sympathetic Publics
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Z

Citation preview

Last Project Standing

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Last Project Standing CIVICS AND SYMPATHY IN POST-WELFARE CHICAGO

CATHERINE FENNELL A Quadrant Book

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London

Quadrant, a joint initiative of the University of Minnesota Press and the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota, provides support for interdisciplinary scholarship within a new, more collaborative model of research and publication. http://quadrant.umn.edu.

Sponsored by the Quadrant Design, Architecture, and Culture group (advisory board: John Archer, Ritu Bhatt, Marilyn DeLong, and Katherine Solomonson) and by the College of Design at the University of Minnesota. Quadrant is generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Photographs were taken by the author, unless credited otherwise. Proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to the Major Adams Community Committee in memory of Dave McCool. Portions of chapter 3 were published in “ ‘Project Heat’ and Sensory Politics in Redeveloping Chicago Public Housing,” Ethnography 12, no. 1 (2011): 40–64; http://online.sagepub.com; doi: 10.1177/1466138110387221. Portions of chapter 4 were published in “Experiments in Vulnerability: Sociability and Care in Chicago’s Redeveloping Public Housing,” City and Society 26, no. 2 (2014): 262–84. Portions of chapter 6 were published in “ ‘The Museum of Resilience’: Raising a Sympathetic Public in Post-Welfare Chicago,” Cultural Anthropology 27, no. 4 (2012): 641–66. Copyright 2015 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. isbn 978-0-8166-9736-6 (hc) isbn 978-0-8166-9737-3 (pb) Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 21 20 19 18 17 16 15

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What do you want—a cliff over a city? A foreland, sloped to sea and overgrown with roses? These people live here. —Muriel Rukeyser, “The Book of the Dead”

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Contents

Introduction 1. Across Damen

1 33

Part I. Sympathy “Toward a Better Life”

67

2. The Many Harms of Staying Here

71

3. Project Heat and Sensory Politics

101

Part II. Civics Radio Rumors

135

4. Experiments in Vulnerability

137

5. The City, the Grassroots, the Poverty Pimps

169

Part III. Publics Resurrections

203

6. The Museum of Resilience

207

Epilogue: Raising Sympathetic Publics

239

Acknowledgments

253

Notes

257

Bibliography

277

Index

295

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Introduction We want the inebriation of presence to dissolve the fact of difference. —Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

This Is Care From 2004 to 2006, Chicagoans came face-to-face with public housing residents in an unlikely place: during their everyday commutes and errands. Posters and placards featuring intimate portraits of residents alongside testimonials about life in and after Chicago’s projects anchored a public relations campaign that blanketed the city’s buses and trains. They were most prominent on routes that traversed public housing complexes then in the thick of demolition.1 The “This is CHANGE” campaign emerged when the Chicago-based international advertising giant Leo Burnett Inc. donated its services to the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA). The campaign’s designers had two aims. The first was to debut the CHA’s new logo, CHANGE, a play on both the authority’s acronym and its train wreck of a history. And the second was to pitch to Chicagoans positive narratives about an ambitious planning experiment under way in their city: the demolition of troubled public housing projects and their replacement with much smaller, partially privatized developments known as mixed-income new communities. For many I met while conducting research on this experiment, “mixed-income” stood for something more. “Mixed-income is not exactly the right word,” one middle-aged white planner observed in 2003. “This is about finally integrating this city, block by block.” In Chicago “class” had become a metonym for “race.”2 “I feel just like the building, all brand new,” exclaimed one poster that featured an elderly African American woman named Camille Jackson. “Rats, faulty fire alarms, and peeling paint” had once riddled the Hattie Callner Senior Apartments, the building in which 1

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Jackson lived. “Camille felt scared, and worse, like no one cared.” But after her building’s renovation, Jackson marveled at her new sinks and appliances. “There’s even an atrium where she can read or admire the city’s skyline,” the poster gushed. “Camille’s building has never looked better. And at the age of 66, neither has she.” Another poster featured an older African American lawyer named Charles Pinkston who mentored young people in the Robert Taylor Homes, the same public housing complex where he had grown up. “When Charles heard that Robert Taylor was to be rebuilt, he worried about its residents. Where would they stay in the meantime? Would they be OK?” Those fears were put to rest as he watched old friends and neighbors being “temporarily relocated to safe, clean neighborhoods.” “Thanks to changes the CHA is making,” the poster concluded, “he feels confident that other kids will find the same success he did.” In the world conjured by the CHANGE campaign, changed things and changed places would make for changed lives. But as much as encounters with changing places and things would change the lives of public housing residents, the campaign suggested that these encounters also stood to change the lives of those who had little to do with public housing. All these changes would turn on the reeducation of care. We often understand care as activity undertaken to maintain and protect a person or thing. Jackson’s poster drew on this sense of care when it suggested that the CHA had failed to maintain her building. Yet even worse than feeling scared by dangerous conditions, Jackson felt “like no one cared.” She felt as if her fellow Chicagoans had grown indifferent to the CHA’s failures and to those who had to live with them. It was this second sense of care, of attention or concern paid to something, that a man I call Brian, a middle-aged African American man who had worked on the campaign, emphasized in early 2006.3 Brian told me that the campaign would “spark the conversations that Chicago needs to have about public housing” by inviting three different “spheres” of people to encounter it in unexpected ways. The first included current and former public housing residents. These were people who had “complicated feelings” about the places  that had both sheltered and endangered them. Brian knew about those feelings. He himself had come of age in one of the city’s largest public housing complexes as it spiraled into neglect and crime. Brian’s “second sphere” included Chicagoans who lived near the projects, people who maybe blamed project residents for destroying their buildings and neighborhoods. His “third sphere” included “strangers to public housing.” These were people who might also not hold its residents in high regard, if they held them in any regard at all.

For Brian, encounters with images and narratives focused on the “normal things” public housing residents do—read, teach, go to school—alongside the very buildings they did them in would provoke changes that would reverberate across his three spheres. Public housing residents would take more pride in each other, in themselves, and in their homes. Neighbors and “strangers to public housing” would understand that its residents “are not so different than me or you” and that “the changes you see out the window are about caring for people. And when you read about the lawyer mentoring the youth, maybe you will become interested in doing something like that too.” For Brian, teaching a range of Chicagoans to care differently about changing housing projects and their residents could pull them into the work of caring better for both. Some would-be members of Brian’s spheres thought that any conversation emerging around Chicago’s experiment needed to be far more critical. Take a group of young, mostly white artists in their twenties and thirties. Friends of friends, they had heard about my interest in the CHANGE campaign and invited me along to watch them “reverse” it. On a May night in 2005 they donned the fluorescent vests of maintenance workers, unlocked bus-shelter display cases around the city, and swapped out CHANGE posters for their own. But instead of featuring residents, their near-perfect replicas showed powerful politicians and developers and lambasted them for profiting on development driven by the displacement of poor people. And instead of “This is CHANGE,” their posters read, “This is CHAOS.” As one of the young white artists, Lou, would later explain to a reporter, the group hoped that commuters’ encounters with these posters would push them to look anew at the demolitions, and that these looks would open “a dialogue” that would make the CHA’s new logo “become transparently the cynical thing that it is and . . . cease to function.” But Lou had sounded far less optimistic that May morning as she waited by a phone to field calls from “the public” about their campaign. Few came. Early that morning the private company that managed advertising for Chicago’s public transit system had dispatched its staff to remove the offending posters. By noon, most were gone. As she put away equipment, Lou wondered aloud, “Did we just stage another failed utopian project?” INTRODUCTION

The CHA began ridding Chicago of “severely distressed” housing projects in 1995 when demolitions got underway at the Governor Henry Horner public housing complex on the city’s West Side

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“This is CHAOS,” May 2005. Poster critical of Mayor Richard M. Daley’s redevelopment commitments, particularly his administration’s willingness to advance public–private development partnerships. The poster singles out Millennium Park, a downtown public park that ran $300 million over budget. Mayor Daley was a major proponent of the Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan for Transformation. This poster was briefly displayed at a bus shelter on Michigan Avenue. Courtesy of the CHAOS Campaign.

INTRODUCTION

(“Horner”) (see Plate 1). Horner was a midsize, modernist-era public housing complex that opened in three stages between the late 1950s and the late 1960s. At the height of its occupancy in the late 1970s, at least 8,400 residents called Horner home. By then most were black, and the site was becoming increasingly impoverished. Many could trace their roots to places like Tennessee and Alabama. Like other housing projects built in Chicago during the 1950s and 1960s, Horner’s residents included many black migrants pulled to the city during the Great Migration. They came chasing economic, social, and political opportunities unavailable to them in the South. Those who remained at Horner, as well as their children and grandchildren, ended up living with the racial segregation and economic inequality that Chicago’s projects shored up in urban space. Limited demolitions at other public housing sites followed Horner’s wrecking balls, and in 2000 the CHA officially embarked on its Plan for Transformation. Known throughout my research simply as “the Plan,” it was initially a decade-long comprehensive effort to redevelop Chicago’s most troubled public housing projects. Extended another five years in 2006, its proponents argued that by 2015 Chicagoans would find their city a changed one, devoid of its vertical slums and their grinding poverty. Other cities, including

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Baltimore, Atlanta, and San Francisco, embarked on similar efforts. Yet the scale and ambition of Chicago’s experiment has been singular. Since 1995, the CHA has demolished some twenty-one thousand units of public housing and displaced some twenty-five thousand households, many headed by African American women.4 For the most part, demolition has focused on high- and mid-rise buildings at “family developments” like Horner, that is, developments built for households with children. Housing for senior citizens, like the building that Camille Jackson lived in, has largely been renovated. By the time the CHANGE and CHAOS campaigns unfolded, it had already become apparent that the Plan was not exactly going according to plan. Early research suggested that displaced residents were not, as Charles Pinkston hoped, being “relocated to safe, clean neighborhoods.” They were landing in peripheral areas of the city that were as impoverished, racially segregated, and violent as the projects they left behind. But they were landing there without the supportive social networks they had developed over many years of living in the projects, and with the added risk of violence that came with crossing gang territories.5 No wonder, then, that so many of my interlocutors, especially those transitioning out of public housing, declared that Chicago’s experiment was “built to fail,” just like the projects before it. But this book is not a social autopsy of Chicago’s Plan or, more broadly, of public housing reform. It does not dissect these reforms’ failures or unintended consequences, nor does it offer any proposals to improve their outcomes. Others are doing this important work.6 This book is also not a community study focused on public housing residents. Such studies are invaluable because they tell us about the thoughts and experiences of people who too often do not get a say in policies that profoundly affect their lives.7 More than to capture the experiences of residents leaving public housing, my study of Horner’s transformation sought to understand how the arguments its residents advanced about their protection emerged in dynamic tension with the morphing social and material dimensions of a marginalized place, as well as with planning aspirations, legal orders, and public sentiments that extended far beyond Horner’s rotting walls. To that end, this book is an ethnography of an urban planning experiment that over the past two decades has transformed Chicago into a laboratory for reengineering public housing projects and urban citizens. It seeks to understand how an ambitious effort to demolish and rebuild troubled projects also became one to rebuild residents as the kinds of citizens who would prove capable of caring for themselves and their families and neighbors far better than any failed wel-

INTRODUCTION

fare bureaucracy ever had. It is an ethnography of urbanites’ aspirations to move past the entrenched and fraught social divides that got in the way of caring for themselves and others: the divides associated with race and class. In this sense, this book is also an ethnography of sympathy in a neoliberal era. It asks how some Chicagoans collided with changing public housing in ways that taught them to “feel with” each other and in the process to hope for the realization of a political ideal that has long animated but also long eluded their democracy: E pluribus unum, “One from many.” Despite the many differences that separate its citizens, a cohesive polity might emerge that would, in the words of its founding charter, promote “the blessings of liberty” alongside the “general welfare.” Contemporary parlance often treats sympathy as compassion or pity provoked at witnessing another’s suffering or misfortune. These feelings I characterize as empathy. In this book I reserve the word “sympathy” for a relation that is more plastic and materially grounded, closer to what nineteenth-century French psychophysiologist Théodule Ribot characterized as its “etymological sense”: “the existence of identical conditions in two or more individuals of the same, or different, species.”8 Sympathy is a communicative mechanism whose subscribers invest it with the capacity to extend feelings, qualities, and visceral states across very different entities. But such a fellow feeling, this book will argue, does not readily emerge; it is not an inevitable effect of colliding with a changing place, its people, and its things. Rather, for the feeling that one is like—even the same as—another to take hold and spread, someone or something must finely align and intensely coordinate proximity, inferences, senses, and bodies. This book examines that project of alignment and coordination. It asks how and with what effects sympathy emerged in Chicago’s reforms as a medium for building a more inclusive city populated by more caring citizens. It argues that Chicago’s reforms orchestrated material encounters with changing public housing, its people, and its things that many on the ground credited with making them like the people and things in their vicinity. As publicly and nonpublicly housed Chicagoans learned to feel with decaying buildings or new neighbors, they also began to imagine a polity that might overcome systems of racialization and the inequalities these systems had built up in urban space. And they began to imagine and experiment with the dispositions, sentiments, commitments, and arguments that might usher in this polity. Yet even as this book traces efforts and aspirations to raise a more inclusive city populated by more caring citizens, it also shows how

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these efforts required the “demolition” of dispositions, sentiments, and commitments built over many years of living in public housing. These efforts often missed their mark. For many of the transitioning public housing residents, legal advocates, new neighbors, social workers, journalists, artists, and curators I came to work with in Chicago, learning to “feel with” the people and things of changing public housing could easily become a negative experience. And these lessons could inspire feelings of revulsion and distance instead of attraction and fellowship. Sympathy, as cultural theorist Amit Rai has pointed out, is a mode of power that has historically tied together subjects, families, communities, classes, perceived racial groups, nations, and colonies in a fraught “acrobatics of identification and differentiation.” Its subscribers aspire to promote sociality and cohesion by bridging and effacing differences. But in the process they often end up deepening them.9 As much as this book is about a project to raise a more inclusive and caring city that might correct long-standing racial and economic exclusions, it is also a book about what it is like to live in a place caught up in tremendous social and material flux—Horner on its way to becoming a mixed-income new community called Westhaven. Chapter 2 examines in detail the changing site, its history, and how I engaged both. What is important to remember for now is that during the first decade or so of Westhaven’s development, two distinct built environments stood alongside each other on the Near West Side: the gradually passing architecture of the Fordist–Keynesian welfare state (Horner) and the gradually emerging architecture of a neoliberal communitarianism (Westhaven). Each concretized a distinct approach to collective social protection, and each offered its inhabitants radically different material and social dimensions. As we will see, each also demanded radically different modes of engaging those dimensions. I began following Horner’s transformation in the spring of 2003 as a twenty-six-year-old graduate student of anthropology. I continued doing so until I left Chicago in the summer of 2009, pulled away by a job I felt lucky to get during the early bleak of the Great Recession. I have returned every year since for follow-up research. Some visits lasted a few weeks; others, as long as an academic’s summer. Taken together, my time on the Near West Side revealed that as a range of Chicagoans moved around places where little looked, felt, or sounded as they expected it should, they began to experiment with the sentiments and arguments that might better secure well-being for themselves and for those in their immediate orbit—their fami-

Westhaven and Horner standing shoulder to shoulder, summer 2004. The Horner complex was demolished and redeveloped in phases. Throughout the first decade of redevelopment, two distinct architectures stood next to each other.

INTRODUCTION

lies and their friends, as well as neighbors and even strangers they brushed by on their way somewhere else. Public housing residents who were transitioning into mixedincome communities like Westhaven stood and still stand today to lose the most in such experiments. Stricter leasing criteria and looming threats of a displacement driven by redevelopment meant that they stood to lose their ability to remain in a sound place while caring for those they felt obligated to in ways they saw fit. Many had experienced such losses before at the hands of welfare and housing policies that discriminated against women and people of color. Tales of “public aid raids” that forced men to flee or live apart from their households and of building decay that harmed and frightened them ran throughout the personal biographies that residents shared with me.10 Yet as the CHAOS campaign also pointed out, Chicagoans with even the most tenuous connections to public housing also felt disoriented by its redevelopment. This book follows how all these anxiety-provoking experiences compelled publicly and nonpublicly housed Chicagoans to confront the incapacity of their polity to protect its most destitute citizens. And it asks how, in the process, they

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began to imagine the kind of polity—more specifically the kind of city—that might do better. As much as disorienting encounters with changing public housing ignited aspirations toward a more inclusive, more caring city, I found that many of my interlocutors remained uncertain about the rights and the duties of belonging to that city. Such uncertainties are part of what I came to see during my time on the Near West Side as the civics of everyday urban life in a post-welfare city. “Civics” evokes the study of citizenship and by extension the education of a citizen. Civics lessons teach their students about the rights and duties of belonging to a given polity, whether that polity be their nation-state or their city. Civics education came of age in the United States during an era of mass immigration. At the turn of the twentieth century, its proponents saw it as a way to facilitate the assimilation of European immigrants, especially to make them into citizens with firm commitments to their adopted polity. Civics movements got special traction in Chicago. Activists and academics working among immigrants arriving in that rapidly growing city sought to understand how newcomers might move away from primary attachments anchored in families, clans, and villages, and in some cases, how they might be encouraged to develop commitments to the endeavor of collective urban life. They hoped such commitments would model what the United States might someday become, a liberal democratic polity characterized by widespread and inclusive ethnic and religious pluralism.11 My use of “civics” holds fast to these pedagogical dimensions, as well as to the urban setting it implies, while modifying the term for a very different moment preoccupied with a very different population. This would be a moment of national welfare reform, a moment in which federal welfare programs such as public housing seemed— from the look of Chicago’s rotten projects at least—to not be working, to not be facilitating widespread political inclusion or social well-being. And this would be a population of people who were natural-born citizens of a nation-state that treated them, as it had treated their ancestors, as second-class citizens. My use of “civics” fleshes out its pedagogical dimensions alongside its remedial ones. Chicago’s reforms sought to remedy welfare failures by drawing citizens who had, on account of their racial identity and their poverty, long had trouble assimilating into U.S. society together with those who fit in so well that they might not appreciate the challenges of their counterparts. This book seeks to understand how Chicago’s reforms transformed unnerving encounters between these groups into a civic

INTRODUCTION

pedagogy that would root the rights and obligations of citizenly care in the everyday spaces of their city rather than their nation-state. Chicago’s experiment did ask public housing residents to become self-sufficient, and over the past twenty years, nongovernmental organizations, developers, advocates, and service agencies have stepped up to help them exercise responsibility for themselves and their families. This network has taken on a greater share of the work of managing low-income housing and related social services. Chicago’s experiment in this sense fits into broader developments identified by scholars who have examined welfare state retrenchment in North America and western Europe. Taking inspiration from studies that examined how early liberal polities cultivated subjects free to meet their own needs, this scholarship has tracked welfare state retrenchment as it unfolds around two parallel gestures: the “responsibilization” of citizens coupled with the redistribution of social protection across a network of public and private entities that exceed any centralized welfare bureaucracy.12 However, as I spent more time on the Near West Side getting to know more residents leaving public housing and as I became neighbors with new and long-term residents grappling with everyday life in a mixed-income community, I came to suspect that this literature took too much for granted. Specifically, I worried that it took for granted that bodies, their movements, and their sentiments were infinitely tractable, that they could be readily fashioned and refashioned into responsible, self-managing subjects and citizens. I began pursuing questions that would tease apart not only how demands for personal and collective responsibility were disciplined but also how claims on ongoing resources emerged as people ran aground on sensations, movements, and sentiments that they experienced as intractable. This book has three aims. The first is to understand how and with what effect a built environment in flux became central within the arguments that public housing residents advanced concerning their protection at a post-welfare moment. The U.S. welfare state did not end with landmark Welfare Reform legislation in 1996 or with the national overhaul of public housing that got under way a few years earlier. However, I use the term “post-welfare” to highlight the fact that many of my interlocutors understood both policy moves to have terminated one way of protecting impoverished citizens. The book’s second aim is to examine how feelings of interpersonal and collective obligation emerged, expanded, and were cut short in the wake of public housing. Here I am interested in how publicly and nonpublicly housed citizens forged or turned away from new orientations

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toward care through their encounters with the changing people and things of changing housing. The book’s final aim is to understand the terms on which residents of Chicago’s public housing might be included within a city that has, over the past two decades, seen the demolition of residents’ homes and a marked decline in the city’s African American population. This aim requires a consideration of people whose presence might seem strange in a study about public housing: those who have never lived in it. How might outsiders without any obvious biographical connection to public housing come to pay attention to its former residents, to see them as valuable fellow citizens of their city? To meet these aims, the chapters ahead develop three arguments, each of which works with a materialist concept of sympathy. First, Chicago’s reforms rested on the assumption that immediate contact between the people and things of changing public housing would cause the positive qualities, dispositions, and commitments embodied in one group to rub off on the other. Those who authored these policies focused on the transfer of mainstream work habits and security commitments. Yet as chapters 2 and 3 show, my interlocutors learned to encounter things like heating pipes as entities whose unstable qualities reached beyond the surfaces that contained them to affect, even alter, their bodies. Such experiences and the claims they supported played a critical role in how public housing residents advocated for protection at the very moment welfare retrenchment barreled ahead. Second, long-time and recent residents of the Near West Side came to treat contact between changing people, places, and things as a medium that would teach them the practices of sociability and obligation necessary to care differently for those around them—their family members, friends, and new neighbors. For instance, Brenda, a middle-aged woman who had recently left a Horner high-rise for a Westhaven replacement unit when I met her in 2004, often complained to me that unlike her old friends and neighbors from Horner, the better-off neighbors who were moving into the area, “the blacks, the whites, the Puerto Rican people,” often failed to acknowledge her when she passed them on the sidewalk. Still, Brenda clung to the idea that continuing to greet “all of them” would “teach us all” that it was important for “Chicago” to “connect the disconnect.” Many of my interlocutors credited such contact with teaching them the importance of extending themselves across perceived racial and economic divides. At the same time, these experiments shredded intimate networks of reciprocity and obligation that public housing residents had relied upon for affection and support.

Finally, sympathetic contact with ruined public housing allowed outsiders to attend to public housing in ways that inspired them to revisit antipathies they might hold about wrecked places and the people who lived within them. As chapter 6 shows, efforts to open a public housing museum had the potential to render public housing a matter of collective political and social concern while expanding the types of recognition and resources available to public housing residents. Yet that potential recognition and whatever resources it might release turned on the expectation that public housing residents would embody suffering and resilience in the most poignant terms. Put differently, as a mode of expansive connection, inclusion, and obligation, sympathy has its limits. The pages ahead unpack these aims and arguments. Readers more interested in my material might move directly to the chapters.

INTRODUCTION

The Physics of Post-Welfare Care Urban geographers tell us that beginning in the 1970s, the industrial cities of North America and western Europe became central to the reconfiguration of welfare protections anchored in Fordist–Keynesian nation-states.13 In the United States, this reconfiguration unfolded as such cities navigated a twofold process. On the one hand, municipal governments faced a host of social problems exacerbated by the flight of industry, diminished public investments in physical and social infrastructures, impoverished tax bases, and climbing unemployment. On the other hand, federal and state governments were grappling with rapidly shifting capital flows and were coming under growing pressure to roll back established social safety nets and programs. Rollbacks hit urban populations especially hard. Cities began to experiment with ways to attract substantial private investments and to generate revenue to fund critical amenities and services. Chicago’s public housing experiment is by no means singular within a clutch of such experiments that have emerged over the last three decades. These have included everything from public–private partnerships, to the marketing of place to promote private development and tourism, to new surveillance and crime-control strategies. Yet its ambitious scale, its residential focus, and the sheer physical and social wreckage that inspired it make it a productive site to examine the rights and duties of urban citizenship at a moment when national governments seemed incapable of protecting destitute citizens. The U.S. welfare state expanded in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century to encompass a range of programs designed

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to protect citizens against common problems, like old age and its infirmities, and extraordinary ones, like the Great Depression and the mass unemployment it unleashed. Housing programs became pivotal within this expanding welfare state. In fact, the New Deal— the raft of legislation advanced during the 1930s that pulled the United States out of the Great Depression—included not one but two major housing acts. The first, the National Housing Act of 1934, established the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). It made the self-amortizing, low-interest mortgage—that is, a mortgage that allows the borrower to pay down both the interest and the principle of the loan across a set period of time—a fixture of economic mobility for middle-class or middle-class-aspiring citizens. The FHA would go on to guarantee some thirty-four million properties, making it the largest mortgage backer not just in the United States but anywhere in the entire world.14 The Housing Act of 1937 established a system of “low rent housing,” what we now know as public housing. This program aspired to “remedy the unsafe and unsanitary housing conditions and the acute shortage of safe, decent, and sanitary dwellings for families of lower income.”15 Taken together, these acts made housing subsidies indispensable to the physical, financial, and social well-being of many citizens. Yet as chapter 2 shows, these programs meted out that well-being on unmistakably uneven terms. Housing subsidies provided white ethnics with social and economic mobility, while relegating people of color to situations that provided little opportunity for either. Subsidized housing programs may have been central within this burgeoning welfare state, but as the century wore on, the term “welfare” came to refer colloquially to just one program: Aid to Dependent Children, later Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC).16 In the 1950s and 1960s, the federal government pressured states to expand AFDC rolls to include people of color.17 And in the 1960s, a welfare rights movement emerged in northern cities like New York and Chicago as poor people empowered by the civil rights movement organized to secure benefits.18 Public backlash against these expansions intensified in the 1970s and 1980s, with the most vitriolic criticisms aimed at black women on welfare. That popular discourse around these reforms should fixate on impoverished black women should come as no surprise: the work of mothering, most especially when performed by women of color, had never counted for too much in a welfare state that orbited white masculine labor and soldierly sacrifice.19 In 1996, the passage of the federal Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, better

INTRODUCTION

known as Welfare Reform, abolished AFDC and replaced it with a temporary assistance program designed to push recipients into regular employment outside the home.20 Welfare Reform was widely touted as the central domestic policy achievement of Bill Clinton’s presidency—evidence that he had fulfilled his campaign pledge to “end welfare as we have come to know it.” The public face of troubled public housing in the 1990s, too, was a single black woman, as suggested by the image of a young mother mired in decrepit, dangerous, and isolating housing conditions. Such an image graced the cover of the 1992 report of the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing.21 This congressional commission, formed during George H. W. Bush’s presidency, classified eighty-six thousand public housing units as “severely distressed.” That is, 6 percent of the nation’s public housing stock stood in housing projects plagued by decline, crime, inadequate services, and a high concentration of impoverished and underemployed residents. A small percentage, to be sure, but the report insisted that the severity of such conditions constituted a “national disgrace” that warranted immediate intervention. The commission called for the elimination of “unfit, unsafe, unlivable” conditions by 2000 and situated that effort within Bush’s push for social policies that would usher in a “kinder, gentler nation.” Pressed by conservative and moderate congressional factions to enact sweeping changes, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) responded that same year with its Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere program. Known as HOPE VI, this program distributed grants to public housing authorities so that they might experiment with redevelopment measures at troubled sites. When Clinton assumed office in 1993, his HUD made HOPE VI a priority. This included embracing a planning and design movement known as New Urbanism. By the time HUD caught on to New Urbanism, the movement had already attracted national attention for developments like Seaside, a planned Florida beach town. Its quaint wooden cottages and pedestrian-oriented design spoke to the movement’s full-throated rejection of architectural and zoning practices that had redefined urban and suburban landscapes in the middle decades of the twentieth century. In particular, the movement criticized the urban renewal and suburban development initiatives that had dramatically altered how Americans lived in the postwar decades. Proponents called for much smaller, mixed-income, neighborhood-based developments rather than urban cores presided over by vast tracts of modernist-era public housing. These developments would employ

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The Final Report of the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing, August 1992. In the 1990s, calls arose for welfare reform, including national public housing reform. The public face of public housing was a young single black mother living in decrepit conditions. Illustration by Derek Horton.

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neotraditional architectural styles to blend low-income housing into the surrounding urban fabric. “We wanted public housing to become like Where’s Waldo,” wrote Marc Weiss, a housing policy expert who promoted New Urbanism within Clinton’s administration. “Invisible in the urban landscape, interwoven into the wider metropolitan fabric, indistinguishable from all other types of private and publicly

INTRODUCTION

assisted homes and apartments.”22 For enthusiasts like Weiss, this visual seamlessness would do much to eradicate the stigma of living in public housing. And because these developments would be built upon reconnected street grids, proponents expected that everyday movements within them would further promote interaction and integration among a diverse set of neighbors. In theory at least, a public housing resident would assume the habits and schedules that led to regular employment once she could take pride in her surroundings and once she had close, casual contact with better-off neighbors who went off to work daily. These interactions would, as one policy pamphlet from this era put it, “boost low-income people into the mainstream.”23 HOPE VI could be analyzed as the spatial extension of the same demands that animated Welfare Reform—demands that poor people assume “personal responsibility” for themselves and their families. More, though, was at stake. Proponents of HOPE VI also expected that everyday encounters among a diverse set of neighbors would ignite interpersonal bonds of trust and cooperation that would then spread throughout redeveloping neighborhoods and cities. In theory, neighbors would leverage these bonds into efforts to manage security, resources, and neighborhood life themselves instead of leaning on state institutions for support; these bonds would lead them to work with other organizations, such as YMCAs and communitydevelopment corporations already dedicated to their neighborhoods and cities; and these bonds would also lead neighbors to appreciate the social and ethnic variety of their cities and towns and to transform the racial fractures of past housing policies into a commitment to multicultural diversity. In theory, the experience of living in these neighborhoods would show their residents, their cities, maybe even their nation how the life of a self-sufficient yet civically minded citizen could, under the right spatial conditions, become contagious.24 In short, what HOPE VI did was flesh out a social physics for collective care in a post-welfare era and invest it with the capacity to transform both publicly and nonpublicly housed citizens. As much as changed things and places might change individual lives, they might also change the lives that citizens led in common. In the 1990s, these aspirations converged in Chicago. More specifically, they converged on the city’s Near West Side. At the start of that decade, Chicago boasted the third-largest housing authority in the United States and its territories. Only New York City and Puerto Rico had larger. Yet those in housing policy

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circles considered the CHA to be the most distressed authority in HUD’s portfolio. The CHA’s record of what some might (and did) call cronyism and corruption stood out, even in a city where neither has ever raised too many eyebrows. By 1995, HUD officials were reporting that eleven of the nation’s fifteen most impoverished census tracts fell within the walls of CHA projects, where 70 percent of households received some form of public assistance in addition to subsidized rental housing. The CHA appeared to be in serious disarray. HUD officials pointed out that some $15 million had gone missing from its pension funds, that it had repeatedly failed to submit an operating budget, and that nearly a third of its roughly forty thousand housing units needed extensive rehabilitation or outright demolition because they were not fit for habitation.25 With such dismal figures, HUD handily justified the department’s takeover of the CHA in 1995 as necessary for the solvency of a national public housing program. Federal takeovers of public housing authorities had happened before, but never in an authority so large, with quite so many highprofile problems. Horner was an obvious place for HUD to begin its efforts. A class-action lawsuit brought in 1991 by a group of Horner mothers against the CHA and HUD (Henry Horner Mothers Guild v. HUD and CHA) and a nonfiction national best seller released that same year (There Are No Children Here) highlighted the complex’s difficult social and physical conditions. The CHA began to seek HOPE VI planning and revitalization grants for the site. When the lawsuit was finally settled in 1995, HOPE VI plans could finally move off the drawing board. As HUD took over the CHA, officials made jump-starting Horner’s redevelopment a priority and framed it as an example of what the agency would be able to do in Chicago.26 Horner’s redevelopment would, thanks to special protections established by the legal settlement, diverge from that of other public housing sites in Chicago. Chapters 1 and 2 take up that divergence in greater detail. For now, I will note two key outcomes of the legal settlement. First, when compared to other public housing complexes undergoing transformation, a higher proportion of Horner residents could remain in the redevelopment. This was not displacement in the classic sense of the term—those residents who opted to remain were not removed from their corner of the Near West Side. Yet it was a displacement just the same. Horner’s phased redevelopment meant that familiar social and material worlds gradually morphed around them. They would learn that place encompasses much more than location.27 Second, those original residents who remained were

not required, at least not at first, to work in order to retain their housing subsidy. With a work requirement and its challenges initially off the table, many could focus on the social and material dimensions of their odd displacement, as well as on the strange presences that it foregrounded in their lives.

INTRODUCTION

A Sympathetic Civics Historically, the U.S. welfare state has championed special protections for citizens whose work is thought to advance national interests. This has included workers (and their families) who contribute to building its economic prosperity and soldiers (and their families) who defend or advance its geopolitical influence. Their protection has superseded that of citizens who cannot or do not toil and reproduce in normative ways.28 Leasing criteria at many of the CHA’s “new communities” included mandatory work requirements, and in this sense, Chicago’s housing experiment also distinguished between deserving and nondeserving citizens in terms of valorized forms of work. But Chicago’s experiment did not only promote work as a citizenly obligation. It also promoted neighborly relations among publicly and nonpublicly housed citizens. In such a system, a citizen’s protection would emerge not only because she worked in virtuous and normative ways. It would also emerge because her neighbor had encountered her presence in place and found it compelling. Yet it is not at all clear why a presence that could be construed as happenstance should be compelling enough to extend obligation and sociality, especially toward groups long construed as different from one’s own. “Something in the call to neighbor-love remains opaque,” Kenneth Reinhard, Eric Santner, and Slavoj Žižek observe in their political theology of the neighbor, “and does not give itself up willingly to univocal interpretation.”29 Scholars of welfare and citizenship have long known that the experience of immediacy is bound up in the way citizens grasp obligations toward fellow citizens. In the late 1940s sociologist T.  H. Marshall suggested that social rights in modern welfare states had expanded to such an extent that every citizen could claim exactly what he was entitled to by way of concrete benefits. Yet that same citizen had only the foggiest sense of how to live “the life of a good citizen, giving such service as one can to promote the welfare of the community.” He met basic obligations toward that community—serving in the military, paying taxes, even working regularly—with apathy and indifference. For Marshall, the problem was one of scale. The

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national welfare community was so large that obligations to it could not but feel “remote and unreal.”30 Anxieties about a bloodless citizenship and the dependent, even parasitic citizens it nurtured arose again at the end of the century. With them came “third-way” welfare policies that moved to dismantle welfare bureaucracies while they promoted a denationalized and in some cases highly localized “welfare community” as the ideal site in and through which to generate and deliver critical resources and protections.31 “Community” need not take an overtly spatial form. Yet as anthropologist Andrea Muehlebach has perceptively noted, an ethos of citizenship has taken root in retrenching welfare states that is aligned not “with the national frameworks that we have come to associate with twentieth-century modernity, but with a new, localized politics of intimacy and immediacy.”32 Her recent study of voluntarism in a neoliberal Italy examines citizenship experiments that mobilize “dependent” and “passive” populations like retirees to perform a critical yet unremunerated labor: the care of the elderly. This mobilization, she argues, turns on the valorization, indeed the sacralization, of relational ties—more specifically, of the labor necessary to maintain elderly citizens. These mobilizations are wrought from the affective associations cultivated by Catholic charity and socialist labor solidarities. Paradoxically this sacralized relational labor undoes the modern welfare state and its obligations by propping up public fantasies of a moral communion rooted in the intimate experience of caring for local infirm. There are striking parallels between the citizenship experiments that preoccupy Muehlebach and me. Both unfolded as a Fordist–Keynesian welfare state redistributed the burdens of caring for vulnerable persons, and both mobilized fantasies of immediacy to valorize face-to-face relationships among citizens. In Muehlebach’s case, these mobilizations reconfigured how citizens valued “immaterial” labor—that is, forms of labor thought to produce little of concrete or durable value. Unpaid care work previously taken for granted was recast as “a redemptive force” that reactivated solidarity in the face of the anomie and isolation of neoliberal market insecurities. Chicago’s experiment has been centered not so much on the valorization of immaterial labor as on the valorization of human vulnerability within an urban world in tremendous material and social flux. Interestingly enough, scholars concerned with urban citizenship movements have also examined a localized politics of immediacy, intimacy, and vulnerability. They have asked how cities that anchor global and translocal circuits of people, goods, and capital lay bare a disconnect between the formal rights extended to official or first-

INTRODUCTION

class members of a nation-state and the dearth of resources for those who hover precariously around its edges. Marginal urbanites push against this disconnect by managing the everyday exigencies of urban life. As they improvise electricity or sanitation, they gain what sociologist Saskia Sassen has called “presence” in their engagement with power and each other. Through that presence, they negotiate forms of inclusion that exceed national citizenship.33 “The city is not merely the context of citizenship struggles,” anthropologist James Holston writes of such scenarios. “Its wraps of asphalt, concrete and stucco, its infrastructure of electricity and plumbing also provide the substance of a new urban citizenship.”34 This work helpfully pulls everyday urban life into the political processes by which the meanings and rules of citizenship expand, but it also raises questions. How exactly does any urbanite learn to attend to presence? How does she come to notice the sensory footprint of another person or thing, be that the electric lights that flicker irregularly through an informal settlement or the neighbors she brushes past every day? And how does she come to grasp those resonances as relevant to their life in common, let alone as matters of mutual commitment? This book tracks how Chicago’s experiment marshaled encounters with a changing built environment, its people, and its things to teach urbanites about the rights and obligations of belonging to a post-welfare city. And it does this by working with the concept of sympathy. One of the best-known philosophical tracts on sympathy in liberal thought flowed from the pen of Adam Smith. Smith insisted throughout his Theory of Moral Sentiments that “fellow feeling” is an effect of the imagination. A bystander forms an impression of another’s passions by imagining how he himself might feel were he to be placed in the exact same situation. “We enter as it were into his body,” Smith wrote, “and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form an idea of his sensations, which though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.”35 Yet because the bystander is not in that situation, he cannot fully enter into another’s passion. A fundamental distance remains. The boundaries of bodies remain intact; the individual remains sacrosanct. Smith described what we would now call empathy. Other early theorists of sympathy considered how bodies might come to understand themselves not just as feeling for but also as feeling with one another. Smith’s contemporary, David Hume, developed one such understanding. In his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume argued that other people’s passions are physically contagious. The bystander first

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observes their signs in another’s body and speech. He treats these signs as evidence of some underlying passion and then converts this inference into an impression. Under the right conditions, a lively impression can acquire “such a degree of force and vivacity, as to become the very passion itself, and produce an equal emotion, as any original affection.”36 Just what are those conditions for Hume? Part of the answer lies in relations of what he called “contiguity” and “resemblance.” Physical proximity to an impassioned being makes for a vivid impression. So does the bystander’s ability to recognize that he and this impassioned being share the same basic human nature. Let me offer an example from my field notes to tease out the distinction that Hume’s concept helps draw between empathy and sympathy. Anne, when I met her in 2003, was a middle-aged white program officer working for a foundation based in Chicago. The foundation had become heavily involved in supporting the CHA’s Plan. When I asked her why a foundation that worked all over the world had become enmeshed in a “backyard” issue, she replied with an account of her own visit in the 1990s to a public housing complex on the city’s South Side. I paraphrase from my notes:

INTRODUCTION

It was a winter morning and Anne was attending a meeting about homelessness in an apartment that had been converted into offices for a social service agency. She had bundled up because it was “freezing.” The minute she walked through the door, she realized “there was something wrong.” It was “boiling” even with the windows wide open. Anne grew uncomfortable. She was overdressed. She was also pregnant. She fled to the bathroom to peel off her scarf, suit jacket, and sweater. She became dizzy. Slumped against the concrete block wall, she thought, “How can we let any mother raise her child in these conditions?” After recovering she went back to the office and set about pitching public housing reform as a major new funding priority.

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Anne’s body was not at all like those of the mothers who lived in Chicago’s projects. It wore elegant clothes; it had several fancy degrees; it lived and worked in a well-maintained building. Even so, what Anne described was not the remove of pity. Through her vivid encounter with haywire heating—an encounter that she filtered through her understanding of motherhood as a general human experience—she inferred that she felt with these women. From there she arrived at a “we” that should neither accept nor permit such treatment.

INTRODUCTION

Throughout my research I heard many accounts like this, and they did not just involve outsiders. Regardless of whether they lingered on boiling heat or mute neighbors, these accounts often ended in a similar fashion: encounters with changing public housing, its material upheaval, and its distressed lives innervated bodies in ways that ignited convictions that one was like (or unlike) other citizens and thus obligated (or not) to promote their well-being. There are, of course, other ways to think about an encounter like Anne’s. Scholars working across a number of fields have recently turned to “affect” to examine how sensory impressions and bodily intensities infuse matter and movement in ways that generate novel forms, thoughts, movements, and alliances in the world.37 One strand of this work focuses on urban life and asks, as geographer Nigel Thrift has, how humans emerge as the effects of “trans-human” networks and events that their bodies respond to and facilitate.38 For example, consider the fact that sleep among residents of the New York apartment building I live in is determined as much by the schedule of a baby who arrived on the first floor two autumns ago as it is by that of the subway that rolls underneath it. Even at rest, my neighbors and I are not confined to our beds. Our nights and our waking hours extend across the reach of cries and vibrations that move through walls and rattle our cabinets, cups, and nerves. Viewed in this light, Anne’s philanthropic endeavors did not just emerge from moral convictions concerning the protection of women and children. They are the wooziest extensions of an overdressed body moving within an overheated building. This perspective pushes us to attend to the energies that saturate and reshape everyday urban life. And that is an especially helpful push when approaching life in cities—places where especially dense configurations of materials, forces, and things impinge on each other in multiple and unexpected ways. Affect scholarship’s emphasis on emergent potentials, novelty, and immediacy, however, can be difficult to transpose to everyday movements within cities shaped by one of the U.S. welfare state’s premier racial projects: subsidized housing. Chapter 2 takes up this project in more detail, looking at how it carved up cities and meted out shelter in ways that exacerbated racial divides. What I want to note now is that my interlocutors’ sensibilities concerning movements and social interactions in everyday urban space emerged within these racial projects. Consider another viscerally intense encounter with the people and things of changing housing, this one relayed by an African American accountant in her late thirties. When I met her in 2004, Cynthia had recently purchased a new

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home on the Near West Side. The house lay across the street from several buildings constructed in the late 1990s to house residents leaving Horner. Cynthia had spent her earliest years in a housing project, but her parents had left it behind in the late 1960s. Housing options were opening up for working- and middle-class African Americans as ethnic whites gained access to mortgages that allowed them to buy property in more desirable parts of the city and its burgeoning suburbs. When I asked why she might return to an area associated with public housing, she replied that property on the West Side was a promising investment. She also talked about a desire to help impoverished African Americans see “something better.” But she also emphasized that she just felt “more comfortable” on the Near West Side. By way of explanation, she relayed an incident that had unfolded three decades earlier. Again, from my notes:

INTRODUCTION

When they left public housing, Cynthia’s family settled in an area that was “turning” [undergoing racial turnover]. Cynthia recalls that their new white neighbors stared at them and that they never spoke. Because she was so young, she had a difficult time understanding what was making her parents nervous. Yet when they all returned one day to find a dead bird strung up on the door by its neck, she felt “sick” and “hurt.” She finally “knew we weren’t welcome.” She gets annoyed by her new neighbors’ outdoor socializing. Their parties are loud, and they run late, even on school nights when her kids (and their kids) need to be getting their rest. Yet she’s never “felt unwelcome here.”

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Cynthia did not mistake the analogy that her old neighbors drew between her family and the bird. And she felt it as their assertion that her family was patently unlike their own. Shared movements in everyday neighborhood spaces did not change this view. Rather, they reinforced perceptions and convictions about racial difference that resonated decades later in her own choices about where to live. A materialist concept of sympathy can accommodate the visceral intensities that course through encounters such as Cynthia’s. It can also, as chapter 3 shows, accommodate suppositions about the transfer of qualities and states between the people and things of a changing built environment. Yet because a materialist concept of sympathy also underscores the fact that feeling with does not emerge easily or spontaneously, it provides more traction for thinking through aspira-

INTRODUCTION

tions and attempts to extend similarity and for asking where both fall short. To see this, it helps to return briefly to Hume. For Hume, physical proximity and resemblance are not enough to make two people alike. A “similarity” must already exist between them. That similarity could be “natural,” that is, rooted in shared blood. It could also be produced through shared education, etiquette, or language. For Hume, the workings of “education and custom” allow the bystander to recognize the signs of another’s passion on his face and in his words and then to make that vivid leap into his feelings and emotions. Yet Hume recognized the problem posed by a citizenry in which shared education, custom, or habit could not be taken for granted. Hume argued that an artificial extension of sympathy could correct the propensity of citizens to care only about what was near and contiguous (that is, one’s family and friends) even if it was in their interest to widen their purview.39 And as anthropologist Danilyn Rutherford has pointed out in her study of Dutch colonial statecraft, for Hume, such corrections would unfold as government staged “concrete experiences that [brought] the interests and viewpoints of fellow citizens into intimate proximity with their own.”40 For Hume, encounters orchestrated, enlivened, and above all made vivid by government and its many “compositions” allowed citizens to step out of their preference for the familiar and the contiguous and to experience the presence of a remote other, to consider her needs or her interests to be as immediate and pressing as any of their own.41 The compositions that preoccupied Hume fit the world in which he wrote. An impartial judiciary, canals to move around goods, harbors from which to launch ships, ramparts to fend off invaders— these were the spectacular infrastructures of an empire working to knit its far-flung subjects together. Chicago’s public housing experiment unfolds at a very different moment. It deals not with state expansion but with retrenchment. Yet it too represents a scenario in which neither the institutions of a polity nor the cohesiveness of its citizenry can be taken for granted. The concept of sympathy invites us to consider how suppositions of likeness might take hold through the coordination of proximity, senses, inferences, and bodies. It challenges us to scrutinize the material experiences by which those entangled in Chicago’s experiment learned to extend themselves and forge sociability across long-standing racial and economic divides. Yet it also asks us to consider those instances in which these divides could not be overcome and in fact were reinforced. This book traces sympathy’s fraught acrobatics of identification and differentiation

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INTRODUCTION

as it unfolded at Horner and Westhaven. It also shows how this acrobatics extended beyond Westhaven, to enliven imaginations of collective life and citizenly obligation.

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A Sympathetic Public Political philosopher Charles Taylor reminds us that the social imaginaries of “the public” and “the citizenry” are inextricably bound. Individual citizens come to understand their citizenship and the rights and duties it metes out as they are summoned to publics that orient them toward collective objects of contemplation, discussion, or sentiment.42 My research began as an effort to track how public housing’s redevelopment redistributed the work of caring for poor people across private citizens and entities. Yet it became focused on the nascent public congealing around Chicago’s housing experiment. As I tracked the publicity, or widespread noteworthiness, of public housing, I began asking what kinds of arguments and actions around protection would become thinkable within a public that trafficked in sympathetic encounters with changing places, their people, and their things.43 Any invocation of “public” is rife with ambiguity. The term can refer to state-administered goods like public housing, to a realm of dense and lively sociability, or even to anything beyond the private domestic realm.44 These meanings resonate throughout the story that this book tells about public housing reform. But when I refer to a public, I have something very particular in mind: a large-scale, mass subject that emerges through shared attention to a form in circulation. Scholars have tended to examine publics by tracking discursive or textual materials in circulation. For them a public is that sense of a total social whole, that fleeting sense of a “we” that sometimes comes into focus when you read a newspaper, magazine, or novel; when you talk, write, or think about something you have read or seen in the media; and when you imagine countless others doing the same in the far reaches of your city, your nation, maybe even your world.45At these moments, you abstract away from your body and your location to imagine and enact membership in a group that spans social and geographic distances. Anyone who recognizes a discursive form to be addressing or speaking to them, that is, anyone who can notice and respond to that form, can be knitted into this whole. A public, then, is an expansive, voluntary, and open-ended relation among strangers.46 Stranger sociability is critical to understandings of publics in liberal democratic polities. It provides the basis for strangers to

INTRODUCTION

gather in sites of sanctioned exchange—the pages of newspapers, the squares and streets claimed by protesters—to come to consensus on matters of shared relevance and to make demands of authorities in a position to respond to them. Aspirations toward something like an expansive, collective social whole hang around the edges of my interlocutors’ remarks. Brian and Lou invoked them when they hoped that the CHANGE and CHAOS campaigns might spark “the conversation” or “the dialogue” that Chicago or “the public” needed to have about public housing reform. Brenda gestured toward a “Chicago” whose diverse residents might “connect the disconnect” as they learned to greet neighbors across the lines of race, class, gender, and generation. And when Anne nearly fainted in that bathroom, she slumped toward a we that should no longer tolerate poor housing conditions for poor people. Yet in each of these cases, imaginations and invocations of this “we,” this “Chicago,” this “city” spill beyond the speaking, reading, and writing practices that so often anchor studies of publics. As much as these invocations might involve the circulation of discourse, they also involve the circulation of embodied, corporeal, and tactile experiences. After all, Anne’s convictions and actions emerged not through talking, writing, or debating about heat. They took hold as her body became entirely undone by a heating system that she found unbearable. My interlocutors aspired to an expansive we whose members might sort out the rights and duties of belonging to a post-welfare city. Yet they arrived at these aspirations not by abstracting away from their locations and bodies but by learning to attend more closely to both. In this respect, the addresses of a changing built environment and the people and things moving through it became a demanding social and material phenomenology. This phenomenology pulled people into collective attention and consternation about the obligations of collective protection in a polity that no longer seemed capable of guaranteeing it. An unnerving encounter, then, was not the only thing at stake as my interlocutors collided with wrecked buildings, excruciatingly hot and cold homes, raucous neighbors, or poignant stories about the resilient poor. At stake was consensus itself—an agreement that emerges as sentient beings come to feel with each other. A meeting of bodies and senses might make for a meeting of the minds. As my interlocutors’ comments might suggest, the nascent we gathering force around redeveloping public housing encouraged some to imagine an ideal welfare community as a city whose citizens would care for those immediately in their midst. I want to be clear

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INTRODUCTION

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that I am not claiming that this sympathetic public has formed in Chicago. Nor am I suggesting that it has ushered in a more inclusive, “post-racial” city made up of more caring citizens. Rather, this book examines how aspirations toward both allowed a range of Chicagoans to reckon with the feelings, arguments, and sentiments that they hoped would help move them past the social fractures of failed public housing. Understanding these aspirations and how they are generated through encounters with changing public housing is critical to understanding the terms upon which residents leaving public housing will come to be seen as important and valuable citizens of a city that was demolishing their homes. These are important considerations during the decade that Chicago underwent profound demographic changes. Chicago’s pronounced history of residential segregation has made the city a textbook example in studies focused on the politics of race and space in twentieth-century urban America. The questions that many scholars have brought to this city have, for good reason, concentrated on the impact of racial segregation on every aspect of social life. This is especially the case in studies focused on housing, because everything from sound shelter, jobs, schools, and hospitals to wealth generation is bound up in the distribution of this good. To adapt sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois’s phrase, in the urban United States, housing represents a particularly stark example of the color line and the multiple economic, political, and social inequalities mapped along it.47 Housing is a case in which the black–white binary that has long structured racial categorization in the United States seems especially pronounced. Even so, scholars examining contemporary immigration and migration are showing how these processes displace and restructure categories of racialized and economic difference in ways that cannot be encapsulated in the black–white binary.48 The need to attend to the complex and shifting politics of difference was especially apparent during my research. It was a moment when Chicago was undergoing a striking demographic transformation. In 1920, only 4 percent of Chicago’s inhabitants were black, but after four decades of the Great Migration, they accounted for 40 percent of the city’s population.49 The last census suggests a startling shift. Between 2000 and 2010, Chicago lost some two hundred thousand people, and African Americans accounted for 90 percent of that loss. The Great Migration, in its second and third generations, seems to be migrating on. Census data also suggest that those African Americans leaving Chicago tend to be people of more means. Those

INTRODUCTION

remaining, then, have inherited problems that come with population decline. This includes increased vacancy and abandonment, shuttered schools and churches, and a diminished political voice. Yet because they are more impoverished, they have fewer resources with which to navigate these problems. In this shifting demographic context, it is worth asking whether the politics of citizenly inclusion will also shift to foreground arguments about difference that engage familiar racial binaries and hierarchies at the same time as they take them in unexpected directions. For example, those who lived through Horner’s decline confronted a legal arena in which claims about racial discrimination in housing no longer held the sway they once had. Nevertheless, they had to deal with the material and social legacies of discrimination. Some of those legacies, as chapters 2 and 3 show, took shape as decrepit buildings. As public housing residents and their advocates grappled with these conditions, they advanced claims upon critical resources that moved away from arguments about racial discrimination. They called attention to physical and emotional harms that any body exposed to such conditions would experience. Similarly, chapter 6 takes up efforts to stretch a celebratory cultural politics of multiculturalism to accommodate darker histories of state-mediated neglect, such as the federal abandonment of public housing. In these and other cases, encounters with changing built environments and their social and material impingements ignited novel claims about what had made publicly housed Chicagoans so different from other citizens. But they also ignited aspirations toward a moral and social whole anchored in the city, a whole that might someday reconcile those differences. As much as these aspirations involved public housing residents, their advocates, and their new neighbors, Chicagoans with no obvious stake in the reforms also became swept up in them. For this reason, it is important to examine the communicative practices, material encounters, and sensory experiences that summoned them to collective meanings and commitments of care. Anthropologist Patricia Spyer has asked if the well-worn analytical categories available for thinking through social difference, namely, race or class, are supple enough to convey “the intricacies of agentive, sensuously informed social differentiation.”50 The same might be asked about the intricacies of sensuously informed social belonging. These are tough questions to entertain given the extent to which transformative politics in the United States have been bound up in movements that take

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INTRODUCTION

aim at racial and economic exclusion. Without losing sight of such exclusions, how might scholars refine familiar categories of analysis to make sense of a context in which marginal urbanites’ claims to place and belonging have come to hinge on something so fragile as a corroding pipe or a noisy neighbor?

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Plan of the Book To unpack aspirations toward a more inclusive city populated by more caring citizens, this book pieces together the discursive, social, and material conditions through which an urban public might emerge in and through place. After an overview of the Near West Side and the challenges of conducting research there, each part of the book takes up a different dimension of a public and its formation: circulation, sociability, and expansion. Part I focuses on the things that circulated within and beyond Horner’s moldering walls and the interpretive communities that began to emerge around them. It asks how encounters with these things shaped the kinds of political recognition and redress available to those who had lived at Horner. Chapter 2 tracks building decay as it began to move beyond Horner’s walls in the 1990s. It pays special attention to how this decay got traction and propelled a sense of national urgency about severely distressed public housing. I examine how residents and their advocates drew attention to Horner’s conditions by experimenting with legal and narrative strategies that undermined arguments that its residents should be held responsible for Horner’s destruction. Through these experiments, residents established new protections, but these protections were rooted in their ongoing exposure to decrepit housing. In chapter 3 I track how this association between harm and protection resonated a decade later, as transitioning Horner residents coped with the loss of abundant heat. As they sought to replicate this heat, its sensations, and its comforts, they did not just expose themselves and their families to serious risks. Some also argued that a taste for intense heat had become a dangerous fact of their bodies. The second part of this book is organized around the problem of sociability and its reeducation within neighborhood spaces and intimate social networks. How, it asks, do urbanites learn to relate differently to the strange and familiar people around them? Chapter 4 takes up newcomers’ and transitioning Horner residents’ preoccupations with their new neighbors, and in particular with the extent

INTRODUCTION

to which these new neighbors seemed (in)vulnerable to the people and things around them. It examines how members of both groups collided in public in ways that prodded them to experiment with extending themselves or closing themselves off. As much as these experiments compelled some Westhaven residents to entertain the prospect of social intimacy across long-standing racial and economic divides, they also prodded some transitioning Horner residents to reevaluate their intimate ties and obligations. Chapter 5 takes this problem up in greater detail by examining how transitioning Horner residents grappled with the fact that control over critical resources was migrating away from familiar networks and into the hands of external organizations. Here I track suspicions that emerged in this uncertain climate of provisioning and show how they threatened longstanding obligations among transitioning Horner residents. Taken together, this second part examines how residents of Westhaven reckoned with sociability, its potentials, and its constraints in a place where neither nuclear households nor sprawling networks of kith and kin could serve as a locus of obligation. The final part of this book tracks how the collective sentiments, arguments, and debates gathering around Chicago’s changing public housing might expand and grow beyond those most immediately affected by its reforms—transitioning public housing residents and their new neighbors. How might those without any obvious connection to public housing, its failures, or its redevelopment learn to care for and about its former residents? Chapter 6 takes up this question by tracking early efforts to bring a national museum of public housing to Chicago’s Near West Side. I focus on this museum’s early supporters as they imagined the kinds of exhibits that could bring strangers to public housing into contact with its residents. These imagined exhibits transformed the racism, neglect, and sexism endured by public housing residents into a poignant feature of their cultural heritage. They also positioned the display and consumption of poor people’s resilience as a civic virtue in its own right, one that publicly and nonpublicly housed museumgoers might participate in. The book’s epilogue resituates Chicago’s housing experiment within the wake of the Fordist–Keynesian welfare state’s premier housing project: subsidized housing, in all its guises. It considers the mobilization of sympathy within efforts to raise urban publics capable of managing the fallout of public housing and mortgaged home ownership. And it also raises questions about sympathy’s sway

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within a contemporary anthropology preoccupied with capturing, cataloging, and conveying the physical and social wreckage of our neoliberal moment.

INTRODUCTION

Before I proceed with this study of public housing’s transformation on Chicago’s West Side, I want to acknowledge the challenges of writing about aspirations that unfold within the footprints of intense racial and economic inequality. In Chicago, aspirations for a more inclusive city made up of more caring citizens were just that—aspirations. But rather than dismiss them as naive, critique them for not having been realized, or count the ways they exacerbate or evade inequalities, this book does something else. It examines how the engagements that these aspirations staged among people, places, and things compelled a range of urbanites to feel a likeness to the people and things around them, and it examines how, in the process, some began to think, argue, and act differently about public housing and poverty. I take this approach because I want an analysis of urban planning and, more broadly, urban life that moves beyond what has been, in the fields I am closest to at least, an almost single-minded focus on the gap between intended plans and actualized orders, between those who devise and unroll schemes and those who must endure or resist them. Concerns about human intention and failure are important within studies of urban planning and policy.51 Yet post-industrial cities like Chicago invite other questions as well: How do obsolete infrastructures such as decaying projects, shuttered factories, and vacant homes linger in the sensibilities, solidarities, and bodies of those who have spent lifetimes moving around them? How do these lingering sensibilities and solidarities now press into flesh, thought, feeling, and action novel arguments concerning what might be owed to citizens who weathered the worst of such abandonment? And what might citizens of a city struggling to get past their divisive social and material legacies now owe to one another? Such questions can illuminate the peculiar social and material aftermaths of the Fordist– Keynesian welfare state in the United States. In the urban Midwest, they can help us think about everything from how urbanites navigate the spatial and psychic scars of racial segregation, to how they will navigate the hazardous materials that flake off so many abandoned buildings and into the bodies that move alongside them.

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1

Across Damen

Olds • New Every summer for the past decade, a couple thousand former public housing residents gather at Union Park on Chicago’s Near West Side for the Henry Horner Family Reunion Picnic. Those who have moved into Westhaven, the mixed-income community that has risen in Horner’s wake, come from just a few blocks away. Others arrive from the suburbs. Some even come from out of state to catch up with old friends and family, share photographs, play games, listen to music, and dance. Union Park is often busy in the summer, but these revelers stand out in the crowds. Many wear versions of the official reunion T-shirt. Printed on its back are the addresses of all twenty-one buildings that once made up the complex. Many wearers decorate the backs with airbrushed images and messages that memorialize people and buildings who have “passed.” The front is usually printed with some version of the following: Henry Horner Olds • New Across Damen

Damen Avenue between Washington Boulevard and Lake Street divided two of the three subsections that once made up the entire Horner complex. It separated the Henry Horner Homes (“the Olds”) from the Henry Horner Extension (“the New”). A third subsection, the Annex, still lies a few blocks to the south. Much to the chagrin of its former and current residents, during the reunion’s earliest years, “the Valley” appeared on the T-shirt not by name but as a series of addresses. Residents of Horner’s subsections attended different schools and churches; they played in different parks and recreation centers; 33

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Aerial view, looking east, of the Horner complex during the earliest phase of demolition and redevelopment, 1996. The Extension, footprints of demolished Extension buildings, and the first town houses of the Superblock can be seen in the lower left of the frame. The Horner Homes stand “across Damen”—that is, across the third north–south street from the bottom of the frame (north is to the left). The Annex is visible at the top right corner of the United Center. The United Center is surrounded by a sea of parking lots, just south of Madison, the major east–west artery in the area. Photograph by the Chicago Housing Authority; courtesy of William Wilen.

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they formed and joined different social groups, including youth clubs, mutual aid groups, and gangs. And while many who lived at Horner, and later Horner as it was becoming Westhaven, frequently crossed Damen, all these differences could complicate that crossing. When I started spending time in the area in 2003, parents and guardians worried that Horner’s redevelopment was relocating children in ways that exacerbated gang tensions. They complained about shortsighted planners and developers who had located new parks, recreation centers, or schools on one versus the other side of Damen. But getting across Damen was complicated for another

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reason: the traffic was terrible. Damen swells to five lanes in other parts of Chicago. However, between Washington Boulevard and Lake Street, Damen has just three lanes. That narrowness is deceptive. Traffic lurches, diverges, and speeds up unpredictably through these blocks. Some motorists race south toward the on-ramps of the Eisenhower Expressway. Dating from the mid-1950s, the era of Interstate expansion, the Eisenhower connects Chicago’s downtown business district, “the Loop,” to its western suburbs. Other drivers might be en route to an event at the United Center, such as a basketball or hockey game, a circus, or a concert. The United Center lies just to the south. At these times cars swerve around traffic managers and ticket scalpers as motorists search for parking in the sea of asphalt that surrounds this massive sports and entertainment complex. Other cars stop suddenly to discharge passengers at their “church home.” Many African Americans who had the means left the Near West Side as it underwent intense disinvestment in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet some retain ties to local churches and return to visit them regularly. Throughout my research, several of these churches stood along this stretch of Damen. Also converging here were memories of the concrete walkways that had once connected the Olds with the New. By 2005, these walkways were nearly gone, and a reconstructed street grid had begun emerging in their wake. Like many midcentury urban renewal projects, Horner’s site plan called for expansive open spaces that interrupted the perpendicular lines of the regular street grid. Yet in 2005, those with Horner still in their feet were beating its recently demolished walkways back into the urban landscape. Children who lived in the last two mid-rises at the Horner Homes often bunched along the sidewalk where a desire line that traced one of Horner’s demolished walkways let out. There they would pause, considering how best to chance the crossing to get home. The smallest among them would wait for adults to ferry them across. One early summer evening in 2005, that adult was me. The four-year-old daughter of a friend seized my hand as I passed by. As I walked her and her brother across Damen, three older men socializing alongside one of the mid-rises began to point and shout. The men “stayed,” as local vernacular put it, in these partially shuttered buildings while they awaited relocation to their as yet unconstructed replacement housing. I had often noticed them passing balmy afternoons sitting under a towering tree, on lawn chairs and milk crates crowded around a small card table as they conducted furious checkers matches. We had never spoken. “See,” one of them shouted as he

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gestured to the children and me, “a teacher!” His companions looked to me for affirmation. I denied it, but added that I might teach someday. A second piped up, “Kevin’s sister!” I did not know Kevin, so I shook my head. But when I finally met him the next year I understood this guess. Redheaded like me, Kevin belongs to a family that owns and operates several parking lots around the United Center. With my second denial, the third gamer crowed in triumph, “Okay, okay. Researcher! Making a study, right?” This I could not deny. The checkers players then walked me through the process of elimination by which they had situated me in their world. Unlike me, the young “white church people” did not walk around alone. They pulled their vans up to Horner’s remaining buildings and walked their halls in pairs, brandishing the Pixy Stix and dill pickles and permission slips that reeled some project children into services at a suburban megachurch. While I had been spotted making rounds with social service agents tasked with helping residents transition out of Horner, I never carried a clipboard. Besides, they noted, that staff was composed almost entirely of “black ladies.” Maybe she’s a reporter, someone suggested. But they decided my camera was not big enough. Someone ventured that I might be a police officer—not a bad guess given that drug and gang activity in one of the remaining mid-rises had attracted police attention. Yet the men agreed that I did not look like “no lady cop.” This left teacher and researcher contending as the best and, as it turned out, most accurate guesses.

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A young white woman cannot live or conduct research in a place whose decline and revitalization is tangled up in histories of racial segregation, surveillance, and state abandonment without being asked, again and again, to account for her presence to a variety of people. Shortly after I turned my attention to Chicago’s ambitious public housing reforms, academics and activists began asking me to examine the privilege that allowed me to ask questions about a place that poor people of color call home. Some social workers, planners, architects, journalists, and policy makers engaged in public housing reform were perplexed by my interest in their work. Wouldn’t a researcher of public housing be better served talking with the residents? And during my first few months of living in the area, plainclothes police officers demanded that I account for my comings and goings. They stopped me or pulled me over while I was out walking, biking, or driving. They pounded on my apartment door at odd hours, frightening the two cats I was then watching for a friend. They held out the same mug shot of a black man said to live there. He

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could not have been twenty. Where are you going? What are you doing? What’s in that bag? Who else lives here? When will he be back? Some asked these intrusive questions respectfully enough. Others did not. They stood at the threshold and stared at my arms, wrapped around the squirming cats. They insinuated sordid entanglements in local economies surrounding heroin, white women, and sex. Residents transitioning out of Horner also asked me to account for my presence. But what struck me was that, like the checkers players, they usually had a good sense of the exact terms upon which someone like me might be spending time in the area. I could be there to teach or “save” children. I could also be there to monitor impoverished households. That monitoring and management might resemble the activities of a law enforcement official. It was more likely to look like the activities of a social worker armed with her paperwork and clipboards or of a researcher armed with her notebooks. In places like the Near West Side, the production of poverty knowledge cannot be distinguished so easily from the surveillance and management of poor people. At first, I found residents’ accounts of me surprising, because they ran against the grain of literature I had read to prepare for my research. This work tended to emphasize the isolation and fear that kept disadvantaged residents of places like the Near West Side physically and imaginatively confined to “the ghetto” or “the projects.” Yet residents leaving Horner had a keen sense of what had brought me to the area. Our Chicago was not the city that sociologist Robert Park had once famously described as “a mosaic of little worlds which touch but do not interpenetrate.”1 Our “little worlds” touched and folded in on one another. Suspended in those folds were the fates of leases, grants, housing benefits, dissertations, and policy experiments. I started spending time on the Near West Side in 2003 as a graduate student concerned with the politics of urban planning and poverty. Over the next decade, I ended up conducting some three years of full-time research tracking Horner’s transformation into Westhaven. The most uninterrupted periods of this work fell between 2005 and 2007, the very years Westhaven moved deeper into its mixed-income phases. Horner was never Chicago’s largest public housing project, nor was it the best-known. Those distinctions went to projects like the Robert Taylor and Cabrini–Green Homes. But what drew me to the Near West Side was the fact that multiple local and national interests and institutions had converged around what might, by all accounts, appear to be an insignificant housing project. Horner’s redevelopment began five years before the CHA undertook its Plan

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for Transformation. It attracted outsiders and experts set on developing and refining tools that might be used at other public housing projects classified as “severely distressed,” both in and beyond Chicago. Horner-becoming-Westhaven struck me as an ideal site to start thinking through how federal and state governments were redistributing the work of managing poor people across a network of public and private institutions. Over the next few years I came to understand that this morphing place was not simply one across which to read “privatization,” “criminalization,” “racialization,” or any other -ization I was busy filling my head with as a young graduate student. I came to understand that a built environment in tremendous material and social flux impinged on those who came into range of it, and that these impingements affected the claims that they could make about the rights and obligations of belonging to a post-welfare city. The pages ahead provide an account of the who, the wheres, and the hows of a study that sought to be alive to the complex convergences and impingements that have animated Horner’s redevelopment.

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Housing and Other Projects I will start with the most straightforward of descriptions, that of a modernist-era housing project that once stood on Chicago’s Near West Side, about two miles west of the Loop. Built in stages, Horner’s first building opened in 1955 and its last in 1969. The Governor Henry Horner Housing Complex consisted of three subdevelopments: the Henry Horner Homes, the Henry Horner Extension, and the Henry Horner Annex. Roughly speaking, the Homes and the Extension were bounded on the east and west by Ashland and Western Avenues, on the north by the light-industrial corridor and elevated-train tracks that still run along Lake Street, and on the south by Madison Street. The Annex, the final subdevelopment to be completed, stood a bit apart from the rest of the main development, several blocks south of Madison. The CHA’s records report that at the height of the complex’s occupancy in the late 1970s, Horner housed some 8,400 residents, almost all of them black.2 This estimate is probably low, because many CHA households have long included people who do not appear on leases. In a city whose largest complexes are thought to have housed over twenty thousand people, Horner weighed in as a smaller family development. Its demolition began in 1995, and its redevelopment into Westhaven is ongoing. Only one original building stands today, a renovated mid-rise at the Annex.

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Before these three subdevelopments, or subsections, became “the projects”—that is, before they became a particular and particularly stigmatized kind of place associated with state-subsidized housing for poor people—each was a project in its own right. Each was an undertaking that demanded significant time, planning, and coordination to complete. When you rifle through what is left of the CHA’s archive, you see this second sense of project at play. Its early files are organized not by the names of the developments but by a numbering system that identifies each development as a discrete project within a much more expansive national one. “Public Housing Administration Aided Project No. Illinois 2-19” would later be renamed the Henry Horner Homes, in honor of a Depression-era Illinois governor known for his work on behalf of the state’s poor. Horner first appeared on the drawing board in 1949. It was part of a slate of Public Housing Administration projects in Chicago funded under the National Housing Act of 1949. Project No. Illinois 2-19 emerged when the National Housing Act of 1949 renewed federal commitments to housing programs and slum clearance efforts that had been established during the New Deal but were then stalled by World War II. It expanded the FHA, effectively making low-cost mortgages available to many more citizens. As returning veterans also gained access to home loans through the Veterans Administration, the suburbs and the Sunbelt experienced explosive development.3 In older cities like Chicago, the 1949 act expanded slum-clearance efforts by providing funds to plow under huge swaths of the city to make room for towering public housing blocks. Before the war, Chicago’s public housing program had built row houses and low-rise, walk-up style buildings.4 Projects financed through the 1949 act were of a much higher density. Between 1957 and 1968, the years that many of the projects financed through that act started to open in Chicago, the CHA built 15,591 new units of public housing. All but 696 were in high-rise buildings. In less than ten years, it more than doubled the 14,205 units it had built between 1937 and 1956.5 The U.S. welfare state’s housing projects altered cities like Chicago in the middle decades of the twentieth century. In doing so, it etched into those landscapes one of the most entrenched divides of U.S. society: race. Low-cost mortgages backed by the Federal Housing Administration and, following the war, by the Veterans Administration were generally unavailable for those looking to finance the purchase of homes in urban neighborhoods. This was especially the case for any areas associated with black people. This unavailability was part of a more

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general practice that was known as “redlining,” after the color-coded maps that banking officials used to mark neighborhoods thought to pose too high a risk for lending and insurance.6 At the same time, restrictive housing covenants and general discrimination made it difficult for blacks (and in some metropolitan areas, also Jews, Latinos, and Asians) to secure housing in desirable areas within and beyond the city. Exclusion from mortgaged home ownership did not just bar blacks and others from important economic and educational opportunities.7 It also advanced the decay and disinvestment of urban areas where racialized minorities could secure housing because a major vehicle for investment in the housing stock remained out of reach. As these disinvested areas deteriorated, the residential lives of these racialized groups, most especially blacks, became widely associated with decay and decline. The U.S. welfare state’s twentieth-century housing project was, in sociologists Michael Omi’s and Howard Winant’s sense of the term, a “racial project.” It was “simultaneously an interpretation, representation or explanation of racial dynamics and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular lines.”8 This project meted out subsidized housing on racial terms and mapped blackness onto decay. It shaped the experience and meaning of residential life within and beyond cities, and it fed anxieties that racially integrated areas would become decrepit and worthless. These anxieties were exacerbated by a massive demographic shift underway in the United States during the twentieth century. During the Great Migration (circa 1915–70), industrial cities in the North and West saw an influx of some six million African Americans from the Jim Crow South. Chicago beckoned half a million with the promise of jobs in steel mills and in the meatpacking and war munitions industries.9 The new social and economic opportunities they found were, as St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton describe in their landmark study of Chicago’s largest prewar black enclave, “freedom, limited.” Black migrants hit walls of varying solidity when it came to working, socializing, and, especially in a society anxious about miscegenation, living in racially integrated contexts.10 Fierce opposition to residential integration made housing outside the city’s established black areas a difficult and dangerous prospect for blacks of all classes. Arson, bombings, social intimidation, and racially restrictive housing covenants kept a growing black population hemmed within black enclaves. Their swelling populations strained crowded and subdivided housing stocks. In 1948 the U.S. Supreme Court held that racially restrictive housing covenants were unenforceable. Yet by that time, frustrated residents of Chicago’s black

enclaves had already begun to test race-based residential boundaries by attempting to move into nearby neighborhoods. These moves destabilized racial geographies, and the CHA’s expansion became pulled into efforts to stabilize them.11 When opposition from local politicians forced the CHA to scale back its plans to build on vacant lands in outlying areas, it ended up concentrating its efforts on already-established projects and clearing surrounding slum areas for new construction. Many areas eventually selected for expansion and clearance were located in or nearby already-established, and by this time rapidly deteriorating, black enclaves. The area where Horner eventually rose was one such place.12 The Near West Side did not house Chicago’s largest black enclave in the years leading up to Horner’s construction, but it did house one of its oldest. By the time the city was incorporated in 1837, a small community had already settled along Lake Street around the area that would become Union Park. It grew throughout the nineteenth century as blacks arrived from Missouri, Kentucky, and Virginia, and it came to be known as the Lake Street Community.13 Starting in the late nineteenth century, Italian, Greek, Polish, and Russian immigrants came to the Near West Side to work in warehouses and industry. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Mexican and Puerto Rican migrants came to work in railroads and the industrial corridor growing along Lake Street.14 These first- and second-generation migrants and immigrants hemmed in the Lake Street Community on all sides. Throughout the 1940s, increasing numbers of black migrants continued arriving from the South, as did black residents displaced by slum clearance and urban renewal efforts underway in other parts of the city. Meanwhile, home ownership and rental opportunities beyond the Near West Side began drawing away the white ethnics and Puerto Rican and Mexican migrants in the area. Without these buffers, the Lake Street Community began pushing against its western and southern edges. “When my family moved just south of Madison [in the early 1950s] my sisters and me were the only black kids on my block,” Terrance, a fifty-something community organizer and lifelong resident of the Near West Side, noted to me in 2005.

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But in five years, there was only one white kid on the block left. When we got there, Madison Street was loaded with buildings, shops, and stores. The only thing was that not a lot of the businesses were black owned and operated; they were mostly Jewish. Still, everything was available here to

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us, theaters, groceries, everything. The only thing you really needed to go downtown for was to visit city hall, for tax records. Some worked in the community, and some, not far. Lots of small industry. You had Sears, Spiegel’s, Hawthorne Electric, huge companies, right around here. Then downtown, your chefs, your waitstaff, your porters, your doormen, your elevator operators, were all black. That’s why a lot left the South and came up here—there was a wealth of jobs.

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The ongoing arrival of blacks to the Near West Side throughout the 1950s and 1960s made nonblack residents in surrounding areas nervous. Seeking to quell growing anxieties about the racial turnover of the West Side, Chicago’s City Council elected to site a large public housing project on the Near West Side that might consolidate the area’s growing black population. This large project eventually became two smaller ones: the Henry Horner Homes and Rockwell Gardens. With designs that included fifteen-story buildings, Project No. Illinois 2-19 was among the earliest high-rise developments in Chicago. Sited on eighteen acres and designed by the architecture and engineering firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), 2-19 would bring 920 units of family housing to the Near West Side. SOM has a storied place in the history of modern architecture and is known especially for its work in the International Style. For the Horner Homes, SOM designed two fifteen-story high-rise buildings and seven seven-story mid-rise buildings, basically recycling plans it had already developed for the Harold Ickes Homes, a mid-rise project built on the city’s South Side.15 Two-bedroom apartments made up the vast majority of units, but the buildings also had a fair number of one- and three-bedroom units and a handful of four- and five-bedroom units reserved for larger families. Architects and planners eliminated the established street grid on the site and set Horner’s concrete-framed, brick-infill buildings back from the street. This move conformed to modernist design principles, prioritizing ample space for recreation and repose away from the street, its dangers, and its uncleanliness.16 Blueprints illustrate residents’ access to abundant landscaped spaces, among them playgrounds, tot lots, and a large playing field; lawns alongside walkways and buildings; and a recreation center. Decades later, during my research years, former residents would point to these abundant outdoor and recreational spaces as evidence that Horner had built within them the very tastes for outdoor socializing that had come to unnerve recently arrived residents on the Near West Side. The CHA staggered the Horner Homes’ construction across two

Early sketch of the site plan for the Henry Horner Homes, 1952. Buildings set back far from the street allowed ample space for recreation. Courtesy of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP.

stages. The first opened in 1955; the second, two years later. A press release boasted that it was the eighth housing project to be completed in Chicago in eight years.17 Behind this boast, and behind the rote feel of its designs, stood the fact that demand for CHA housing among Chicago’s working- and middle-class African Americans, and thus the pace of project construction, remained brisk throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. Chicago’s population of African Americans had been growing quickly. Indeed, in 1920, 4 percent of Chicagoans were black; by 1960, that number had reached 40 percent.18 Yet throughout the 1950s, housing prospects outside black enclaves remained limited. Early Horner residents told me they had felt lucky to land there. “It was terrible hard to get into Ida B. Wells” (a project designated for blacks on the city’s South Side), noted Miss Woodley in 2004. So I moved over here in Henry Horner. That’s the one place I could find an apartment. See, landlords in those days would rather take a dog in the house than take children. And I had some children. . . . At the time racism was raging hard in Chicago and it wasn’t too many places blacks could live. Most of them was on the West Side. ACROSS DAMEN

Miss Woodley had moved to the Horner Homes in 1956, after bouncing for several years with her children around relatives’ apartments on the South Side. She had come to Chicago from Mississippi in the

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late 1940s as a twenty-five-year-old. “I got tired of sharecropping,” she explained. “Henry Horner, it was beautiful.” By the time the Horner Homes began opening in 1955, the CHA had already engaged a different firm, Quinn and Christiansen Architects and Engineers, to build Project No. Illinois 2-35, which would extend Horner a half mile to the west. The Henry Horner Extension brought 736 more units to the growing complex, in three eight-story mid-rises and four fourteen-story high-rises. The Extension’s buildings also sat back from the street on large tracts of open space, and the site also included a recreation center. Yet “the New” or “New Projects,” as residents came to know the Extension, were not a straight repeat of the Olds. Quinn and Christiansen specialized in residential hotels, apartment blocks, and single-family homes in Chicago and several other cities in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century. Its staff brought special attention to the configuration of domestic space. Correspondence between the CHA and the architects shows each to be wrestling with, as one architect put it, “certain sociological problems of public housing.”19 In particular, the CHA and the architects seemed already to be worrying about the monotony, the institutional character, the noisiness, and the anonymity fostered in buildings made up of floor upon floor of apartments. The architects experimented with low- and mid-rise designs that would impart a more private feel to living spaces and play areas, as well as accommodate those who worked at night and would need sleeping quarters to be quiet during the day. The Extension’s architects hoped to construct a lower-density development. However, the CHA’s difficulty obtaining land on which to build a lower-density development caused them to shift their plans and focus exclusively on mid- and high-rise buildings. When it opened in 1961, the Horner Extension greeted its residents with several unusual features designed to make its buildings feel much smaller. The most prominent included duplex unit configurations that parsed buildings into two-floor segments meant to mimic the feel of two-story row houses. The first floor of the units provided households with eating and gathering spaces, and the second, sleeping and bathing areas. The apartments opened onto open-air galleries that ran the length of the building; called “ramps” by residents, these breezeways provided semiprivate outdoor play and social space. The “street” level also included amenities like communal laundry rooms and play spaces. Architects expected that by parsing social circulation in two-story segments, they would create mutual cooperation and as-

sistance among a smaller set of households—again, making the site feel and work like a low-density neighborhood. With its four- and five-bedroom units, the Extension was especially a boon to larger black families, who had trouble locating housing in a racially constrained housing market. “We lived in a building on West Lake Street,” Mrs. Benton, an elderly black woman who had transitioned into Westhaven in late 1997, noted in 2004. We rented the entire two flat because we had the children. In 1961 we had to move because the city tore our house down. We wanted to move in with my in-laws at [a nearby complex under construction]. But [the managers] said we had too many children. They told us: You’re moving to Horner.

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Mrs. Benton and her husband came to Chicago from a small town in Tennessee in the early 1950s. He found steady factory work while she minded their growing family. Together they raised ten children in an Extension duplex. The first time I visited Mrs. Benton at her home in 2003, one of the earliest town houses built in Westhaven, she walked me through all the photographs of her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. They peered down from the walls. They crowded over the coffee table and the television cabinet. But she also wanted me to have a look in the hall closet. Stacked neatly along one side stood half a dozen bright red bricks. A young neighbor had pulled them for her from the pile that her building became after a demolition crew got to work on it in 1996. Like many of her former neighbors, she explained, she wanted a keepsake of a building that she had loved. Over the years, I would occasionally see these bricks in other homes belonging to former Horner residents, stacked along a wall, in a closet, displayed in a cabinet, or propping open a door. Also in the works by the late 1950s were plans for the Horner Annex, which was originally slated to bring another two hundred units to the complex. However, during the 1960s, the CHA faced mounting criticism that its siting practices intentionally promoted racial segregation in space. These criticisms culminated in a landmark legal case, Hills v. Gautreaux, that wound its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.20 Black tenants and applicants for Chicago public housing alleged in this class-action suit that the CHA and HUD had intentionally concentrated public housing projects (whose residents by then were predominantly black) in such a way as to prevent lowerincome black families from moving into white neighborhoods. Plans

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for the Annex were exempted from the judgment order that prohibited the CHA from building further in racially segregated areas, but the CHA downsized its plans anyway for the Annex. When it finally opened in 1969, the Annex brought another 109 units to the complex, spread between a seven-story mid-rise and two three-story walk-ups. Like the Extension, part of the Annex featured open breezeway corridors. The buildings were arranged around a series of playgrounds. Most everyone who spoke with me about their life in the Annex insisted that its physical separation from the rest of Horner and its smaller proportions gave it a more self-contained and intimate feel. Here is how one thirty-five-year-old black woman, a landscaper and a mother of four who had grown up in the Annex, explained it to me one afternoon in 2006. We were setting out tables and chairs at a local church hall that hosted a federal summer food program for needy children. “The Valley,” Renée began, “was like a little project all to itself.”

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It was totally different because the buildings was shorter. It was a lot of older people, not so many big families, and just a lot quieter, not like everything across Madison. It was scary going over to the Olds and the News. Them tall buildings was not nice. We just never went there. The gangbanging, it was just bad over there.

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Unlike Miss Woodley or Mrs. Benton, Renée came of age just as the entire complex, including the Annex, began falling into decay and insecurity and just when the CHA’s tenant base was becoming increasingly impoverished. She was far from the only former Horner resident who saw the complex’s density and destitution as the cause of its growing insecurity in the 1970s and 1980s. Even so, Renée retained fond memories of the Valley. She left in the 1990s with a voucher provided by the federal Section 8 program. It allowed her to rent a federally subsidized apartment on the private market.21 Despite the fact that she relocated several miles south, she made a point to be at the Annex’s yearly reunion held in a large private parking lot across the street from the one building that remains at Horner today: the Annex’s renovated mid-rise. (Kevin’s family owns the lot and allows current and former Annex residents to gather there in exchange for keeping an eye on things during off days and evenings.) The consent decree that manages Horner’s redevelopment gave all residents the option to vote on whether or not their building would be demolished or renovated. Residents of the Annex opted for the latter. Many

View of renovated Annex from the private parking lot that fronts it, August 2006.

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interpreted that choice as evidence that Annex residents were especially committed to their homes. Horner emerged within one of the U.S. welfare state’s housing projects; it was also a racial project. It facilitated the distribution of critical resources on uneven racial terms, and it suffused everyday life and experience on the Near West Side with racial meanings. In 1930, just one-sixth of the Near West Side was black, but by 1960, that population had grown to 53 percent.22 That growth continued

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over the next two decades. As it did, the corner of the Near West Side where Horner stood came to be understood as black space, even though nonblack residents continued to live there. The association was so strong that it could erase the area’s complex racial history. Take the confusion generated one evening in late 2006, as several friends and I looked at archival images. Two middle-aged black friends who had grown up at the Extension wanted to see images that a historian of Chicago’s public housing had burned for me on a CD. We sank into the plush cushions of one’s new living-room set, huddled around the screen of my laptop, and flipped through blackand-white images that captured photographs of Horner’s construction and early days. An image of children cleaning a ramp elicited laughs from the friends. One recalled that her mother organized all the neighbor children to mop their ramp’s floors and walls. They also marveled at an image of mothers dressed in their Sunday best, supervising groups of small children as they waited to board the elevators. But another image baffled them. It depicted, as its caption explained, the “first family” to move into the Extension. And from the looks of it, that family did not appear to be black. “Horner was black,” one protested. “It was some Puerto Ricans here?” her friend added. One of these women was not yet born when that photograph was taken, and the other was a small child. They were perhaps too young to remember the shifting racial dynamics afoot in the area and in their buildings throughout the 1960s. Yet as Horner and its environs become increasingly identified as a black space, it suffered from the disinvestment and outmigration common to other redlined urban areas. That racially inflected disinvestment did not go unnoticed by those who were a bit older than my two friends. Recall Terrance, who together with his siblings was one of the first black children on their block just south of Madison in the early 1950s. His early neighbors had reflected the demographic complexity of the area:

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When we moved in it was mostly Jewish and Italian and Greeks here. Mrs. Panagopoulos was our neighbor, and Mr. Kleinfeld lived next door. There was a Mexican lady, Maria, and her husband. She was fine! There was Mr. Levi and his wife. A gentlemen by the name of Ray Berg. He was killed in the Seeley Club fire. There used to be a club on Seeley and Madison; it’s a vacant lot now. . . . [Soon] there was a lot of changeover; the city was engaged in spot demolition with no plans for doing anything with the properties, just knocking them down. The houses had been so crowded together.

(Above) Publicity photograph of the Extension’s first tenants, circa 1961. With its duplex apartments, the Extension was a boon to larger black families who had trouble locating housing in a racially restricted rental market. This image suggests it was also a boon to larger Puerto Rican families, who likewise had trouble locating rental housing, as they were also racialized. (Below) Cleanup Day at Horner, early 1970s. Young residents clean their ramp. Open-air breezeways, or “ramps,” as residents called them, were a feature of the Horner Extension and the Horner Annex. Photographs by the Chicago Housing Authority.

So when the first building was demolished we were excited because we now had a place to play other than in our yards. We had our own little ball fields!

As he got older, Terrance’s initial excitement clouded as he began to understand what these demolitions portended for black residents.

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Things were changing, quickly. I remember as a kid, maybe in my early teens, I was still optimistic. I remember whenever it snowed, I was always happy, because the snow hid the ugliness. I would shovel all of the sidewalks and the porches; to me, that’s when the neighborhood looked like a “normal neighborhood”—in the winter. Every other time you could see that there was no grass in the park, and a lot of broken glass. People were leaving. Insurance companies weren’t renewing [policies], so if you wanted to protect your investment, you had to sell and get out of there. People that couldn’t sell, they did what other folks did. They started dividing up, getting money that way. We had what used to be a white practice, now being practiced by black landlords. So when the riot hit when I was sixteen, the neighborhood was already gone.

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With few other financing options, the increasingly black landlord base carved up rental apartments into smaller units to generate revenue to maintain their buildings. This further taxed the housing stock; business and residential outmigration continued apace, marring the area even before the area’s most singularly destructive event: the riot that followed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April 1968. The Near West Side had seen several disturbances in the 1960s. Yet because they remained relatively contained, residents apparently believed that the wave of major civil disturbances shaking other cities in the late 1960s might pass them by. That expectation evaporated on April 5, 1968, when a crowd of mostly young, mostly black people began assembling in Garfield Park, a large park about two miles west of Horner, to mourn King’s assassination. Some had walked out of their schools. Others, some former Horner residents suggested, had come inspired by local organizers, including a well-respected group of Black Panthers who had settled on the Near West Side.23 Mourners marched east along Madison, the once bustling but by then declining commercial corridor that locals relied on for daily necessities and amenities. As they crossed Western Avenue and moved east to-

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ward Horner, a Molotov cocktail shattered the glass window of a furniture store. Within an hour the entire block had gone up in flames. The destruction only abated after three days of fires and looting along twenty-eight blocks of Madison.24 In some parts, Madison was reduced to smoldering rubble. Most businesses lay in ruins. Those that survived continued to exit the area. By the late 1980s, the stretch of Madison Street between Damen and Western—a half mile once dense with amenities—had only four active storefronts.25 The one thing that this part of the Near West Side had plenty of by the late 1980s, courtesy of the riot, arson-for-insurance schemes, and general disinvestment, was vacant lots and buildings. Development interests began circling the area in ways that stoked both optimism and suspicion among local residents. In particular, former Horner residents focused on a failed attempt to bring a new football stadium to the area in the late 1980s as an ominous moment. Their homes would have been plowed under to make space for a football stadium that would have stood next to the already-existing Chicago Stadium, the home of Chicago’s hockey and basketball franchises, and it would have necessitated the displacement of some 1,500 families. A group of ministers organized local residents, especially African American senior citizens who owned homes in the area, to oppose the proposal. As one reporter put it, oppositional forces framed the proposal as a “ ‘land grab’ by white developers and ‘another David versus Goliath’ confrontation between a poor neighborhood and rich downtown interests.”26 Sensing that a large-scale redevelopment project was inevitable, some locals founded the Near West Side Community Development Corporation and developed their own proposal for the area. It called for extensive replacement housing, retail development, and new amenities, including a park, a library, and a recreation center for young people.27 The football stadium did not happen on the Near West Side, but the idea of a stadium and the residents’ proposal was taken up several years later, when owners of Chicago’s basketball and hockey franchises moved to tear down the Chicago Stadium and replace it with a new arena. The United Center opened in 1994. The redevelopment interests converging around local stadiums did not take long to spread to Horner. Chapter 2 takes up this moment in greater detail. What I want to point out for now is that when early proposals for Horner’s redevelopment began to emerge in the 1990s, they were explained as an effort to unmake the housing projects that had fractured the Near West Side. Yet these proposals framed the housing projects primarily in terms of their economic

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effects rather than in terms of their racial ones. Planning documents from this era do gesture toward the presence of “very low income minority persons,” as one application for the HOPE VI program that would jump-start redevelopment put it.28 Even so, most documents tended to unfold in a language of concentrated poverty, economic disinvestment, and economic opportunity. Plans for mixed-income communities emerged as the solution for housing projects that shored up racial and economic divides in space. The fact that the language of race is not evoked more frequently in early plans for Westhaven does not mean that those plans were any less a racial project than the housing projects they sought to replace. Their drafters intended to redistribute a critical resource, sound housing, in ways that might unmake the racially inflected meanings and experiences of residential life in Chicago. In this respect, the plans speak to the neoliberal policy climate of the 1990s in which they unfolded—a self-consciously color-blind one that advanced a mildly progressive politics of redistribution even while it avoided substantial discourse about racism.29 Plans for Horner’s redevelopment did not overtly take up the way protracted histories of racism had shaped the Near West Side. Rather, they gingerly wrapped it in the language of income mixing and urban economic development. In their relative silence about histories of racism and their material legacies in urban space, early plans for Westhaven imagined transcending both. Demolition began at Horner in the late summer of 1995, and ground was broken soon thereafter on Westhaven. Westhaven’s physical dimensions have departed substantially from Horner’s. The first of the development’s two phases of construction, from 1996 to 2000, brought 461 new rental units to the area. It also included 90 renovated rental units at the Annex. Developers sited 200 of the Phase I units in the area where the Extension had stood. Developers and residents have called these units “the Superblock.” Keeping with HOPE VI’s priority of promoting infill development, that is, development on already available vacant land within a developed area, developers dispersed the remaining 261 units throughout an area roughly a mile west and south of the main complex. These units are called “the Scattered Sites.” HOPE VI proposals generally adhered to the claim that a broad mix of incomes would secure the success of redeveloped public housing. They usually called for one-third of redeveloped units to go to very low income people, one-third to be “affordable” according to local criteria concerning median income, and one-third to go at market rate. However, this mix was altered for Phase I by the consent de-

cree that emerged from the Henry Horner Mothers Guild case, which focused on insecure and unsafe conditions on the site. Half the units would be reserved for the very low income residents leaving Horner, who in 1996 had an average annual income of approximately $5,500; the remaining half would go to households from outside of Horner who earned 50–80 percent of area median income.30 Outsiders who secured housing in Phase I might be better off than former Horner residents, but many of those I got to know also struggled financially and had been on the waiting list for public housing for some time. Phase I otherwise hewed close to the HOPE VI design principles that HUD had developed in collaboration with proponents of New Urbanism. Calthorpe Associates, a San Francisco Bay area urbanplanning, architecture, and design firm aligned with that movement, articulated these principles in a 1994 draft for plans for Horner. Tree-lined streets and mid-block connections reestablish the fine urban fabric. . . . Porch-front designs on the new units replicate Chicago’s historic pattern of housing. Small neighborhood and pocket parks are evenly distributed to provide secure areas for tot lots and community meeting areas. Private yards, entries and parking allow for a sense of identity and pride for the residents. Safety and security are increased through layers of space and “eyes on the street.” . . . By encouraging economic development, intermodal transportation options to retain household diversity, as well as human-scaled development, the Horner neighborhood can begin to integrate into its physical surroundings as well as into a revitalized community and economy.31

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This early draft became the basis of plans developed by the Chicagobased firms Solomon Cordwell Buenz & Associates and Johnson & Lee. Phase I involved the construction of brick-faced, town house– style buildings that echo the early twentieth-century residential brick flats common throughout the West Side. They sit close to the street, often with black metal fences in front. And during this phase, the street grid that disappeared with Horner’s construction began to be restored. Westhaven’s second, ongoing phase of development began in 2001. At that time, it was projected to bring 764 low- and mid-rise units immediately to the east and the west of the Superblock. Designs for the replacement buildings retained some of the neotraditional feel of Phase I, including town houses and walk-ups. Yet a new

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Westhaven Park Redevelopment Plan and Renderings for Phase II-B, 2004. Site plan depicting Phases I (the Superblock, labeled here “The Villages at Westhaven”) and II (Westhaven Park) of Westhaven’s development. Scattered Site units, also developed during Phase I, are dispersed immediately south and west of this main redevelopment site. Courtesy of Landon Bone Baker Architects.

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set of developers, Brinshore–Michaels and architects Landon Bone Baker, moved to incorporate a broader diversity of building types and contemporary design elements into construction. Early Phase II plans called for two mid-rise buildings as well as commercial space and live–work residential buildings. Phase II also included plans for a large park to meet locals’ recreational needs. Phase II has constituted

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the explicitly mixed-income portion of Westhaven. Original income breakdowns called for roughly 35 percent of units to go to public housing residents, 18 percent to go to renters or buyers qualifying for affordable housing, and 47 percent to go to those who could rent or buy at the market rate. About 60 percent of Phase II units would go to renters, and the remaining units would go to homebuyers.32 But at the time of this writing, Phase II’s completion remains stalled. When the U.S. housing market crashed in 2008, so did the demand for mixed-income housing in Chicago. Westhaven has departed from the racial and economic homogeneity that characterized Horner and the Near West Side in the latter part of the twentieth century, and it has promoted racial integration in the guise of economic integration. In this respect, it represents an effort to unmake the racial projects of postwar housing. It represents an effort to redistribute the resource of subsidized housing and to bring more-secure homes to lower-income people of color. It also represents an effort to change the meaning and experience of residential life, to make both more conducive to racial and economic inclusion. The people who came from the outside to live in Phase II’s affordable and market-rate units, as well as additional newcomers arriving to take advantage of private housing development sparked by Horner’s redevelopment, have proven to be very different from the former Horner residents who remain. At the time of my research, these outsiders were mostly in their thirties and forties. They tended to have stable work, steady incomes, advanced degrees, and just one or two children, if they had any children at all. Many had or were pursuing professional degrees when I met them. Most identified themselves as African American, but newcomers also included those who identified as Latino, white, or Asian American. In the decade during which my ethnographic research unfolded, median household income in the three census tracks that once contained Horner nearly doubled. For the first time in six decades, the overall population in the area seemed to grow, and the population of white and foreign-born nearly doubled. As of 2010, this broader area remained nearly 70 percent black, even as census data suggest diversification.33 But housing projects and the racial projects they concretized will not be unmade in census columns. They will be unmade and remade in everyday space, as urbanites collide with the changing people and things of a built environment in flux. They will be unmade and remade as these collisions prod longtime residents, newcomers, and also those with little connection to changing public housing to

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entertain their similarities and differences to the people and things they are colliding with. And they will be unmade and remade as these collisions prod a range of urbanites to reckon with what it means to belong to a city struggling to get past some of the most bitter divides of U.S. society.

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Entry Points I arrived in Chicago in the fall of 2001 for graduate study in anthropology with a head full of vague plans to study the politics of urban planning in Philadelphia, the city that anchored my itinerant youth. Yet as I spent that fall trying to get a handle on Chicago, I ran up against an urban planning experiment whose scale, ambition, and pace boggled me. The CHA had just embarked on the Plan for Transformation, and mammoth buildings had started to come down not far from where I lived on the city’s South Side. I realized that staying in Chicago offered an opportunity not often available to students of anthropology: the chance to spend several years engaged in intensive ethnographic research. Looking back a decade later, I can see now that I was both familiar with and tired of displacements. I had spent my earliest years as an army brat, and a restlessness settled on my family even after my father left that institution behind. We moved eight times that I could remember before I began high school, and I had moved just as many times again before I landed in Chicago. I wanted to stay put. As my peers polished field languages and prepared for research stints in far-off places, I studied planning documents and crashed ribbon-cutting ceremonies. By 2003 I was spending my summers and time between seminars and the library on the city’s Near West Side, drawn by Horner’s advanced and unusual redevelopment course. In 2005 I finally put my coursework behind me and signed a lease on a private apartment just north of Westhaven. A few months later I moved again to Westhaven’s western edge, into a private building sandwiched by Horner Scattered Site replacement units. A friend I had met through summers of volunteering at a local social service agency had helped me find it. I devoted the next two years to uninterrupted fieldwork and continued following Westhaven’s development as I wrote up my dissertation. After I moved to New York City in 2009 for a job, I continued to return every year for follow-up research, for visits with friends, and, increasingly, for funerals. If epidemic gun violence now kills and maims many young people on the West and South Sides, the middle-aged people I became close to are succumbing to diseases of poverty: hypertension, diabetes, and asthma.

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When I was settling on Horner-becoming-Westhaven as the site to ground my study, other researchers tracking Chicago’s experiment offered well-intentioned advice. Westhaven, they warned me, held little potential for generalizations. Its redevelopment was too strange and too complicated. There were too many parties involved, and they were often at odds. All this would make it hard to get results that would inform and improve policy outcomes. But that was not my aim. What I wanted to understand was how and with what effects urban planning initiatives had become pulled into the thorny politics of distributing the care of poor people across a network of municipal, private, and nongovernmental entities. I set about mapping sites on the Near West Side that would help me track the lived experiences of these effects. In the summer of 2003, I began volunteering at the Home Visitors Program, the social service arm of the Near West Side Community Development Corporation. This latter entity had emerged from organizing against the proposed football stadium and had become heavily involved in Horner’s redevelopment. At various points, Home Visitors held contracts to refer, or in the terms of these contracts, “connect,” public housing residents to services and resources that the CHA would no longer provide, such as job training programs. Its director put my computer and writing skills to use by having me serve as their “résumé specialist.” I spent countless hours working with transitioning Horner residents as they drafted and redrafted résumés for jobs that would probably remain out of their reach without more experience, more connections, more education, and, in the case of men especially, without expungements of criminal records. Throughout my years at Home Visitors, I observed the challenges of service provision in a context of privatization, dwindling resources, and competitive granting. By 2004 I had begun following groups whose members had internalized the discourses of participation and entrepreneurship that drove Chicago’s housing experiment and now styled themselves as “stakeholders” in Westhaven’s development. These included older tenant representatives who served on tenant councils, known as Local Advisory Councils (LACs), and their legal advocates. The LACs were established in the 1970s throughout Chicago’s projects to make sure that residents had a voice in operations and management decisions at their developments. The consent decree that governed Horner’s redevelopment gave members of Horner’s LAC a firm role in negotiating all aspects of redevelopment. They welcomed me into their planning and strategizing sessions and let me tag along to meetings with CHA officials, developers, and social service agencies.

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Upstart political entities also began elbowing their way into redevelopment politics. By 2004, a group of younger residents leaving Horner had begun wresting control away from the older, long-term resident leaders. Over the span of several years, they allowed me to observe their activities and to trail them around while they fanned the fires of discord and support. In late 2004 they assumed control of the LAC, and they granted me access to formal and backroom meetings. Because I had a digital camera, they also regularly referred transitioning residents to me to document housing conditions in their homes. Residents asked me to take pictures and write statements about faulty wiring, faulty plumbing, faulty windows, faulty walls, faulty everything. This work led to other things. A group of men who lived in Westhaven but who could not, on account of criminal offenses, appear on leases heard that I liked to write. They invited me to document their meetings and help them generate materials that they hoped would attract grants and resources for local ex-offenders. A nascent group of private, market-rate home owners and renters calling themselves Homeowners of Westtown also allowed me to document some of their meetings and organizing efforts. They were seeking a greater say in development decisions, especially around their demands for better security and amenities. Over my years on the Near West Side, I started spending more and more time with long-term and recent residents in and around their homes: I babysat for friends, I sat the better part of Sundays in church, I lifted (the lightest) weights with ex-felons, I ran errands, and I shared many meals. All of this work gave me a good sense of the many arguments and interests converging around Westhaven’s development. I filled my notebooks with observations and interviews focused on how various groups advanced claims upon critical resources as well as how they evaluated the moral soundness of others’ claims. I began to see that the Near West Side was not simply an empty field across which various people jockeyed for political influence, for a grocery store that carried fruit juice that was not electric blue and meat that was not pushing its expiration date, for a temporary job, for permission to be on a lease, for a more consistent police presence in the area, or for safeguarded property values. Rather, a rapidly changing built environment and its rapidly shifting residential demographics converged on the Near West Side in ways that made the material and sensory dimensions of living and working there a disorienting and unnerving experience for many new and long-term area residents. Any stranger to what one of my friends in Westhaven called “mixed

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living” would probably be disoriented and unnerved by it. But what made Westhaven noteworthy in this regard was the fact that its physical and social dimensions departed from those of most other redeveloping sites in Chicago. Throughout most of my research, the gradually disappearing Horner and the gradually emerging Westhaven stood shoulder to shoulder, in constant and strange tension. The consent decree that governed Horner’s redevelopment granted Horner residents special legal protections. Whereas other complexes would be emptied and demolished in one fell swoop, Horner would be demolished and redeveloped in phases. This meant that those opting to stay moved around the remaining Horner buildings while waiting for their new homes to be built. It also meant that those who had already relocated to new homes could readily access places, people, and practices associated with everyday life at Horner. In short, interpersonal obligations and sensory sensibilities “built within” Horner lingered long past initial demolitions because a critical mass of original residents and buildings also hung on in place. Transitioning Horner residents were not initially subject to the strict work requirements faced by former public housing residents moving into other redeveloping sites. For this reason they could become occupied with other things that threatened their tenure, such as complaints and suspicions that they harbored people in their households who did not appear on the lease, or that they engaged in “antisocial” behavior, including excessive partying and noisiness. All this made for an unusual kind of displacement: Horner residents who opted to remain stayed in place while familiar worlds fluctuated around them. To get at this strange displacement, I began to widen my scope to trace how a built environment in flux realigned the movements of people and things and how these realignments fed arguments about what collective protection and obligations should look, sound, and feel like. For instance, constant talk about heat among transitioning Horner residents alerted me to the significance of demolished heating infrastructures. Staff at plants comparable to the ones that had once stood at Horner allowed me to spend a winter shadowing them on their rounds as they fixed radiators, monitored boiler outputs, mixed water-softening solutions, and reflected on decades of attending to what they called the “comfort” of CHA residents. I dove into archives to track how CHA residents’ taste for extreme heat emerged from these elaborate infrastructures, and I observed how transitioning Horner residents sought to replicate the feeling of extreme heat in their new homes. I also tracked less ephemeral resources that were circulating—or circulating less and less—through redeveloping

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public housing. Resident leaders allowed me to follow the work of distributing everything from donated stationery to cleaning supplies. When the holidays rolled around I would spend hours helping pull together “gift baskets” of hams and turkeys and then months listening to the acid and ire that spread around anyone who received baskets out of order. I also tracked images and ideas about public housing redevelopment that circulated beyond Westhaven. I spent weeks in legal archives tracing several decades of evolving legal theories concerning the maintenance of public housing. And I followed the work of journalists, writers, photographers, playwrights, and curators seeking to make public housing’s transformation palpable to people in and beyond Chicago. Eventually, this work led to an invitation to serve as the volunteer secretary for a then-nascent effort to bring the National Public Housing Museum to the Near West Side. The remembered warmth of demolished buildings, the difference between the noise of a firecracker and that of a gunshot, dwindling streams of donated turkeys, curators’ worries over authentic glimpses into demolished buildings—these will strike some readers as strange preoccupations in the face of themes more often associated with public housing, such as crime or structural inequality. Yet on the Near West Side, these were the very things that determined whether or not one could keep a lease or whether or not one could learn to care for those beyond one’s household. Writing about them challenged me to consider experiences that do not often show up in studies of public housing but that nevertheless steered how my interlocutors imagined, practiced, and made demands on interpersonal and collective obligations in the wake of public housing.

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Finally, some comments on the choices I have made while writing about my research. First, most of the people I met and worked with on the Near West Side were African American. If they hailed from Horner, they tended to identify themselves as “black.” In contrast, “African American” was the term most often used, at least in my company, by middle-class residents and professionals new to the area. Unless I note otherwise, readers should assume that my default interlocutor is a former or transitioning public housing resident who identifies as “black.” Anthropologists have pointed out that such terms are not merely sociological descriptions. “African American” is a term that emphasizes an ethnicized over a racialized identity. In the United States, ethnicized identities emphasize compatibility with a broader national community. Yet as anthropologist Rolph Trouillot notes, “All hyphens are not equal in the pot that does not melt. The

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first part measures compatibility with the second at any given historical moment.”34 The fact that my interlocutors leaving public housing tended to forgo “African American” in favor of “black” underscores just how much they understood their lives and situations to be incompatible with this national community. Second, I noticed early on that while formal interviews often worked well with developers, outside advocates, or recently arrived renters and home owners, they tended to make transitioning Horner residents uncomfortable and reticent. This was the case with some of my closest friends, even after several years. When I asked a friend about this in 2005, she explained that even though it was me “on the other end,” my notebook and recorder made her feel like she was at “public aid.” In other words, she felt as if she were being scrutinized to determine her ongoing eligibility for cash and other benefits. The classic props of the ethnographer are, in fact, those of the welfare investigator. This I learned when “public aid” called in a different friend, also a transitioning Horner resident, in 2006. Officials wanted to investigate whether she was actually the legal guardian of a niece for whose care she claimed benefits. My friend had asked me to take “good notes” and “record” the session, so she could refer to them as a fraud investigation got underway. Everyone in the meeting came wielding a minirecorder and notebook. Little wonder that so many of my friends leaving Horner felt uneasy around these tools. With some exceptions, I found my expanded notes on conversations and observations made with transitioning Horner residents to be more effective but also, more importantly, more sensitive than formal interviews. I know that for some readers, this choice may leave something to be desired: the (sometimes) paraphrased words and sentiments of public housing residents in this book may feel anemic when compared to the extended and often verbatim words of people who had little to worry about around recorders and notebooks. But the words of transitioning Horner residents might feel anemic for another reason. Public housing is a topic that tends to invite writing and thinking around a relatively closed set of themes, namely, crime, deviance, and poor people’s “survival strategies.” There are many reasons to bring these themes to bear on a study of Horner-becoming-Westhaven. At the same time, I was concerned that the very questions that researchers and writers tend to bring to public housing have limited the way debates about poverty unfold among scholarly and lay audiences. For this reason, I focused my energy on understanding how and with what effects public housing reform shaped the terms on which a range of urbanites would be summoned to attend to redeveloping

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public housing and to the people that lived there, including friends and neighbors. Still, many transitioning Horner residents who generously gave me their time understood that when it came to public housing, outsiders tended to gravitate toward questions and stories about crime, drugs, and so-called family dysfunction. They were mindful that any information that touched on these themes was charged in a context where everything from an illegitimate presence in a household to complaints about noise could jeopardize a lease. I have respected their privacy and their requests to not write about anything that would contribute to these problems. My interlocutors helped me with this tricky task. “Don’t write this down,” they would say. “Don’t tape this.” “Don’t put this in your book.” In several cases they directed me to transpose or alter details slightly so that their privacy could be maintained. Their edits made sense when the situation touched on sensitive themes. At other times, though, they struck me as odd. At first, I saw little incriminating in mundane details about commonplace routines or pleasant memories. Yet the push of early outside readers of this book to include more of the very details that my interlocutors instructed me to leave out challenged me to ask why it is that readers of ethnographic accounts demand not just information about strangers—especially marginalized ones—but a kind of intimacy with them. My interlocutors’ edits concerning serious but also mundane matters challenged me to write in ways that would sidestep the very terms upon which readers expect and demand admittance to their lives.35 This brings me to a final decision I have made. When I began presenting my research, I realized that audiences were more curious about my own living and working conditions “in the field” than they were about those that belonged to people leaving public housing. Part of this curiosity is grounded in the need to understand how an ethnographer comes to her materials and conclusions. But it seems to me that another part is grounded in ethnography’s central sympathetic conceit: strange worlds promise to become less strange when mediated by the body of the ethnographer. This is the body that presumably goes elsewhere, comes into contact with very different kinds of bodies, and, through this contact, becomes otherwise. This conceit is powerful and timeless for a reason. It promises to bridge differences between near and strange worlds by making those strange worlds more immediate, more sensible, more vivid, and more familiar. Yet it also presumes that the ethnographic encounter allows the bodies of ethnographers and their interlocutors to become more alike, if not the same. My friends and interlocutors on the Near West Side reminded

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me constantly that this was simply not the case. For that reason, this book does not linger at length on my experiences in the field. Consider the following. I lived alone throughout my time on the Near West Side. This often made me feel uncomfortable. It also regularly made me the object of intimidation from strangers, from police, and even on occasion, from acquaintances. One summer night at a dance held in the parking lot of a local restaurant, someone with very good or very bad aim threw a rock. It struck me in back of the head. When I turned to see who might have thrown it, it seemed that a sea of faces turned away. “Here go Catherine with her hat to listen to the Blues,” a friend joked to smooth over my shock. She imagined a ridiculous scene: the next time I came back to the lot for the stepper’s set, I would be wearing my bicycle helmet. “Probably just some kids throwing rocks,” she assured me, “and they don’t know how to throw rocks.” The whole thing became funny. It also became another occasion for friends to point out what many others leaving public housing had said before. I might well be uncomfortable living and working on the Near West Side. But I could always come and go as I pleased, thanks to my whiteness, my “someday Ph.D.,” my “researcher money,” my bicycle, my car, my carfare, my connections, my confidence. These things, they insisted, along with my “nice” smile and a “little shape” not “ruined” by a lifetime of “unhealthy” food, got locals to watch out for me, to let me sail into their homes, their offices, their meetings, and their filing cabinets. These observations were sound. I was small in a place where many struggled with obesity. The braces that lapped my adolescence left me with a straight and full smile in a place where inadequate dental care made both an anomaly. My friends on the Near West Side empathized with my troubles. But they tended to be more interested in the fact that I, unlike them, expected that my complaints would go somewhere, that I would be listened to when I was intimidated, that others would respond to my concerns. “You don’t see us [lower-income black women] out riding and walking around whenever we want,” another friend angrily scolded as she cut me off in her car late one night in late 2006. I had been biking along an especially desolate stretch of Lake Street. She had just gotten off her work shift and insisted I accept a ride home. She made it clear that her offer was not entirely for my sake. If I “got hurt,” the police, but also my friends in Westhaven, would raise trouble as they tried to figure out who went and messed with “a nice” but “stupid white girl.” These were my friends’ accounts of the differences that separate us to this day. And these were their refusals of ethnography’s sympathetic magic. All of them, I think, are fair.

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PART I

Sympathy

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“Toward a Better Life”

On a summer afternoon in 2006, I stood at a security desk in the lobby of 626 West Jackson Boulevard. The building served then as the Chicago Housing Authority’s headquarters. This was before the CHA downsized and moved to an even smaller building. I was there to attend a “development working group meeting.” The lawyers who represented residents transitioning out of the Governor Henry Horner housing complex had started taking me along to these meetings so that I could learn how residents negotiated Horner’s ongoing redevelopment with developers, CHA officials, and their legal representatives. As I waited for the sticker that would admit me to the building’s interiors, I caught something glittering out of the corner of my eye. The sunlight that flooded the lobby was bouncing across the chunky tiles of a mosaic that hung high on the wall above the glass security doors. I craned my neck for a better look. The mosaic showed the official seal of the Chicago Housing Authority: two hands clasped over austere buildings lining a road that disappears into a sunlit horizon and, suspended amid the rays of that sun, the date 1937 (see Plate 2). That year marks the founding of the CHA as a municipal corporation tasked with building, operating, and maintaining public housing in the city. It also marks the passage of the U.S. Housing Act of 1937, which established a national public housing program. I had seen versions of the seal before, emblazoned on everything from old correspondence at the CHA’s shrinking archive to the small white pickup trucks that made up what was left of its maintenance fleet. Yet I had never seen it rendered large or in color. From the looks of the buildings it depicted, it probably dated from the late 1950s or early 1960s, the years when the CHA moved to high-rise construction. This rendering threw into sharp relief the aspirations animating Chicago’s public housing program at that time: this program would, in no uncertain terms, improve the lives of Chicagoans, especially its African American citizens. 67

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The mosaic did not reveal much about the figures it depicted. Yet their clothing and the color of their hands (one brown, one white) suggested that these two figures were men who hailed from different economic and racial backgrounds. If Shirtsleeves made a living with his brown hands, the Suit probably did not. The mosaic also suggested that despite these apparent differences, these figures’ agreement over housing would move them and their city ad meliōrem vitam, “toward a better life.” One interpretation of the mosaic might situate it within the hierarchies of difference that have long structured the way the U.S. welfare state distributes its protections to its citizens. This was in fact the interpretation that ran through my head as I scrambled for the best vantage point from which to photograph the mosaic. It might be simply put as follows: the image depicts a domestic good, shelter, but those figures most often associated with domestic contexts in the United States (namely, women and children) are nowhere in sight. Their protection would be mediated through men. What is more, the fact that the mosaic marks its figures racially underscores just how much a role racial categorizations would play into the kind of subsidized housing to which one had access. I repositioned a small chair to get the height I needed for a photograph. But before I could congratulate myself for achieving these interpretive and physical feats, a middle-aged white man dressed in the coveralls of a maintenance worker emerged with a stepladder to interrupt both. Tom, as I will call him, unfolded the ladder just below the mosaic. He helped me onto it, and we got to speaking about the seal. I noted that the CHANGE logo seemed to have replaced the seal as the public face of the CHA. He nodded. “You used to see the old seal on business cards,” he observed. “Now all anyone sees is ‘CHANGE.’ ” I asked him which one he preferred. Pointing to the mosaic, he remarked, “This old seal’s just better. . . . It shows more of what we do, what we’re about. Buildings, and the people in those buildings.” Tom paused to help me balance while I snapped my camera. “With [the CHANGE campaign] does anyone know what we’re about?” Tom helped me reconsider the perspective that I had brought to my own research by flipping the perspective of the mosaic. He directed my attention to the buildings once tasked with leading their inhabitants toward better lives, instead of to the hands superimposed over them. As I worked through my research materials, I came to see that Tom was not alone. My interlocutors on the West Side, most especially those transitioning out of public housing, were much more likely to fixate on the condition of the buildings they lived

in or hailed from than they were to make sweeping claims about race- or gender-based discrimination. They were much more likely to complain about the physical harms and effects of decrepit building components—busted lights, worn stair treads, crooked door jambs—than they were to read deep-seated structures of discrimination off material forms. How, I wanted to know, might following their lead open up unexpected claims about difference and inequality in the wake of Chicago’s public housing and its tattered aspirations toward a better life?

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2

The Many Harms of Staying Here

Wreckage “This is a good case for dropping a nuclear bomb.” In April 2002, the voice of a man named Donald Kimball on the radio introduced me to the Governor Henry Horner Homes housing complex. In halting tones, Kimball told an audience of Chicago’s public radio listeners that he felt “almost ashamed” that this “harsh” statement had once popped into his head whenever he drove past Horner.1 Eleven years earlier, a group of Horner residents had hired him to assess the physical condition of their buildings. As a forensics engineer, that is, an engineer who works with obsolete structures, Kimball could investigate the causes of Horner’s decline and make recommendations about what might be done to staunch it. He could also prepare a report detailing his findings, which residents would need to get a legal motion centered on Horner’s decay off the ground. But as the radio narrator explained, this “nattily dressed, silver-haired, bedrock Republican”— translation, a conservative, middle-aged white man from suburban Chicago—took the job with much hesitation. “You blame the people who live there for those conditions,” Kimball mused. “Look what they’ve done to their neighborhood. Why don’t they take care of it?”2 Then Kimball went inside. He saw things that he “didn’t even know existed”: planks residents had laid out to traverse the inches of raw sewage backing up into their apartments; trash chutes clogged because their liners had corroded; lye that someone had poured down hallways to kill the swarming maggots. This decay and residents’ attempts to fend it off moved Kimball so much that he soon disavowed his “harsh” ideas. He threw himself into the job. It would preoccupy him for the next two decades. The residents transitioning out of Horner whom I began meeting the following spring knew that widespread assumptions about 71

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their irresponsibility still cast long shadows across their new homes in Westhaven and their lives within them. Many guarded their households from the eyes of management officials, social service agents, journalists, and researchers. However, Westhaven’s leaseholders threw open their doors to anyone in a position to document faulty conditions in their homes, myself included. At the time, most apartments had been built brand-new or had been renovated within the preceding six years. They did not, to my untrained eyes, appear to be in serious decline. Even so, over the next several years I came to expect that whenever a transitioning Horner resident asked to borrow my digital camera (word of it got around), the next day we would be just as likely to be downloading, printing, and photocopying images of water stains and mold lines creeping across new walls and ceilings as snapshots from a child’s birthday party. Such sensitivity to decay reverberated beyond Westhaven. I learned this one afternoon in the spring of 2006 when I stopped by a friend’s apartment several miles west of Westhaven. Martha was born and raised at Horner but had “vouchered out” in the mid-1990s as its demolition got underway. That is, she had forgone Horner replacement housing for a Section 8 voucher that allowed her to find subsidized housing on the private rental market. When I met her in 2003, she was in her forties and living with her teenage daughter in a private rental. Because she worked near Westhaven and had so many friends living there, her social life continued to revolve around the area. I had met her through these friends. After lunch we paused in the stairwell, and Martha reached to pull the apartment’s front door closed behind us. That door hung in a frame that pitched to the right, so it fell open, again and again. Martha eventually managed to coax the door shut while muttering through the list of repairs that her landlord had still not made. As she pointed to a loosening light fixture and stamped on softening floorboards, she vowed that she would “open” her apartment for “everyone to see.” “I’ll put it on Good Morning America,” Martha insisted, “and ABC.”

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By the time Kimball ventured into Horner in 1991, widespread censure of welfare recipients had been brewing for decades. In Chicago, that censure became especially animated around the city’s decaying housing projects. Many had opened in the 1950s and 1960s. By the mid-1960s, local news outlets were already criticizing the vandalism, violence, and declining conditions in practically brand-new buildings.3 By the 1980s, the buildings loomed over expanses of balding lawns and cracking asphalt, while metal grates and smoke-ringed

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windows pockmarked their once-sleek exteriors. The sight of such rapid decay left many passersby wondering what—and more pointedly who—was to blame. Many, like Kimball, assumed that the obvious culprits lived inside. “Look what they’ve done to their neighborhood. Why don’t they take care of it?” By the early 1990s, news of Chicago’s troubled public housing projects had circulated beyond the city. National newspapers, documentaries, a nonfiction bestseller, even a cult horror film (Candyman, which follows the gory exploits of a ghost that terrorizes the residents of a troubled project) offered Americans glimpses of Chicago’s rotting homes and rotting social structures.4 Many accounts, even the most empathetic ones, portrayed public housing residents as the victims and perpetrators of the ruin that engulfed their homes: those who were not wrecking their buildings could not exert the control necessary to prevent others from doing so. In this sense, they meshed well with the political climate that yielded the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, known better as Welfare Reform. During these years, experts and lay people across the political spectrum looked at single black women and their families to dissect and analyze the personal behaviors thought to intensify or diminish poverty and disorder.5 Yet also in the 1990s, the publicity, or widespread noteworthiness of, Horner’s decline began circulating in ways that moved residents and outsiders to entertain different arguments about its causes. These arguments turned on the force of decaying things. Things, as scholars of material culture remind us, are not the sum of the meanings or aims that we humans wrap them up in. A building in the throes of becoming a ramshackle mess does more than mean something, and it does more than play handmaiden to human intentions.6 Poorly insulated pipes will burn what touches them, and broken lights will obstruct navigation. Yet understanding a thing’s capacity to act in ways that become relevant beyond any one singed limb or stumbling body requires tracking how its qualities put pressure on meanings and actions that render its movements broadly noteworthy and effective. This chapter pursues such an understanding. It argues that transitioning Horner residents’ preoccupations with decay were not straightforward outcomes of past or ongoing contact with a deteriorating built environment. Rather, they were also historical effects of efforts that made Horner’s decay legally and sentimentally legible as resulting from institutional neglect instead of from the personal failings of its residents. This was a departure from widespread assumptions that residents had caused their buildings to deteriorate

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either by destroying them or by failing to exert the control necessary to prevent others from doing so. This chapter tracks how Horner’s decay worked on residents and outsiders in the 1990s in ways that forged sympathetic bonds between buildings and the bodies that came into contact with them. How it did so hinged on two movements that I have come to see as inextricably bound. The first involves material disintegration itself. During Horner’s rapid decline in the 1980s, pipes, lights, and other building components simply fell apart. The second concerns a broader movement, the circulation of documented decay. In the 1990s, residents and their advocates began capturing and conveying decaying things in ways that rendered the harms they posed both legible and sensible beyond Horner’s moldering walls. Sympathetic bonds forged between buildings and bodies chipped away at the antipathies that people like Kimball held toward public housing residents. As they did, they shifted the claims that public housing residents made on housing related resources. Before I take up those concerns, I need to outline Horner’s precipitous decline from a physically sound complex to what the Chicago Housing Authority in 1991 called one of “the most distressed public housing properties in the nation.”7

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Decay Narratives Housing subsidies in the form of low-rent public housing and lowerrate home mortgages have constituted one of the U.S. welfare state’s premier racial projects. Yet as much as the history of Horner must be situated within projects that advanced racial segregation in urban space, redistributed critical resources along racial lines, and rendered life in integrated areas difficult to imagine let along carry out, it must also be told as a history of housing. That is, any effort to narrate Horner’s past or Westhaven’s future must examine the material processes that any building is bound up in. When I first met them, transitioning Horner residents struck me as oddly preoccupied with building maintenance and decay.8 But over time I came to see that Horner’s redevelopment could not be understood without attending to the way its most unremarkable objects had, as sociologist Bruno Latour has put it, “given way to their complicated entanglements and become matters of collective concern.”9 Such a consideration, as I will suggest below, is critical for understanding activism around public housing in the wake of the civil rights movement. The roots of Horner’s decline stretch back two decades before construction began, to financial arrangements put in place by the

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U.S. Housing Act of 1937. This act established a national system of public housing to, as its opening paragraph notes, “remedy the unsafe and unsanitary housing conditions and the acute shortage of safe, decent and sanitary dwellings for families of lower income.” Proponents of a national public housing program struggled to establish financing structures that would make public housing affordable to those who needed it while also providing sufficient funds for upkeep. With this act, the federal government committed itself to providing low-interest construction loans to public housing authorities to build developments. Since favorable construction loans alone could not put rents within reach of low-income families, the federal government also established a second set of subsidies. Known as “annual contributions,” they would later become a critical issue in legal complaints about Horner’s decline. In theory at least, income from tenants’ rents would cover an authority’s operations and management costs. With its property taxes waived, it could then apply yearly infusions of funds from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to service debt and finance improvements that went beyond basic maintenance.10 The new housing complexes that the CHA built within and alongside Chicago’s black enclaves in the 1950s and early 1960s held out attractive housing options for working- and middle-class black households. Apartments were spacious and amenities ample, a change from the deteriorating housing stock previously available to them. Even with adjustments that left better-off households paying a greater share of rent, robust demand guaranteed that the CHA generated more than enough rental revenue for upkeep. Yet those better-off households started exiting the projects in the 1960s to pursue new rental and home-ownership options in more-desirable parts of the city. They also left because policy changes made the CHA’s high-rise family developments less appealing places to live. Public housing tenant pools around the nation were becoming much poorer, younger, and more likely to include families headed by single women.11 When the betteroff households left the CHA’s housing projects, they took its financial and physical solvency with them. Unable to generate sufficient revenue for upkeep, the CHA began in the late 1960s to dip into its annual contributions—the very funds earmarked for debt service and capital improvements. These funds did not stretch far enough, and the situation became dire as serious mismanagement overtook the CHA in the 1960s. By the 1970s, its buildings began staggering under aging infrastructures, ballooning maintenance costs, misdirected funding streams, and the

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wear and tear that comes with an unusually high density of child residents.12 By 1981 it teetered on bankruptcy and faced its first real threat of a federal takeover. Physical deterioration worsened and vacancies skyrocketed, especially within high-rise family developments like Horner. In two decades, the CHA had gone from providing “safe, decent and sanitary dwellings” for a mix of middle-class, working-class, and working-poor residents to providing highly stigmatized housing to those with few other options. Those who lived through Horner’s decline in the 1980s felt the stigma that came with living in the housing of last resort, and they tended to assume a defensive posture whenever discussions turned to Horner’s decline. Consider what Mary, a middle-aged woman who moved into the Annex in 1970 with her two siblings and her parents, had to say about it in 2006. “People say,” she began, adopting a critical tone, “ ‘You living here, and your mother, your daughter, her too.’ Well, it did start to be generations of mothers and daughters and sisters.” Then her tone changed as she explained why someone might remain in the housing of last resort:

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At the time we didn’t have nowhere else to go. We needed that structure. . . . When you had family around, you was happy. It wasn’t something that you wanted to happen. It just happened, automatically . . . [but outsiders] came around the old building to stare at us, like we was “the lost children.” They saw how it was and they thought that we didn’t care about where we lived, that all we wanted was just someplace to hang our clothes on the ramp, to have our kids stand out, getting drunk and doing drive-bys. It’s not true. It was generations who wanted the best for each other. It was generations who cared for this place.

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Mary appreciated why domestic arrangements like her own might raise hackles over the “dependency” of women on welfare. She also knew that Horner’s ruin was evident to anyone who came around to gawk. Yet she rejected any facile reading that would reduce Horner’s decrepit state to yet another expression of its residents’ apathy or disorder. Many who had lived through Horner’s decline refused to look past its deteriorating conditions in search of broader explanations that would root it in the “tangle of pathology” famously attributed to households headed by black women.13 More to the point, they absolutely refused to let me look past these conditions. They took

tremendous pains to make sure that I recorded the most mundane dimensions of a place that had disappeared well before the wrecking balls went to work in 1995. “Catherine, write this down,” they would instruct when our casual conversations turned to Horner’s history. “Cassie, this is for those little books,” they would say, gesturing to my bag and the notebook they knew it held. Those who could read well sometimes looked over my shoulder to make sure I got the details exactly right. Here I paraphrase what they had me put in these “little books”: For its first decade, some debate, its first decade and a half, Horner boasted “spacious” apartments that stayed warm all winter. The buildings were “clean” and “airy” with “a lot of glass.” The floors were “shiny” and easy to “keep clean.” The janitor and his helpers regularly stripped, waxed, and buffed the hallways and “pulled” garbage from chutes. Clean hallways and ramps made for hours of games, roller skating, and shared child-care routines. Children could also play in outdoor ball fields and playgrounds interspersed throughout the complex. The Boy’s Club boasted a swimming pool that “was just beautiful,” far bigger than any in the area. Manicured lawns, flowerbeds, and “little gardens” flourished. They stayed tidy because of fines that “housing” slapped on any adult or child who wandered through them. Residents also tended gardens. Many adults hailed from “down South” and had grown up doing agricultural work, “chopping cotton,” and growing vegetables. Tomatoes, collards, mustard greens, Chinese greens, flowers, they grew them all.

dirty, dank, and dark stairwells and slow or broken elevators, all often modified with the adjective “pissy.” Apartments needing both minor and major repairs. Pipes leaking. Trash everywhere. Holes in the walls. “Young mothers” with “kids running loose.” They “played hard” “on the buildings.” They

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At first I understood such idyllic minutiae as nostalgia for a time in which housing projects had improved the city and the social and physical well-being of the black migrants who had come to live within it. Yet the frequency of these decay narratives, and the insistence with which so many pushed me to inscribe them, challenged me to see such details as the necessary counterpoint to what rarely failed to follow—descriptions of

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wrote over the walls, “tore up” the elevators by joyriding on them, and “busted” hallway lights. Playground equipment wore out, the ball field got too “hard” to play on, the rec centers got “raggedy,” the pool was broken most of the time. Without adequate security, people “who didn’t even live here” walked right into the buildings, “tearing them up” and “hurting people.”

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As I was instructed to record them, these decay narratives did not exonerate individual Horner residents from the destruction that beset their buildings or neighborhood. Yet my interlocutors insisted that Horner’s rapid decline could only in part be attributed to poor maternal supervision or vandalism. Adequate security and maintenance would have checked destructive individuals and their destructive activities. Sufficient support for youth programs and recreation would have helped as well. These preoccupations with the minutiae of decay came to a dramatic head around the way my interlocutors narrated the destruction that tore through the West Side after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968.14 What most of my interlocutors simply called “the riot” must be situated within a slower-moving destruction caused by disinvestment and outmigration. Recall Terrance from chapter 1. His family purchased a house south of Madison Street in the 1950s and watched the urban fabric disappear quickly around them. “When the riot hit when I was sixteen, the neighborhood was already gone.” Most of my interlocutors narrated the riot and its aftermath as a watershed, as the moment when they realized that the fate of their homes and neighborhood would be destruction via neglect. Consider a friend’s reflections around the anniversary of King’s assassination in 2006. Shawn had grown up at the Extension and had moved to a Scattered Site replacement unit in the late 1990s. She often gave me a ride in her car whenever she came upon me walking my bike home, its tires flattened by the broken glass that often lined Madison. One such afternoon, she stopped, I threw my bike in her trunk, and we sped off. Shawn is a fast driver, but she suddenly slowed to roll past several vacant lots. Our talk turned to the time following the riot. As a small girl, Shawn had passed several days glued to the windows of their high-rise apartment, watching Madison burn. Her mother had forbidden her and her siblings, especially her brothers, from going down to the streets to watch. She worried they would become swept up in the arson and looting. “We knew thirty years ago that everything [here] would fail,” Shawn remarked, pointing out the

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tangle of wildflowers, broken concrete, and debris that carpeted the lots where Madison’s storefronts had once stood. “The parents started having all sorts of meetings about it to get organized. My mother, she knew, because after the riots, things weren’t rebuilt. Parents knew we were not going to be able to stay.” As Shawn and others told it, the older generation expected that a reconstruction effort would follow the civil disturbance. Many had, after all, witnessed large sections of the city torn down and rebuilt during the 1950s. Yet reconstruction never came, and they began to worry about their ability to remain in a place that many had taken enormous strides to make home. Vacant lots left after the city dispatched bulldozers to wipe away the mess remained vacant, and over the next decade, more buildings fell out of use throughout the area. Disinvestment and outmigration continued apace through the 1980s. Many of my friends who hailed from Horner referred to the gaps left in the local streetscape as “scattered teeth.” This is a suggestive metaphor in a place where getting to the age of thirty with your smile intact is no mean feat. The aftermath of King’s assassination brought incredible destruction to the Near West Side, but transitioning Horner residents folded it into a longer history of material neglect that wasted their homes, their neighborhood, and their bodies. Shawn and others narrated this event from the distance of three decades. Their knowledge of the decline that wracked Horner could not but color how they narrated the Near West Side’s past and ongoing destruction. The insights fed by such hindsight are nevertheless significant: the ruin and vacancy that their parents witnessed tearing through their neighborhood and buildings in the 1970s and 1980s did more than point to a single event of federal abandonment. Rather, these narratives infused ruined places with the movements of time, stretching decay across an indefinite future. In short, my interlocutors understood just how much their lives had become embroiled in housing projects born out of but also bound up in a decaying built environment. Shawn, Martha, and many others whom I came to know in Westhaven treated the most minor details of decay as significant enough to warrant constant pressure on my “little books” and the bigger one they expected me to write. But then, few were unfamiliar with the look, interests, and activities of “people like me.” In the years before and following my fieldwork, researchers, policy analysts, organizers, lawyers, journalists, photographers, oral historians, and documentarians made their way to Horner and other Chicago projects at a steady clip. If the accounts that have emerged are anything to go by,

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I was not the first outsider to be pointed to the physical assaults of what the best-known in our bunch, a young organizer named Barack Obama, described as “ink-black stairwells” and “urine stained lobbies.”15 I doubt that I will be the last. For transitioning Horner residents, “people like me” should find the decay that beset their homes noteworthy. They expected us to document that decay and make it broadly known. It was our job. The content of my interlocutors’ decay narratives is important in any story or analysis of Chicago public housing’s trajectory. But it is just as important to ask how transitioning Horner residents had become so primed to narrate that decay.

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Sympathy and Decaying Things Transitioning Horner residents’ preoccupation with the past, ongoing, and imminent decay of their homes suggests that they understood their own political efficacy to be bound up in so many floors, sockets, elevators, and light fixtures. In many ways, such preoccupations speak to Latour’s efforts to trace the processes by which humans and objects form associations that extend their influence in the world.16 For Latour, “making” another entity “do something” is not a question of one entity exerting its force on another. Rather, “making do” emerges more symmetrically, when two or more entities draw on each other’s capacities to extend or enlarge an action. Together they become a hybrid entity capable of an agency that neither commands on its own. For example, a would-be arsonist only becomes an actual arsonist when he or she has a torch, disaffection, and something flammable at hand, something Shawn’s mother knew, and so she kept all her children—especially her teenage sons—inside. Yet apart from transitioning Horner residents’ access to these objects, what was it about these floors, sockets, or fixtures that made them such reliable allies? Remember that it was not just any floor or socket that my interlocutors pointed me toward, but ones busy warping and dangling. It was not just any elevator or light fixture that they strong-armed into my “little books” and now this bigger one, but those that emitted stenches or obscured hallways. What should we make of the fact that my interlocutors’ go-to allies were not just unreliable, but unreliable in the most dangerous ways? Some scholars have sought to get a handle on the challenges that morphing objects pose to human action by treating them not as discrete or bounded objects that loan their capacities to humans but as “leaky” or “vibrant” things in constant flux.17 For them, the properties of any given thing constantly reach beyond the surfaces that house

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them. As these properties become entangled in those trailing off other things, they gather persons and matter into assemblages or meshworks that have force and efficacy in our worlds. Because things are fundamentally vulnerable to affect and to being affected by other things, because they command the capacity to, as political theorist Jane Bennett notes, “make something new appear or occur,” their properties are never “entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set them, never entirely exhausted by their semiotics.”18 Anyone who has ever watched a block “weather out,” as my interlocutors put it, knows that human hands are not the only things that take down buildings. Rain and snow that meets little resistance from weakened shingles and sealants will run roughshod over roofs and through ceilings. Several seasons of Chicago weather can topple a block just as well as any arsonist’s torch can—albeit at a slower rate. The insights we can reach by considering “leaky” or “vibrant” matter allow us to move away from approaching built environments as places fully determined by human intentions and their “unintended” consequences and to instead focus on the dynamic interface of buildings and the people and things moving within them. Still, I hesitate to transpose the generative capacities of things to places like Horner. That approach risks focusing on novelty at the expense of understanding how the longer trajectory of any thing shapes exactly what forms emerge through its deterioration and how those forms can be taken up in social life. Those who weathered Horner’s decline knew well that decaying windows, pipes, walls, floors, ceilings, doors, elevators, and faucets generated situations that needed to be dealt with. Yet it also mattered to Shawn that “the parents” began to organize around Horner’s deterioration at right about the time it became clear that further reinvestment in the West Side would not be forthcoming. For these residents, the sticking, shaking, rusting, leaking, chipping, peeling, and bursting things around them could not just be chalked up to any thing’s capacity to affect or be affected by some other vibrant thing. Doing justice to this understanding requires a closer look at how Horner’s unfurling things needled the frameworks within which they had emerged and had begun to rot. Here it is helpful to consider what insights a materialist understanding of sympathy holds for the analysis of vibrant things. In its classic conceptualization, sympathy operates as a psychological and physiological correspondence that emerges when entities move within range of one other. This view resonates with recent work on vibrant matter, yet it departs on one critical point. Sympathetic encounters cannot fuse entities in lasting or consequential

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ways unless they are coordinated within a meaningful order. This becomes clear in James Frazer’s discussion of sympathetic magic.19 For Frazer, those who subscribe to such magic and the two forms it takes (“contagious magic” and “imitative magic”) believe that as one entity comes into direct contact with another entity, or, crucially, with a representation of that entity, its properties can become communicable. One entity can assume, even indelibly, the properties of a radically different person, animal, plant, or other thing. Frazer sees sympathetic magic as a spurious form of reasoning. Nevertheless, his conceptualization opens up a world pulsating with animate things whose properties push beyond the physical surfaces that anchor them in place and bind them to nearby things. In the process, two entirely different things become alike. Yet Frazer never takes a thing’s leakiness or forcefulness as a given. The potential of its properties to reach beyond its surfaces and become like those of another depends on the proper initiation of proximity and the proper coordination of resemblance. For Frazer, this coordinated proximity and resemblance unfolds within a ritual or habitual order. Frazer spends pages cataloging instances in which transfers ride on matters as delicate as whether or not subscribers to sympathetic magic have properly avoided a footprint in the sand, whether or not they have properly buried a tooth.20 In Frazer’s account, things have force and efficacy in the world. They can press into, reconfigure, and bind persons and places. Yet it is properties realigned, reinforced, and above all qualified within meaningful orders and systems of value that steer whether or not subscribers to sympathetic magic will recognize these things to be affecting them in durable and discernable ways. It is here where we can glean one of the most promising insights that a materialist theory of sympathy holds for scholars concerned with the role of matter in social and political life. Encounters with things affect us viscerally. They impinge on bodies and sensibilities in ways that help us understand our own feelings or sentiments to resonate with those of another thing. Such understandings can even open up novel courses of interpretation and action. Yet if these encounters are to bind unlike people and things together in ways that matter beyond any single encounter, the people entangled within them must recognize the forcefulness of vibrant matter. That recognition hinges on the qualification of that force within some system of value. Looking toward the orders or values that any given thing is entangled within is not the same as denying its autonomy or forcefulness. It is only to suggest that a thing’s efficacy emerges as its properties exert what anthropologist Webb Keane has called a “transformative

Moving Decay When Don Kimball ventured into Horner in 1991, he came convinced that its residents had caused the decay that plagued their buildings.

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pressure” on the systems of meaning, value, and action that dispose humans and things to each another.21 A trip into Horner’s rotting stairwells helps make this clear. From an engineer’s standpoint, the concrete blocks that made up Horner’s interior walls had many advantages. They made for strong and quick construction. They insulated noise and heat well. But concrete cracks as it settles or bears heavy loads. Such fissures are easily repaired, but without regular maintenance, Horner’s cracking concrete blocks loosened the fixtures they held in place, including the handrails designed to steady residents’ trips up and down the stairs. During the 1980s, residents were forced to conduct those trips in darkness. Maintenance crews failed to replace light bulbs that were burned out, smashed, or stolen. My interlocutors almost always brought up decrepit stairwells when conversations turned to Horner’s decay. Former and transitioning residents spoke of avoiding the stairs whenever the elevators worked. They learned to carry flashlights at all times and to descend the stairs without touching potentially unstable rails lest they stumble into the broken glass, trash, and human and animal shit gathering in the stairwells. Cracking concrete and loosening handrails changed navigational practices at Horner in the 1980s. And because handrails happened to be governed by building codes, broken handrails could support arguments about dangers posed to residents. But for such arguments to resonate beyond Horner, sympathetic links between unsteady handrails and unsteadied bodies needed to be forged and recognized within institutions tasked with keeping handrails steady. For those who navigated them everyday, the effects of Horner’s decaying stairwells were obvious. Unsteady handrails could and did unsteady residents; they could and did force residents to move differently around their buildings. However, widespread consensus about the CHA’s responsibility to secure Horner’s stairwells was altogether another matter. Below I turn to the legal and sentimental arguments that Horner residents and their advocates experimented with to forge sympathetic links between decaying buildings and the bodies moving within them. In the process, I show how Horner’s decaying things began to move beyond the complex’s moldering walls in ways that altered the course of national public housing reform.

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“Look what they’ve done to their neighborhood. Why don’t they take care of it?” The CHA did in fact expect its residents to take care of their homes and buildings. A tenant handbook from the late 1970s, for instance, lays out detailed cleaning and maintenance instructions. Topics cover everything from where to put the garbage out (in or by hallway chutes) and how to keep tile floors clean (sweep, then mop) to the best way to remove soot from windows (with a crumpled newspaper) and who to call with serious issues (such as a leak or a broken stove).22 The handbook dates from the decade when the CHA’s larger complexes began falling into decline, yet it lays out the same simple maintenance tasks recommended in editions from earlier decades. My interviews with former Horner residents indicated that they performed these simple tasks, but also that they took on more complex ones as formal maintenance began lapsing. Many pointed out the steps they took to “clean,” “fix,” and “beautify” apartments and common areas. They cleaned and painted walls. They cleared and mopped hallways and ramps. More than a few betrayed an impressive working knowledge of the operation and maintenance of household appliances and building infrastructures. That knowledge suggests that they stepped in to tinker with ailing pipes, stoves, lights, and refrigerators. Yet handiness with a mop, a paintbrush, fuses, elevator controls, and radiators was no match for the decay that engulfed Horner and other CHA complexes in the 1980s. Its scale and ferocity demanded other kinds of experiments and other kinds of tools. In the 1970s, public housing authorities in several larger cities struggled to maintain their housing stocks as inflation pushed operating expenses higher than what rent receipts from an increasingly impoverished tenant base could cover.23 Emboldened by the civil rights movement as well as by local activism seeded by Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, tenant groups began organizing to address concerns. By the early 1970s, public housing tenants in Newark, New Jersey, and St. Louis, Missouri, had staged rent strikes that publicized the deferred maintenance and lapsed security ravaging their buildings.24 Residents did more than go on strike. Around the country, legal actions were becoming the strategy through which residents and their advocates sought to realize the 1937 Housing Act’s aspirations to “remedy . . . the acute shortage of safe, decent and sanitary dwellings for families of lower income.” Below I describe the “transformative pressure” that public housing’s decrepit things placed on the legal remedies and public sentiments to which residents had recourse and show how this consistent pressure advanced arguments and actions that would come to a national head at Horner.

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Chicago’s projects were no strangers to federal court. Even before the decline of the 1970s set in, they had become embroiled in a landmark case concerning racial discrimination. A class-action suit filed in 1966 (Hills v. Gautreaux) alleged that with the complicity of HUD, CHA officials promoted racial segregation by siting postwar housing projects in areas that were predominantly black, in violation of the Civil Rights Act. Gautreaux spent a decade winding its way through the courts. After the Supreme Court decided in favor of the class in 1976, an experimental program emerged that allowed those who would qualify for public housing to move to less racially segregated areas with a housing voucher. The program became a model for municipalities across the country.25 Yet while Gautreaux helped open white residential areas to blacks and other people of color, it could not address the upkeep of public housing projects already built in racially segregated urban cores. In the early 1970s tenant groups active at several of Chicago’s larger complexes began working with legal advocates to resolve declining conditions. They mobilized around legal strategies common in years following the Civil Rights Act, years in which intentional discrimination became increasingly difficult to prove. In Chicago Housing Tenants Organization v. Chicago Housing Authority, for example, tenants argued that adequate grievance procedures did not exist for them to fight evictions, demand action on repairs, and recoup the cost of personal property, especially food and medicine, ruined or lost to broken refrigerators, apartment fires, or thieves.26 The CHA responded by establishing clear grievance procedures. Yet the existence of such procedures would not guarantee that repairs would be made. Decay continued apace. Public housing tenants in other cities took a more direct approach when they began putting intractable decay at the center of legal complaints. As they did, they advanced a legal theory. The decay spreading through increasingly vacant public housing complexes was not simply a symptom of intentional racial discrimination, lax enforcement, or inadequate grievance procedures; decay destroyed structures as surely as demolition. A public housing unit left vacant because severe decay had rendered it uninhabitable was as good as demolished. It could not do what Congress had tasked it to do under the terms of the 1937 Housing Act. It could not house “families of lower income” in “safe, decent and sanitary dwellings.” The decaying public housing unit may have stood as a structure, but it did not stand as a home. In the span of fifteen years, this theory became a formidable legal tool poised to alter the landscape of public housing reform around the nation.

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The first court to articulate this theory did so in the mid-1970s. In Cole v. Lynn, the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., considered a class action brought by tenants of an affordable-housing project operated by the D.C. Housing Authority. This case concerned an ongoing physical demolition of the project, which tenants sought to halt. Yet the court also raised the possibility that the Housing Authority’s physical neglect might constitute another kind of demolition. “Vandalism, empty apartments and continuing unsafe conditions would, as a practical matter” the Cole court found, “effectively accomplish demolition by a process of erosion. Only by filling the building with qualified needy tenants can the project remain viable.”27 Subsequent courts moved along the concept of public housing’s de facto demolition. Consider a dissenting opinion offered in a case about a decade later. Edwards v. District of Columbia pertained to the demolition of another D.C. housing project (1986).28 Its residents alleged that the D.C. Housing Authority had failed to follow demolition procedure when it allowed apartments to deteriorate while it awaited HUD’s approval for demolition. Residents were not successful in their de facto demolition claim. However, two years later, the U.S. District Court in Connecticut, in a ruling that concerned Father Panik Village, a decayed public housing project in Bridgeport, drew favorably on a dissenting opinion in the Edwards case. Plaintiffs alleged that decrepit conditions, which ranged from broken windows and vermin infestations to missing locks and inadequate lighting, physically endangered them. Quoting favorably from the Edwards dissent, the court noted that “the unapproved destruction of a housing project . . . is the same whether done by a wrecking ball and bulldozers or by neglect that renders the units uninhabitable. . . . To conclude otherwise would allow public housing agencies to evade the law by simply allowing housing projects to fall into decay and disrepair.”29 In different cities around the country, public housing’s decaying things pushed the evolution of a legal theory that would prove capable of addressing their dangerous effects. The evolution of the de facto demolition concept, and with it the potential for rotting things in rotting public housing to move into a national limelight, took a major leap forward in 1987. Until 1983, HUD did not offer public housing authorities any formal demolition guidelines. This in itself is not alarming. The oldest projects in HUD’s portfolio were not yet fifty years old. Most of Chicago’s were barely thirty. Yet in 1983, Congress amended the Housing Act of 1937 to require public housing authorities to get approval from HUD before they undertook any demolition activities. HUD would only grant

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that approval once the local authority had consulted with affected tenants and had helped them secure other housing. In 1987, Congress responded to the Edwards decision, which had found that these demolition guidelines did not apply in de facto cases, by further amending the Housing Act to cover such scenarios as well.30 Taken together, these amendments guaranteed public housing residents enforceable rights and protections regardless of whether a wrecking ball or serious neglect had toppled their homes. Congress then further strengthened demolition guidelines by requiring that public housing authorities replace every single unit demolished with another and by stipulating that this requirement would hold in both physical and de facto demolition scenarios. With the de facto demolition concept grounded firmly in statute, the one-to-one replacement rule would guarantee that the nation’s public housing stock would remain constant. It would also provide the basis for Horner residents to finally address the rapid deterioration of their buildings and homes. In the late 1980s, a group of residents at the Henry Horner Annex, the Henry Horner Mothers Guild, approached the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago (LAFC) for guidance with a new effort. The LAFC had helped the Mothers Guild incorporate as a nonprofit several years earlier. As some of its founding members suggested to me (and as the name of the organization itself might suggest), the women emphasized the serious work of mothering at a time when mothers “on welfare” faced intense public scrutiny and criticism. They initially organized to improve educational and social service opportunities for children living at the Annex. Yet the Annex’s intensifying decline and skyrocketing vacancy rate began consuming all their attention. In the 1980s, Horner had an overall vacancy rate of just over 2 percent, reflecting a steady demand for apartments in the complex. Yet by the end of that decade, Horner’s overall vacancy rate had skyrocketed to nearly 50 percent. In some of the Extension’s high-rises, the vacancy rate hovered close to 70 percent.31 Throughout the CHA’s housing, high-rise buildings were proving especially difficult to maintain and secure. LAFC staff had observed Horner’s worsening conditions during site visits. But absent a frame within which to hang a violation and secure the repairs and security improvements, Horner’s decaying apartments were merely decaying apartments full of disintegrating things that put constant pressure on the bodies that navigated them every day. With changing statutes and evolving judicial decisions, the legal conditions of their intelligibility had changed. In a growing number of cities, the decay of public housing units had finally been

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recognized as a legal matter in its own right. And that recognition might have widespread effects. In short, decaying things had finally exerted enough “transformative pressure” on the systems of meaning that governed the enforceable rights of public housing residents. The Mothers Guild’s lawyers were “thrilled” when they learned about the Father Panik Village case: Horner residents struggled with the exact same conditions. The case provided a template for other complaints that could be hung on a de facto demolition charge. These complaints included the allegation that HUD and the local public housing authority had violated tenants’ rights as third-party beneficiaries of the Annual Contributions Contract. The CHA received the funds every year, but they had not resulted in Horner’s maintenance. As William Wilen, the supervising attorney in the suit that the Mothers Guild brought in 1991 against the CHA and HUD, noted to me in 2005:

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The de facto demolition theory was such a powerful tool. We considered not just filing the case on behalf of Horner residents, but on behalf of all CHA residents. Our dream was, let’s file Horner first, let’s make the law good. Then let’s see where else it has legs. There was no reason why you couldn’t file the same suit at Taylor or Cabrini–Green.

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Now retired, Wilen is a white lawyer who spent his entire career working in the field of poverty law. In the early 1990s, he hoped that taking Horner’s decay to court might give the de facto demolition theory traction at Chicago’s Robert Taylor and Cabrini–Green Homes. These were two of the largest housing projects in the United States, and their insecurity and squalor were widely known. Yet he also sensed that moving the decay of such high-profile sites into federal court would be easier after the de facto theory was more firmly established in judicial opinion. Given the circumspection that surrounds novel legal theories, this was a challenge. Successful applications of the de facto theory had all turned on arguments about administrative procedure. Yet they also touched on something far less straightforward and far more subjective: Was the decay of a housing project severe enough to be categorized as “demolition”? Could that decay be attributed wholly to institutional abandonment? Or, as the CHA would argue in its defense, was decay the outcome of destructive residents run amok? The Mothers Guild’s legal team concentrated on “painting” what Wilen called “a graphic picture for the judge.” They presented an

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image of Horner as hulking over the Near West Side—not as “safe, decent and sanitary” housing but as the decrepit aftermath of such housing. Its increasing vacancy rate and decay violated demolition procedures. Vacancy was the central issue in the case, rather than the physical and emotional toll of living in a rotting place. However, residents and their advocates saw their efforts to convey this toll as critical to making the de facto theory persuasive in Chicago. They set about assembling evidence, specifically affidavits, reports, and photographs, that would illustrate the complaints in the case, all the while foregrounding the fact that Horner’s decaying things were disintegrating in ways that stood to harm anyone in their path. The graphic picture offered to the court turned on forging sympathetic bonds between decaying buildings and anyone unlucky enough to come within range. Consider Carol Henderson, a named plaintiff in the Mothers’ Guild case. At the time of her affidavit in 1992, she had lived in a Horner mid-rise for four years with her children. The affidavit reads like a tour. It lists the faulty conditions in her apartment and building and directs the court to photographs said to capture them accurately. People do not appear in these photographs; the physical decay of things is the matter at hand. The tour starts in Henderson’s kitchen. “After living in my apartment about four years,” it begins, “my kitchen cabinets began to rot and rust severely. The problem is that the sink repeatedly backs up, the drain clogs and water overflows the sink. Also, the drainpipe is broken, the trap is rotted out and has a hole in it.” The tour then goes on to the living room, lingering on a hotwater pipe that lacks insulation. That pipe “is very hot, constantly leaks and my children are in danger of being burned.” It then moves to an ongoing cockroach infestation and the defective windows that allow water to “constantly come” into the apartment. On to the hallways, where the “smell of rotted garbage” rises from “damaged and non-functional” trash chutes. And on to the building’s lobby. Missing lights and unlit exit signs are noted along the way. The affidavit closes by insisting that Henderson’s repeated complaints have yielded no response from maintenance staff. The pipe still lacks insulation. The cabinets are still rusting and rotting away.32 Like the others filed in the case, Henderson’s affidavit focuses on the broken things in her apartment and building and alleges that despite her best efforts, those broken things went unrepaired. Yet although those things remained broken, they were not static. As they disintegrated and unfurled, they let loose all the things held within pipes, walls, and windows: water, steam, heat, vermin. At the same

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time, they pulled together what Horner’s no longer smooth or functional surfaces had once held apart: exposed pipes, exposed skin, exposed children, exposed nerves. The things impinging on Henderson and her children, as well as on their fellow residents, did not bear down on them as much as bore into them. However, in order for decaying, leaky things to move beyond the affidavits that voiced residents’ endangerment, residents needed to persuade those who did not regularly come into contact with them. In short, the widespread noteworthiness of these decaying things hinged on their capacity to move onlookers to experience how and with what effect they might unfurl across others’ bodies and press into others’ nerves. Their capacity to do that emerged in a lengthy inspection report submitted to the court as further evidence of a de facto demolition—Donald Kimball’s report. Written in 1991 and appended to his 1992 affidavit in the case, it describes hazardous conditions found in Horner’s buildings, paired with photographs said to represent those conditions accurately. The report nails down two points running through the previous legal cases that advanced the de facto demolition theory: first, documented conditions violated local building codes; second, conditions of decay had been caused by the failure of the CHA to maintain and secure its buildings. In language and in appearance, the report’s narrative descriptions and photographs resemble the straightforward feel of those employed in Henderson’s affidavit. Kimball’s report narrates most of its findings, in fact, in the third person. This makes the single instance in which such narrative remove falters all the more notable. It breaks at the very moment a figure referred to as “this writer” reports investigating two holes gaping in the wall of a “dimly lit stairwell” in an Extension apartment:

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When this writer asked the tenant when they occurred, she explained that the holes occurred when her mentally retarded son fell down the stairs a few years ago. Later on in the inspection, this writer had the opportunity to put his hand on the handrail, which then came off the wall and fell to the floor. The handrail anchor into the concrete wall had pulled out, but the handrail could be set in place, albeit temporarily. The tenant then explained that the handrail had also been in this condition for a number of years.33

As “this writer” grasps a handrail that could no longer steady anyone’s descent, it becomes something besides an ex-handrail, an ongoing

hazard to a disabled child, a worry to his mother, or another example of excessive code violations. It becomes a medium of sympathy that transfers unsteadiness to someone besides that mother and her child. Now, an engineer’s caution or, for that matter, the physical remove of the judge who reviews evidence might seem to preclude the feeling of unsteadiness, worries about tumbling down the stairs, or fears that one’s child will do so. Recall, though, Frazer’s discussion of contagious and imitative magic. Through the force of ritual or habit and whatever authoritative orders and practices back those forces up, two unlike entities can be made alike. An engineer’s body could, through the conventions of evidence that animate his field, come to take on the unsteadiness of loosening handrails, and a judge reputed by lawyers involved in the Mothers Guild case to be “tough and skeptical” could, through conventions that govern the presentation of legal evidence, come to infer that any body that stepped into Horner would be similarly undone by the disintegrating things that threatened Henderson and her children. Here, these conventions staged concrete experiences that brought Henderson’s perspectives into “intimate proximity” with their own.34 Such proximity might be brief, but those working to forge these sympathetic bonds suggested that they had lasting effects. In 2012, William Wilen walked me once more through the evidence submitted in the case, as well as a video press release that the Mothers Guild produced to announce their lawsuit on national television (a younger Martha, it turns out, had put her apartment on ABC and CBS). Wilen remarked that he still looked at the evidence and materials “once in a while.” He continued, referencing the video,

Wilen suggested that the recognition of serious legal and moral infractions hinges in part on a working knowledge of housing codes

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Just look at the rat in the corner, the water dripping down. . . . And then when [a mother] talks about fighting “the drugs, the rats and the roaches.” It goes into your ears, your eyes and it just stays there. That’s what we wanted to do to the judge. We wanted to make him realize that these were horrendous, not just code violations, but conditions no human being should have to put up with. An affront to the dignity of these people, and violations of our duties to the people that live there. . . . “Decent,” “safe” and “sanitary”— it’s not like this, it’s the opposite of this. It violates the law. But it’s an outrage as well.

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and housing law and on the way both govern the condition and presentation of buildings. Yet moving from this recognition toward moral outrage requires something more. An expert witness, an advocate, a judge, even members of an anonymous viewing audience needed to step into a place, a tour, a photograph, or a narrative in ways that fed inferences about what encroaching decay and its many harms might look, sound, and feel like. These inferences were not temporary. They could go “into your ears, your eyes” and just stay there. Even at a remove, Horner’s decaying things could sympathetically augment a bystander’s perceptual repertoires and with them, his moral imagination. A series of favorable rulings for the plaintiffs pushed the Mothers Guild case toward settlement in 1995. It resulted in a consent decree that has governed Horner’s redevelopment ever since. The settlement was a major victory for residents because it granted them important protections. It also further grounded the de facto demolition argument in ways that made HUD officials nervous—if an experimental legal theory bolstered by distressed public housing’s decaying things had found legs in Chicago, it would surely find legs elsewhere. HUD officials lobbied Congress to repeal the one-to-one replacement rule, and by 1996 it was off the books. Repeal meant that a public housing authority could embark on large-scale demolitions without having to replace every unit of public housing that it demolished. The Mothers Guild case brought important protections to Horner residents. Yet Horner’s decay had circulated beyond the complex’s walls and into legal and political realms in ways that enabled the demolition of public housing on a large scale. Other public housing residents in and beyond Chicago would not have recourse to such protections. So far I have concentrated on legal experiments that forged sympathetic links between decaying buildings and the bodies moving through them. Yet as Martha’s threat to open her apartment “for everyone to see” suggests, Horner’s decaying things did not just circulate within a legal arena. In the late 1980s, just as the Mothers Guild and their advocates were moving to get their legal motion off the ground, a series of articles began appearing about conditions at Horner. They attracted national attention. Alex Kotlowitz, a white journalist then writing for the Wall Street Journal, penned these articles. They ran in 1987 and followed two young brothers living at Horner as they navigated the poverty and violence that scourged the site. Kotlowitz expanded the articles into a book, There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America. Published in 1991 to great acclaim, the

book spent eight weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. When I spoke with Kotlowitz in 2012, he described the articles as “an experiment” in telling stories about a place and a people who inspired “little empathy”: “The public was actively turning away from these communities. . . . It was normal to think that people lived in projects because of the choices they had made. If they wanted to get out, they needed to work harder. Simple as that.” Kotlowitz first ventured into Horner in the late 1980s to generate copy for a friend’s photo essay about children living in poverty. At the time, he stressed to me, he considered himself “pretty savvy” about the challenges facing U.S. cities. Yet nothing had prepared him for what he encountered at Horner. Not his own coming-of-age in New York as that city was spiraling toward bankruptcy. Nor the year he spent during college working in a settlement house in an impoverished Atlanta neighborhood. “When I first came out to Horner, I was mortified. I felt so ashamed. I just saw this, well, this wreckage, this devastation. And I thought, How could I possibly live in this city, work a mile and a half from this place, and not know?” Urban poverty could, Kotlowitz knew, seem like an “old story.” “So what else is new?,” he anticipated readers, researchers, and editors asking. Yet he suspected that the scale and severity of Horner’s devastation really did suggest something new: a place mired in the intensifying violence of the crack epidemic. As he spent more time at Horner, he hit upon a strategy to deflect reader fatigue. He would anchor his narrative entirely around children, their lives, their concerns, and their perspectives: It’s easy to point your fingers at adults who make choices. But these kids aren’t old enough to have made any profound choices in their lives. So they are being assaulted by all that was around them, by choices made by adults, men and women in that community, and by decisions made by the CHA, the schools, by the police, city politics. And kids, they’re just naturally sympathetic. Everyone has been one. THE MANY HARMS OF STAYING HERE

Kotlowitz’s articles for the Wall Street Journal focused on the gun violence and failing schools that plagued young people on the Near West Side. The “assaults” of decrepit buildings and their many harms came to the fore in his highly anticipated book. In his book, a decaying housing project takes on a life of its own. The narrative opens and closes with vivid descriptions of bodies overwhelmed by decrepit, dangerous things. Two children die of smoke inhalation when broken elevators stymie firefighters who cannot

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make it up fourteen flights in time. A colony of roaches teems into the brothers’ apartment from the hallways and “takes refuge from the pesticides in a small portable radio that belonged to one of the older children.” The origins of “a horrible stench, suggesting raw, spoiled meat, [that] periodically rose from the toilet” turns out to be a basement full of dog, cat, and rodent carcasses, rotting alongside two thousand refrigerators, cabinets, and stoves, which, still sealed new in their boxes, are themselves rusting away in pools of stagnant water.35 Like the conditions described in the affidavits filed in the Mothers Guild case, the rotting things that impinge on the children’s bodies do not so much bear down on them as they bore into them. The boys’ bodies, in fact, begin to mirror the qualities of Horner’s decaying things. A malfunctioning heating system’s “dry, crackling 85 degrees” parches one boy’s throat into a “blistering cough.” The regular staccato of gunfire ignites a nervous stutter in his brother. But theirs are not the only bodies that become entangled within decaying things.36 In one especially vivid scene, a CHA administrator keen to unearth the missing appliances enters the tombs that Horner’s basements have become. She promptly vomits and faints. As in the Mothers Guild case, decaying buildings and their decaying things emerge as a heaving, cleaving, and dangerous mess, poised to affect and undo anything caught in their unfurling currents. And reminiscent also of the legal team’s efforts to sway a tough judge, Kotlowitz’s narration leans on sympathy as a medium of transfer to compel those reading at a remove to feel something not altogether unlike “the assaults” visited upon Horner’s children. “It’s very visceral,” Kotlowitz mused in 2012; “I wanted people to feel what they feel, see what they see. Just say, ‘My God, how can anyone get through this mess?’ ” If the response to Kotlowitz’s account is anything to go by, he was successful. The book has sold five hundred thousand copies, garnered numerous awards, and become required reading for students of urban affairs and anyone working in the field. To this day I meet journalists, policy analysts, social workers, and urban planners who attribute their careers to having read Kotlowitz’s book in a class. The New York Public Library placed it on its “150 Most Important Books of the Century” list in 1995. There it kept company with titles that ranged formidably from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth to Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl.37 But There Are No Children Here did not just address publics anchored around urban affairs or elite literary tastes. Oprah Winfrey adapted it as a madefor-television movie in 1993, starring herself and Maya Angelou, two of the most recognized black women in late twentieth-century

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America. And throughout the 1990s, various politicians took to referencing Kotlowitz’s book in speeches, debates, and hearings that touched on urban crime, violence, disinvestment, and racism. For instance, when then former HUD secretary and vice presidential nominee Jack Kemp reminded party faithful at the 1996 Republican National Convention that American society would “never achieve the outer-reaches of potential, so long as it tolerates the inner-cities of despair,” he followed with an oft-cited remark made by one of Kotlowitz’s child protagonists. If he grew up, he would like to become a bus driver.38 The book had brought widespread consensus, across party lines, on a general point: the nation could not move forward if it failed to protect its most vulnerable citizens. The vulnerability of children became a point that everyone could agree upon. In our conversation in 2012, Kotlowitz recalled Kemp’s successor at HUD, Henry Cisneros, “[talking] about [the] book as influencing the decision to seriously consider razing public housing.” That decision came to a head in the spring of 1995 as Cisneros’s HUD assumed control of the CHA. As Cisneros explained in 1995 before a Congress wary of federal intervention in Chicago, decades of deferred maintenance, budget cuts, and gross mismanagement had resulted in “a near meltdown situation” at the CHA. Cisneros stressed that nearly half of those living with this “meltdown” were children. “We must find a way to help them.”39 Cisneros was not the only HUD official to invoke disasters and vulnerability. “If Chicago, as conventional wisdom muses, drags all public housing down,” wrote a member of the “recovery team” that HUD sent to Chicago in the summer of 1995 to assess the situation on the ground, “then improving Chicago will increase the likelihood that the rest of public housing will improve . . . [and HUD will meet its] overarching goal of improving the lives of public housing residents and changing public housing as we know it.”40 HUD’s takeover in Chicago would unfold squarely within Bill Clinton’s commitments to “end welfare as we have come to know it.” Yet as the language of “meltdowns,” “recovery teams,” and vulnerable children suggests, it would also unfold squarely within a much longer, foundational trope of the welfare state in the United States—that of a large-scale disaster whose victims suffered a misfortune utterly beyond their making.41 HUD would beat a path to its overarching goal straight through Horner’s wreckage. The Mothers Guild case had pushed the CHA to begin tackling Horner’s decrepit conditions. That effort involved a successful application to HUD’s HOPE VI demonstration program, which dispersed grants to housing authorities so that they

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could experiment with redevelopment measures at troubled public housing projects. With the lawsuit’s settlement in the spring of 1995, HUD moved to implement Horner’s grant. That August, Cisneros climbed onto a makeshift stage erected before a high-rise at the Horner Extension. Together with tenant leaders, residents, journalists, and news cameras, he watched a wrecking ball tear into the decrepit, vacant building.42 A former Horner resident who attended the event recalled Cisneros’s words to me ten years later. “He said, ‘We’re putting public housing on trial here.’ ” Newspaper accounts of that day do not document Cisneros’s exact words. Yet throughout that summer, he had used variations of this phrase in news conferences. “The national system of public housing is on trial in Chicago,” Cisneros had announced at one such conference; “As goes Chicago, so goes America.”43 HUD officials insisted that Horner’s severe decay fueled their sprint toward demolition and redevelopment at the complex. But politicians and media commentators wasted no time in suggesting that there might be another reason HUD had moved so quickly that summer. When Democratic Party faithful gathered the following August to nominate Bill Clinton for his second term in office, they would do so at the new United Center. So when Clinton took that stage to celebrate his first term’s major domestic achievements— notably, the Welfare Reform law that he had signed a week earlier—he would have quite the scene. Horner’s demolition and redevelopment would be well underway, just across the street. Media crews made a point of treating those who watched or read about the convention at a remove to images and narratives that underscored Horner’s transformation. Sympathetic contact with Horner’s demise and redevelopment had become a concrete experience that promised to bring the lives, viewpoints, and vulnerabilities of public housing residents into “intimate proximity” with their fellow citizens.

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In the 2002 public radio broadcast, Kimball recalled that as his work with the Mothers Guild advanced, he kept trying to tell his family, his coworkers, and the “guys in the neighborhood” about Horner’s conditions. Eyes just glazed over. “They don’t really want to hear about it or if they do the natural reaction is, ‘Why don’t these people fix this place up? . . . They’re responsible for that and we ought to put them in jail for living that way.’ I mean, I felt kind of isolated.”44 He explained that the church he belonged to took “testimonials” on Wednesday evenings. One Wednesday evening he felt moved to stand up and testify about how grateful he was for having had the opportunity to see

Horner, to witness how its residents were making homes and taking care of each other in spite of its conditions. “The people living in public housing are no different than my next-door neighbors,” I said, “we should include them in our prayers as part of our community.” . . . [I told them I] would be in favor of having our share of low income housing. I think it would benefit our community. . . . I think we’d be a better town.

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Horner’s decaying things moved far beyond its walls in the 1990s in ways that enlivened experimental arguments and sentiments concerning the moral worth and physical protection of those who struggled to make a home there. As unraveling things unraveled the bodies and nerves of Horner residents, they began to organize for better housing conditions. Their efforts contributed to the clarification of federal statutes that governed the demolition and disposal of public housing units. These efforts ultimately secured legal protections that allowed many Horner residents to remain in place while newer, better homes emerged around them. As unraveling things also worked on the bodies of those who visited Horner in person, in print, or in images, expectations concerning who or what might be responsible for maintaining this project and places like it also changed. Visits like Kimball’s promised to bring publicly and nonpublicly housed citizens closer together. They promised to make better communities, better towns, and—if the optimism surrounding HUD’s takeover of the CHA is anything to go by—a better nation, better equipped to care for its most vulnerable citizens. Sympathetic engagements with Horner’s decrepit things had renewed protections for Horner’s residents and at the same time had fed imaginations of what social protection should look and feel like at welfare’s “end.” Writing at the height of debates about welfare retrenchment in the 1990s, political theorist Wendy Brown observed that scholarly and activist laments about the shrinking welfare state and its disappearing protections failed to reflect on the possibility that demands for redress and protection might become a technique of domination.45 She worried that as marginalized groups had turned to courts to adjudicate various injuries, including racial discrimination, they had become entangled in a politics that wed their political efficacy to their capacity to embody discrimination. These groups might feel compelled to seek redress and its resources on the grounds that they had suffered the effects of racism. Yet such claims actually invested

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them in ongoing performances of racism’s wounds. In such a politics, members of these groups had come to define themselves by the very categories that differentiated and excluded them. They had become invested in and attached to the very processes that wounded them. Those wounds had become a strange political currency, one they eagerly wielded. Brown wondered whether the impasses of such a politics might lift when “not only economic stratification but other injuries to the human body and psyche enacted by capitalism” were foregrounded. And she singled out displacement and the disintegration of neighborhoods as two possible points of political mobilization that might avoid the trappings of a politicized identity grounded on claims of discrimination.46 Public housing’s decay was an outcome of housing policies born of racial discrimination and economic stratification. In urban cores like Chicago, impoverished people of color bore the brunt of those policies and their fallout. Yet the legal and sentimental arguments that Horner’s decaying things inspired did not foreground claims about racial discrimination. Instead, they foregrounded other “injuries to the human body and psyche”—claims that any body would be affected if it came into range of Horner’s decaying things. People like Kimball’s neighbors or Kotlowitz’s readers might not have been able to inhabit the racial suffering of public housing residents. They might be hostile to such claims; they might shrug them off and say, “What else is new?” Yet Kimball’s and Kotlowitz’s efforts were predicated upon hopes that all these people might come to infer the bodily and psychic injuries of life in decrepit homes. After all, each had a body, and each had experienced that body’s situation within a built environment. Sympathetic encounters between Horner’s buildings and the bodies that came within range of them did forge bonds that circumvented the impasses of legal motions centered on racial discrimination and of public discourses fixated on poor people’s irresponsibility. And they did this while opening up important protections for Horner residents at the very moment when so many other welfare programs and their protections were contracting. Yet it is worth asking whether protections born of sympathetic encounters could become a “technique of domination” in their own right. As Martha’s sensitivity to decay and others’ vigilance over what went into my “little books” might suggest, well after Kotlowitz’s exposé and the Mothers Guild case gained traction, transitioning Horner residents still understood their political efficacy to be bound up in warping, moldering, and breaking things. Throughout my time in Westhaven, transitioning Horner residents fixated on their on-

going exposure to unsound housing and their ability to narrate and document its harms in the most visceral and poignant ways. And they asked “people like me” to help others feel those harms, to become sympathetically alive to them. Those harms and feelings had become a critical but risky political currency. They wedded critical resources for transitioning Horner residents to their ongoing exposure to decrepit conditions. The next chapter takes up how these residents wielded this risky currency to stay—and stay comfortably warm—in houses that were growing increasingly cold.

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3

Project Heat and Sensory Politics

“Pay Your Bill” On the second Sunday of every August, the Bud Billiken Day Parade and Picnic snakes south through the South Side Chicago neighborhood of Bronzeville, thrilling over a million spectators along the way. True to the parade’s mission to showcase African American youth while getting them excited for the upcoming school year, drum-andbugle corps march in bright uniforms, flanked by dancers and tumblers who toss their flags, wooden bayonets, and bodies high into the air. But young musicians and hero acrobats are not the only ones parting the thick blue barbecue smoke that curls over the parade route. Media, spectators, well-known public figures, and the historical epicenter of Chicago’s African American political and cultural life all converge at “the Bud” to knit “Black Chicago” together, at least for the afternoon. Waving from floats and cars, representatives from local businesses, community groups, fraternities, and unions, as well as national and local political luminaries, all show up to woo the crowd. Yet if the Bud hands business, civic, and political leaders a platform, it also hands its tremendous crowd a chance to air their frustrations. At the 2005 parade, the usual mix of glad-handing and marketing met mixed reactions. I stood amid a group whose reunion T-shirts identified them as former residents of the Ida B. Wells Homes, one of Chicago’s earliest public housing projects and its first designated for African Americans.1 Wells stood shuttered along the parade route, awaiting demolition. A restless silence descended when a float covered in orange-and-white bunting stalled before us. It belonged to the Chicago Housing Authority and was festooned with smiling resident leaders and children who waved balloons and felt pennants 101

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emblazoned with the word “CHANGE” (Plate 3). As the float started to move again, the jeering began in earnest: “C-H-A wrecked my building!” “Get me off the wait list!” Or simply, “Boo!” The youngest children began to cry, but the adults knew exactly what to do. They led the children in a singsong chant: “That’s all right. That’s okay. C-H-A will save the day. That’s all right. That’s okay . . .” A float representing Commonwealth Edison, the private utility company that electrifies the Chicagoland area, came rolling not far behind. Led by a boisterous emcee drenched in sweat and charisma, ComEd employees danced on the float and riled up the crowd. “Make some noise if you’ve got lights!” the emcee shouted, punctuating the crowd’s cheers with fist pumps and hip swivels. “Make some noise if you’ve got AC [air conditioning]!” ComEd’s float soon met a fate similar to the CHA’s, when members of the group began to yell: “We’re hot!” “Give me back [my] AC!” “Cut my lights back on!” The emcee paused from his dancing, laughed, wagged a finger at hecklers, and sang, “Pay your bill, pay your bill, pay your bill! Pay your bill . . .”

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In Chicago, frustrations and debates about public housing reform, utility access, physical comfort, and consumer responsibility are more than a coincidence of parade order. Chicago’s brand of economic and racial segregation can make summer cooling and winter heating matters of life and death for the city’s most vulnerable citizens. The enormous death toll among elderly people from the 1995 heat wave, for instance, mapped cleanly onto impoverished, segregated, and underserved neighborhoods. As daytime temperatures soared past one hundred degrees Fahrenheit and hovered there for five days, some 740 people lost their lives.2 In the decade following that disaster, access to utilities to heat homes became a serious issue for those leaving the city’s public housing projects. This chapter follows that issue as it emerged around the loss of what former residents of the Governor Henry Horner Homes housing complex called “project heat.” Project heat, in their words, was a kind of heat that was “hot,” “free,” and “blazing all the time”—that is, it was intense, included in the rent, and on for most of the year. Like many CHA projects, Horner had its own heating plants. As residents moved into replacement homes in which they were required to control and pay for their own heat, many wrangled with unwieldy bills, utility shutoffs, and fears that they would be evicted for failing to manage their utility consumption. This chapter examines the political stances that took shape around

project heat’s demise on the Near West Side. I approach this demise as the loss of both ample heat and the social worlds that its circulation once supported. Drawing on chapter 2, I focus on claims made by some transitioning Horner residents that their bodies had become inextricably attuned—even “addicted”—to the sensation of intense heat. Put differently, some claimed that sympathetic contact with hot buildings had caused their bodies to assume the sensory qualities of those buildings; buildings and bodies had melded. Once removed from those buildings, they insisted, their bodies would pursue their unshakable taste for intense heat. And that pursuit would wreak financial and physical destruction that endangered residents, their families, and their neighbors. Such claims touched on a host of negative, even racialist, assumptions about impoverished black people and their bodies. Yet they did so while advancing novel demands on subsidized heat at the very moment when public housing reforms prodded former residents toward market discipline and self-sufficiency.

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Disciplines and Criticisms The legal trajectory of Horner’s redevelopment granted its residents unusual protections within the landscape of Chicago’s redeveloping public housing. Throughout the earlier periods of my fieldwork, many transitioning Horner residents were not required to work to retain subsidized housing. Yet as a condition of remaining lease compliant—that is, in order to fulfill the specific stipulations of their leases and hold on to their subsidized housing—all former public housing residents moving into the CHA’s mixed-income new communities would have to establish their own gas and light accounts and keep them current. For transitioning Horner residents, heat would no longer arrive at apartments on a preset schedule, nor would its costs be included in the rent. Chicago’s private gas utility company, Peoples Gas, would now broker winter warmth. That warmth would enter Westhaven’s apartments through forced-air systems gauged by individual thermostats. Leaseholders had to control their own thermostats and pay for whatever they consumed. Many would be doing this for the first time in their lives. Efforts to prod public housing residents toward the private utility market fit within the broader logics that have governed Welfare Reform. The utility mandates were designed to make transitioning residents more responsible and self-sufficient, to make them understand, as one tenant leader in Westhaven was fond of putting it, “that

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you do not live for free anymore.” Westhaven’s early development phases may not have included work mandates, but many residents nevertheless saw the utility mandates as a nudge toward regular employment. Staff at the Home Visitors Program, the social services agency that I volunteered at throughout my research, understood that residents leaving Horner worried about utilities. Referrals to federal programs and local charities that assisted poor people with their utility bills made up a major segment of their work throughout the year, especially during the fall and spring utility-shutoff seasons. Those staff members who did not hail from public housing chalked clients’ worries up to the “growing pains” that would inevitably come with leaving public housing; surely they would resolve themselves soon. Developers and managers expected the same thing: when subjected to the utility market and its disciplines, transitioning Horner residents would eventually come to act like other consumers. They would adjust the amount of electricity and gas they consumed by weighing their bills against their ability to pay them. And they would learn to turn off the lights, turn down the thermostat, and put on socks and sweaters. “When you have to pay for that heat,” a social service worker predicted one frigid January morning in 2006, “you just don’t let it out [the window] anymore.” We had been walking past a fully occupied mid-rise Horner building and gazing up at its facade. She counted a half-dozen open windows. As much as a general consumer discipline might characterize the push toward the private utility market, it was residents’ empowerment that seemed to be at stake in the early years of Horner’s redevelopment. A few journalists made passing mention of Horner’s intense heat during this time. Stories of radiators and blistering heat that burned children or sapped them of their vitality became evidence of one more malfunctioning and mismanaged system that plagued residents.3 Largely uncontrollable and intense heat, these accounts had it, robbed individual leaseholders of their capacity to choose how they wanted to live in their own homes. As the Chicago Tribune’s architecture critic Blair Kamin put it in a Pulitzer Prize–winning series about Horner’s early transformation, for residents like Chonta White, a new home meant “lots of little things”: Like controlling the heat in her apartment so the temperature will be at the right level for 6-year-old Rayshawnda, who has asthma. That way, Rayshawnda won’t have to go to the hospital emergency room, as she once did when the family lived in a Chicago Housing Authority high-rise,

where someone at a central heating plant determined how hot or cold it would be.4

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The demise of Horner’s intense heat, such accounts suggest, would restore to residents the rights and pleasures of making their own choices about their own care, as well as the care of their nearest and dearest. Work- or consumer-based forms of discipline. Empowerment. Responsibilization. A belonging predicated upon exercising the pleasures of choice. These are all features of what scholars of welfare retrenchment at the turn of the twenty-first century have discussed as neoliberal or advanced liberal forms of government.5 One prominent strand of this scholarship has focused on the way that contemporary governing projects do not so much coerce citizens into self-sufficiency as foster individual citizens’ own capacity to act, to self-regulate, to pursue pleasures, and to manage personal risks and dangers.6 Here, as much as advanced liberal or post-welfare governing projects might demand self-sufficiency, they also hold out the promise of pleasures free to run their course. Such pleasures might in turn correct the excesses of a welfare system that micromanaged everything down to the temperature of its charges’ domestic lives. As Kamin’s piece suggests, it was precisely this misguided social paternalism, its excesses, its strangulations, its inefficiencies—in short, its one-size-fits-all approach to the care of the poor—that kept landing White and her daughter in the emergency room. What intrigued me as I followed project heat’s demise was not this general family resemblance to advanced liberal social programs and their mandates of personal responsibility. Rather, it was the extent to which so many former Horner residents drew on the ambient experience of life at Horner to criticize suggestions that the private utility market had freed them to partake in the pleasures of self-determination. The Home Visitors Program employed several former Horner residents. They tended to be effective at communityoutreach tasks, more so than their colleagues who did not hail from the area. These former residents would often shake their heads in quiet disagreement whenever those colleagues spoke of the “growing pains” around privatized heat. Consider the first time I caught a glimpse of the gas bills that transitioning Horner residents were racking up in their new homes. It was the fall of 2005, and I was helping a middle-aged staff member make copies of individual bills to include in applications for heat assistance. As I stapled paperwork, I puzzled over how the bills had gotten to be so high. “If you were raised all your life in a building that’s always hot,” she began in the patient tones she

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reserved for my frequent confusion, “you just always love that heat. You love it no matter what.” For this woman and for so many former Horner residents, the expectations, pleasures, and attachments that project heat had created within its charges would never pass. Sympathetic contact with haywire infrastructures had made for haywire bodies. And those bodies would never be able to regulate their wants according to their means. Two things intrigued me about claims that haywire bodies would always love and seek out intense heat “no matter what.” First, these claims challenged a central premise that animates many studies of advanced liberal welfare reform: that an individual’s conduct can be readily reshaped and disciplined in ways that bring into being new dispositions concerning the care of herself and others. Second, claims that bodies could not help themselves when it came to heat consumption—that these bodies raised in this place could not but love heat—drew on but also reworked racialist assumptions about the inflexibility of black bodies. By making these claims, some former and transitioning Horner residents critiqued the way they had been incorporated into post-welfare housing even as they demanded different kinds of incorporation. Before I can take up these claims, we need to go inside Horner’s now-demolished heating infrastructures and the desires for intense heat that they built within their charges.

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Fordist–Keynesian Heat Throughout the earliest years of my research, I regularly barraged any transitioning Horner resident who would humor me with questions designed to elicit contrasts between life at Horner and at Westhaven. “What do you miss about Horner?” I miss my family and friends, most would immediately reply. “It was easier to have a better time then with everyone closer together in the buildings,” replied a thirty-threeyear-old Mark in 2006. Raised at Horner, he stayed with his fiancée in Westhaven. “It was just love.” Former Horner residents could no longer walk outside and expect to run into everyone they had ever cared about—old neighbors, friends, and extended-family members. When I pressed to learn whether such longings extended to demolished buildings, many looked at me as if I were crazy and then rattled off conditions that nobody in his or her right mind could ever miss. Dark and dingy common spaces, vermin, broken elevators—the lists wound on. However, during the winter of 2005–6, the first winter that I lived in Westhaven full-time, I began noticing something different about how residents leaving Horner narrated the colossal mess it

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had become in the 1980s and 1990s. They still spoke of squalid conditions, yet their lists ended with variations on a curious caveat. “I don’t miss anything,” insisted Rhoada, a woman who had grown up in an Extension high-rise and had since relocated to a Scattered Site unit in Westhaven, as we huddled over coffee in her chilly and dim home. “Okay,” she added almost as an afterthought, “the only thing I can say that I do miss is the heat.” Breaking into a wide smile, she continued, “It was the best heat we ever had. It came up through the floors. I can’t even describe it. That’s how good it was, toasty all the time.” By that winter, project heat had pretty much gone the way of the demolished building that Rhoada hailed from.7 And by the books, that winter was a mild one. The seasonal average hovered just under thirty degrees Fahrenheit.8 Even so, casual talk, jokes, gossip, and discussions constantly turned to heat: how to get it, how to make it better, how to pay for it, and who had it best. Consider several of many similar conversations I cataloged that winter. The first unfolded between two middle-aged women who had both grown up at Horner and had in the late 1990s moved into Scattered Site replacement units. The two gossiped that afternoon about a niece who had just vouchered into a private rental apartment on the West Side. “I visited my niece in her new apartment on Sunday,” Trisha began. Her friend followed up, “Nice place?” As Trisha leaned in I braced myself for the onslaught of questions that seemed to go with the discussion of any recent move to a new apartment, questions that would dissect everything from the landlord’s integrity and the number of rooms to the need for a new deep-freezer or bunk beds built special or put on layaway.9 The two embarked on an entirely different topic. “She has some good heat up in there,” Trisha gushed. “I mean good heat.” “Good good?” her friend asked skeptically. “Good like project heat?” Trisha nodded and the two spent the next twenty minutes marveling at her niece’s luck. Or take another, which unfolded between two different middleaged women, Rose and Brenda. They had grown up in neighboring buildings at the Extension and had both moved into the private rental market with Section 8 vouchers. We were all at Brenda’s house, talking while she kept one eye on a young grandchild. Brenda and Rose were comparing notes on the quality of services in their old buildings as they slumped into decline, and they had started to argue about which buildings and which floors were especially “nasty,” that is, decrepit. “Wait!” Rose interjected, “The one thing you never had to call Housing about was the heat.” Brenda began to laugh and added, “You call them and you say, ‘Please! Please! Please! Cut it down!’” No longer part of their

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everyday lives, project heat nevertheless gripped their imaginations. How had project heat become such an ingrained part of life at Horner that its loss saturated so many casual conversations? At the time of their construction, Chicago’s housing projects boasted some of the most advanced heating infrastructures in the city. The unionized engineers and firemen who maintained the CHA plants went further. They bragged to me that their plants had been the biggest and most sophisticated heating infrastructures in the world.10 Such infrastructures allowed the CHA to generate heat onsite and to provide tenants with abundant heat. They also allowed the CHA to provide heat at a cheaper rate than the local utility and to pass the savings on to public housing tenants. As late as the 1940s, many lower-income black Chicagoans did not enjoy regular access to utilities. Haphazardly divided apartments known as “cold-water flats” were common in the city’s black enclaves. Because they lacked a mechanical heating source, any heat would have to come from a wood- or coal-powered stove (if the apartment had one). Any hot water would come from boiling water on that stove. My oldest interlocutors could recall improvising heat and hot water. Yet insufficient and improvised heat invited illness and fire into homes.11 As the CHA constructed massive housing complexes and paired them with heat plants, federal commitments to the basic health and protection of lower-income citizens became thinkable and doable on a large scale. Heat plants varied significantly according to the technologies available at the time of construction. Across the CHA, a network of boilers, coal berths, ash silos, conveyors, radiators, pumps, oil tanks, copper manifolds, miles of pipes, and a small legion of engineers, firemen, and pipe fitters delivered heat to tenants during the heating season. It officially ran from September through June. A low-pressure plant pumped steam through underground pipes that fed the Horner Homes’ baseboard radiators. The CHA began incorporating cutting-edge radiant-floor-heating technologies in its building designs in the late 1950s to promote efficiency and to eliminate the burn risks that radiators posed to children and the elderly.12 The Horner Extension was designed at that time. A second, high-pressure plant eventually pumped hot water into the Extension, where it passed through a system of pipes embedded directly in the floors and ceilings. Residents of the Horner Homes could adjust the heat that came into their apartments with radiator valves. The Extension’s residents could not. Their floors and ceilings simply radiated warmth. Project heat circulated within elaborate infrastructures, but it also circulated within broader federal commitments to national growth

Stateway Gardens heat plant, January 2006.

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and citizenly well-being. These commitments transformed the U.S. landscape in the middle decades of the twentieth century. As large infrastructural projects like highways and dams spread across the continent, they delivered domestic conveniences and commodities like electricity and appliances to even the most isolated inhabitants of “renewing” cities or remote mountain hollows. In this sense, project heat could just as easily go by the name “Fordist–Keynesian heat.” At the height of its influence between the 1930s and 1970s, Keynesianism promoted substantial government expenditures in private and public sectors to stimulate growth. This economic philosophy, as anthropologist Dominic Boyer has pointed out, often utilized largescale public works projects to manage “aggregate demand” all the while it stoked the affective ties of citizenship.13 Federal projects conjoined well-lit homes and well-heated bodies with efforts to promote national defense, industrial production, and energy consumption. Significantly, the CHA did not just commit to the minimum level of heat necessary for survival. Rather, as a tenant handbook from the early 1950s suggests, it committed to something far more indulgent: a system of social care that treated sensory well-being in the form of abundant heat as necessary to the “comfort” and “happiness” of lower-income people. Such subjective goods were, as the handbook would have it, as important as the pleasures of regular recreation and a convenient laundry room.

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Boiler supplying the Jane Addams Homes, spring 2006.

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Abundant heat was a special point of pride for the CHA well into the 1970s, the decade its housing stock began to fall into decline. Under the heading “What You Can Expect from the CHA,” a different tenant handbook from 1977 boasted, Your home will be kept comfortably warm at all times. City laws provide that between September 1 [and] June 1, landlords maintain a minimum temperature of 60 degrees at 6:30 am; 65 degrees at 7:30 am, and 68 degrees from 8:30

Tenant Handbook, circa 1950. Laundry, recreation, and heat promote the “comfort” and “happiness” of public housing residents. Illustration by Chicago Housing Authority; courtesy of the Chicago History Museum.

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Finned tube radiators, circa 1950. The Horner Homes were heated by baseboard radiators like the one depicted here. Illustration by Rittling Radiators; courtesy of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, LLP.

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am until 10:30 pm. However, we do better than that. . . . Heat is furnished by the CHA and is included in the rent. To keep your home comfortable, warm air must move freely in the room. Circulation of air will be improved if you will keep at least one window open slightly at all times.14

During the decade when CHA tenants were learning they could not expect too much in the way of basic maintenance, and when many

Americans were coming to terms with the fact that cheap energy might be a thing of the past, the CHA held fast to heat-fueled comforts. Those comforts seemed so ample that they could be let out the window. Thirty years later, engineers and pipe fitters still generating heat at CHA complexes described their jobs to me as “making tenants comfortable” or “providing comfort.” “I can say that we never went home to a hot shower and heat and left people behind without that,” an engineer who operated a plant comparable to the one that stood at the Horner Homes insisted in 2006. “We did everything possible in our power to make sure they were helped.” Residents leaving Horner missed those comforts, even as they were aware that project heat had a major idiosyncrasy: it heated homes well beyond seventy degrees, the indoor temperature that Horner’s heating system had been designed to maintain.

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Blazing Comforts and Blazing Harms In cities where infrastructural services are a ubiquitous and ordinary part of life, scholars note, urbanites will often take them for granted. We do not notice the infrastructural complexes that move us around, that heat, light, and water our homes. An infrastructure is, as anthropologist Susan Leigh Star has insisted, “by definition invisible, part of the background for other kinds of work. It is ready-to-hand.”15 Except when it stops being ready-to-hand. Moments of breakdown shatter infrastructures’ invisibility by throwing the essential supports of modern urban life into the sharpest relief.16 But as anthropologist Brian Larkin has pointed out, focusing on the drama of the breakdown can miss the dynamic relations that emerge between the ambient worlds that infrastructures raise around their users and the desires and tastes built within them.17 Intense heat was a total sensory fact of life at Horner. Ongoing attachments to it drove transitioning Horner residents to pursue anything and everything that might approximate its certainties and pleasures. And that pursuit ignited the potential for intense social and bodily harm. Project heat’s major idiosyncrasy—that it made homes very hot—seems in fact to have been quite visible to residents and designers from its earliest days. In a 1965 letter written in response to a Chicago Daily News series that was critical of conditions in the thenbrand-new Robert Taylor Homes, then CHA chairman Charles Swibel conceded that radiant-floor systems “sometimes” made homes “too warm because ceiling and floor slabs do not cool as quickly or as

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rapidly as rising outdoor temperatures would make desirable.”18 Designers and engineers, it seems, had not fully accounted for the heatretaining capacities of concrete. And concrete abounded in Horner’s building frames and slabs, as it did in most projects built by the CHA following World War II, making it difficult for Horner’s heat engineers and firemen to calibrate interior temperatures against Chicago’s famously temperamental winters. Horner’s extreme heat, however, was not simply an effect of design miscalculations. It was also an effect of heating systems, their operators, and their users placing mounting pressure upon one another. With that pressure, buildings grew warmer and warmer. At the Horner Homes, residents and engineers began reckoning with tremendous heating outputs as early as 1957. Just two years after the development began to open, CHA officials were already complaining about the boiler system to the engineers who had designed them. The boilers, it seemed, could not carry the load of the half-built complex, even in temperatures that should have caused no problem. “When talking about heat loss,” an engineer at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill scrawled on a note appended to his firm’s response, “you should be reminded that we usually find many tenants leaving the windows wide open, because they always claim the apartments are too warm. This would further complicate the expected load on the boilers.”19 The engineers who had designed Horner’s systems, the boiler men who operated them, and the residents who lived with them all felt this fact: Horner was an overheated place even before the complex was fully built out. Windows would stay open throughout the winter at Horner, as they did across the CHA. Some were open, engineers and residents explained to me, because it was the only way to throttle the intense heat, even in complexes where residents could control their radiators. Others were stuck open because condensation had frozen on them, causing the window joints to rust and jam. Open windows further taxed the heating infrastructures. As Victor, a middle-aged engineer at a South Side heating plant put it in early 2006, “In public housing, it’s been traditional to make people comfortable. People in most cases like it warm. We obliged them for forty years, and they’ve become accustomed to that. But as the systems got older and older, it got harder to maintain that type of comfort.” A self-described “successful product” of Chicago public housing, Victor had apprenticed early as a pipe fitter at his development’s heat plant and risen through the ranks to become a head engineer. He had long since moved out of public housing, but he took enormous pride in the services that he

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provided to current public housing residents. He understood CHA residents’ taste for intense warmth to be rooted in what he saw as black people’s biological sensitivity to the cold. For him, that biological sensitivity had geographical overtones. He insisted that origins in “hot places” had made for bodies that “needed things hot.” We often argued about this when I tagged along on his rounds. As evidence, he would point out the fact that black men (himself included) would break out their winter hats a full month earlier than “Caucasian men” did. “Make your own study next fall,” he urged one morning as he adjusted radiators to keep steam flowing through vacant apartments and by extension the entire circuit of the partially occupied building. “You will see.” Victor’s theory of a race-based desire for heat grounded in geographical origin would not hold water among most anthropologists today. More on this below. For now, I will point out that Victor did not consider his theory to be at odds with his assertions that the design and operation of the CHA heat plants involved commitments to tenant comfort that actually amplified their demands for intense heat. The other engineers and firemen with whom I spoke all agreed with Victor that inadequate design, shrinking maintenance funds, rusting windows, leaking pipes, and crooked contractors who sold diluted chemical softeners all converged at their plants in ways that wore systems down faster, forcing them to pump heat into their complexes at ever more abundant levels. Public housing residents in turn came to expect the warmest winters. If CHA officials were already worrying in the late 1950s and 1960s that temperatures in projects like Horner had crept into the high seventies, hearsay among its former residents put Horner in the eighties and nineties by the time wrecking balls started their work in the 1990s. Ailing infrastructures, the buildings they heated, and the residents who lived in them all put mounting pressures on one another. Many transitioning Horner residents insisted to me that these pressures had completely altered their senses of space, time, comfort, and obligation. My friends and interlocutors in Westhaven spoke about the strange orientations toward space and time that project heat had built into their bodies. To begin with, their buildings and bodies were completely at odds with the seasons. This was best seen in the physical condition of their bodies, which they described as mirroring that of their buildings. “I don’t care how cold it was outside. Them bricks kept the heat up in there,” a thirty-five-year-old woman named Sylvia remarked to me in 2005. She had lived a decade in a mid-rise at the Horner Homes and had left five years earlier with a Section 8

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voucher. She spoke of how the steam escaping from aging radiators at the Horner Homes wetted down walls and caused relentless sweating. “You sweat, everyone sweat, even the walls, they sweat too.” Former residents observed that the dry heat that radiated from the Extension’s ceilings and floors caused paint to crack and peel at the same time that it made for dry skin and scratchy throats. Winters at Horner scored the surfaces of residents’ homes, much in the same way it scored the surfaces of their bodies. These bodies had an unusual relationship to time. Barring breakdowns, winter was more or less on permanent hold. As Mr. Kelly, a man in his sixties who had lived most of his adult life at Horner, put it, “We had summertime in the wintertime.” The hot wintertime demanded very practical measures. Residents slept blanketless or on thin mats rolled out directly onto radiating floors. Fans whirred around the clock. And winter wardrobes consisted of shorts, housecoats, T-shirts, and bare feet. When all this provided no relief, residents throughout Horner would open their windows. Project heat also provided its charges with a pleasure unusual in Chicago: yearround outdoor socializing. Steam that flashed from the corroding underground pipes heated the spaces above. Residents told me that the steam melted the snow and created small pockets of outdoor space that could feel downright balmy, even at the height of the winter. As another older man, Mr. Carol, who had also lived most of his adult life at Horner, explained it to me, “[You could] go out and see the birds along the building, singing, because, no snow! Everybody be standing over the pipes, talking, because it’s warm, standing out all winter long.” Winter was not the only season on hold. With the heat on most of the year, spring and fall effectively became summer as well. “In the New Projects [the Extension], we had it in the floor and in the ceiling,” recalled Penny, a middle-aged woman who had grown up in an Extension mid-rise, “but don’t let April and May come, and the weather was already hot. You’d just melt. There ain’t nothing you could do about it.” Environmental and bodily conditions so out of sync with seasonal rhythms struck outsiders who ventured into Horner and other public housing projects as absolutely unbearable. “Stifling” and “boiling” were the words that most often came up when I spoke about it with social workers and journalists. Yet many residents rejected these descriptions when I repeated them. They certainly acknowledged that project heat could harm them, and they spoke of asthma attacks, radiator burns, nosebleeds, and dry skin. Yet most did not waiver from insisting that they longed for its return. They praised it in remarkably

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similar terms. “Great heat.” “The best heat in the world.” “The best heat we ever had.” And they punctuated this praise with laughter, smiles, and good-natured exclamations. It was hard to miss the fact that memories of project heat dealt with feelings of personal comfort and pleasure. But just what did transitioning Horner residents make of widespread longings for it? For one thing, many insisted that those longings should not be taken as a matter of personal preference. Take PB, who was twentyone years old when I met him in 2005. PB had spent most of his young life at a Horner mid-rise, save for short stints away at college and jail. In the first case, his scholarship did not stretch far enough, and in the second, he had gone riding in a vehicle that he had not realized was stolen. “[Project Heat] felt like we were on an island in the middle of the winter!” PB laughed. “I don’t miss it because I dig breezes. So I just opened the windows and let it out. But it was pretty nice for us.” Despite his own preferences, PB’s comments underscore that project heat was a benefit bestowed collectively upon Horner residents. “It was nice for us.” For a group of people unlikely to winter anywhere, let alone in the tropics, this collective benefit had indulgent, even luxurious overtones. For another, transitioning Horner residents noted that the loss of this collective benefit brought to the fore the dangers that “summertime in the wintertime” had long warded off from their lives. “In the wintertime, wind’s shooting up through here because you’re not far from the lake,” explained Mark, the young man who was staying with his fiancée in Westhaven. “Say you got to go to the store, and walk through fields with the snow up high,” he continued, motioning to his knees. “But you don’t worry, because you come back to the heat. If you was outside, you was totally freezing, but as soon as you walked in the door, that’s done. No heat can ever be like that again.” The “shooting” winds that Mark referred to were commonly known as “the hawk,” a name that captures the biting windchill that sweeps off Lake Michigan and across the flat expanses of the city. But project heat warded off more than hawk bites. As Sylvia, the woman who had spent a decade at a Horner mid-rise, noted, project heat guaranteed poor people basic physical security. Sylvia struggled constantly with heat bills that she had not, in the half decade since she had left Horner, come to manage. This was despite her regular paycheck as a day-care worker. Sylvia had been comparing Horner’s different heating systems when she observed, “It was some radiators you control and some you couldn’t. But that’s okay. You knew you was going to be warm, and not ever have to worry about being cold, and about

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paying no bill.” Project heat had mobilized the sensory certainties of a place that was as hot as a tropical island to exempt its residents from the seasonal worries that now bore down upon them. To hear former Horner residents tell it, the collective comforts and protections that project heat had meted out had disappeared, leaving them with only physical discomfort and financial insecurity. It would be shortsighted to interpret these claims as nostalgia for a time when a critical resource in a cold city—home heating— had been free. Each of the residents quoted above had lived through Horner’s most violent, decrepit, and insecure years. So each knew that longing for anything from that time was no trivial matter. Every former and transitioning Horner resident whom I spoke with about project heat, in fact, acknowledged that a rent that included heat was a benefit for any poor person. But they also stressed again and again that lost comfort and the financial strains associated with it were not the same thing. “People miss it, yes, because it was free. Now you have to pay,” remarked Penny, “but also because now you have to turn your heat up high just to get comfortable.” Samantha, a mother of four in her earlier thirties, drove this point home for me in the spring of 2006. She had vouchered out into a private apartment east of Westhaven and spoke often about the inferior heat in her new home. It was nothing like what she had had at the Olds, she would say. “Well, it was free,” I ventured during one of our conversations. “No,” she swiftly corrected me, “It was hot. They didn’t just give you a little heat, and then you freeze. They gave us heat constantly. It’s hard now. What do they call it?” She paused, drawing on the language of social service workers who had guided her transition out of Horner. “Independent living?” The nudges toward independent living that Samantha experienced included much more than financial self-reliance. They included demands that leaseholders develop total mastery over their own bodily sense of comfort. But these demands could not take into account how impossible such mastery might feel to project heat’s former charges. Many claimed that lifetimes spent living, sleeping, and moving within an extremely warm place had reworked their bodies in ways that bound them to warm seasons and warm comforts that would never exist again. The frustrations of a young woman named Tanika underscored just how much those attachments made independent living feel like an impossible, even dangerous, mandate. In early 2006, Tanika’s mother convinced her to bring her recent gas and electric shutoff notices to a social service worker who might help her work with the utility companies to set up a payment plan.

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This was already, in Tanika’s mind, a risky step. Many transitioning Horner residents hesitated to make their struggles known. They worried that they would invite outside scrutiny into their households. A social service worker explained to Tanika that her situation did not look good. In Illinois, utility companies cannot disconnect residential service during the coldest months of the year. Yet come April 1, disconnections can proceed and utilities can remain off until a bill is resolved, even if resolution drags into the following cold season. Tanika’s balance had grown with late fees and tampering charges. She did not have the money to stave off an impending shutoff. As the two sifted through her bills, the social service worker launched into the standard speech given to those with past-due bills. Don’t deny yourself or your kids heat. Just use less of it. Remember it makes no sense to feel cold when the thermostat is on 72. Tanika had heard it all before, the advice, the call for moderation, the recommended thermostat settings. She shot back, “I know it makes no sense, but winter is for being sweaty, with the fan on. What do I do if ‘warm’ feels like ninety? I have to have my heat on eighty just not to be cold.” What Tanika emphasized was the gap between an enduring bodily gravitation toward warm comforts and the only means available to transform that gravitation—working on her own body.20 For Tanika, the gap could not be closed by any amount of self-conscious reflection or moderation, at least not in time for an April shutoff. Her gas was shut off and she took to heating her home with an electric heater. That in turn ushered in risks that could reverberate beyond her household. “Project heat” actually had two distinct meanings among residents leaving Horner. For the most part they used the term to describe the intense heat that had once circulated through Horner— “the best heat we ever had.” But they also used it to describe attempts to reproduce the feeling of project heat in their new homes. A person could be said to be “making” or “doing” project heat when she had every heating device available to her—a portable heater, an oven— fired up and running beyond capacity. As much as transitioning Horner residents longed for project heat, many also understood that making it exposed themselves, their families, and their neighbors to financial, social, and physical harms. What made these harms especially difficult for leaseholders to juggle was that they were also juggling long-standing obligations to redistribute any and all resources to which they had access. Kin and friends expected better-positioned leaseholders to share cash with them, as well as basic goods like shelter, food, and heat. Kinfolk’s lingering attachments to project heat did enormous

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financial damage. Most obviously, anyone living in a new apartment in which people turned up the heat up high “just to get comfortable” faced the risk of credit problems and utility disconnections. The disconnections hit both electric and gas services, because transitioning Horner residents would often turn to electric sources to supplement available heat. Most past-due electric and gas bills that I reviewed, copied, and filed during the winters of 2005–6 and 2006–7 ranged between $100 and $500, several difficult cases hit $1,000, and a handful weighed in between $3,000 and $4,000.21 Even the lowest end of this spectrum is a problem for people on fixed incomes. Some transitioning Horner residents came to owe more for utilities than they did for rent. Failing to make a utility payment meant the balance would carry over to the next month, and with it, late charges. Leaseholders got slapped with hefty fines if they illegally tampered with their electricity or gas, but they also had to absorb large fines to get their service reconnected by the utility. All these fines could ratchet up utility debts. The utility allowances provided by the CHA to ease residents’ transition to the private utility market were not adequate. Loaning one’s name to another or being a victim of identity theft compounded utility debts. While Horner still stood, its residents had no immediate need for gas accounts. For that reason, some loaned or sold their personal information to friends and relatives who did not live in public housing. Because project heat’s blazing comforts were so taken for granted at Horner, few seemed to anticipate the day in which a loaned name would become a liability. Relatives and friends would use this information to open accounts on the private utility market. But sometimes residents’ names and information were simply stolen. In the 1980s and into the 1990s, anyone could walk into the lobbies of a Horner building and rifle through the banks of broken mailboxes that flanked the walls. A thief could piece together enough personal information from letters, bills, and other formal communications to open up a utility account. Many accounts opened by friends, relatives, or thieves (who were sometimes also friends or relatives) fell delinquent. Because a past-due debt stayed with the person whose information had opened an account, some transitioning Horner residents carried debts that they themselves had not run up. Here is how Martha, a middle-aged woman who had grown up in an Extension high-rise, explained the problem to me in 2005: People noticed the problem [around 1998], after they started moving around. They go to open up their light or gas and learn that they can’t because they names was burnt

up. My cousin took my name and opened up accounts in Milwaukee [Wisconsin]. She thought I would never find out, that I would never need it because I stayed in the projects. I was raised with her like my sister. But she took my name anyway and burnt it up. At the time, I didn’t know not to leave things [lying] around. She probably took that information right off my [identification] card.22

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Martha was luckier than most. She found help with the paperwork necessary to resolve her subsequent credit problems. Countless frustrating hours and one complicated relationship later, she emerged from the ordeal. As Martha suggests, the financial risks of a new utility context further strained kinship obligations that were already being attenuated by Horner’s transformation. Horner leaseholders had long opened their homes to relatives and friends in need of places to stay. These arrangements allowed people to pool resources, to better manage household tasks like child care, and to share shelter basics. These “offlease” arrangements violated lease conditions in Westhaven, just as they had at Horner, but the practice remained common throughout my fieldwork. Practical and ethical considerations barred leaseholders from shunning the very networks they turned to for personal and financial support. Relatives, especially those who had lived at Horner but had since moved away, still leaned on CHA leaseholders for access to heat. It was not uncommon for visitors to pass substantial time with relatives in Westhaven, running leaseholders’ heat bills sky-high. Tensions and frustrations ensued. These frustrations came up one evening in late 2006. Several Westhaven leaseholders had let me in on a regular bingo game for “laundry quarters” because they knew I would never win. The savviest players would distract rivals from their bingo boards with jokes and stories, and they knew that my “job to listen” made me especially susceptible. Talked turned to a common topic: the winter woes of heat bills. One of the regular players had grown up with steam heat; the other, radiant floors. Both had moved to the Superblock in the late 1990s. Knowing that I had become interested in heat, they began to regale all of us with stories about the sensory demands of children, grandchildren, and other visitors. “People is going to work now, and when they go, their kids turn the heat up to ninety,” Henry, then in his fifties began. “When the kids hear that door open, BAM!” he exclaimed, slapping his hands together. “They run to get that heat back down.” The group broke into laughter. Then Nayna, a woman in her

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forties, broke in: “I know when I get home, I turn it down to seventy, because it be up there, eighty, ninety. I go in there and look right at that thermostat.” Everyone laughed in recognition. “Wait!” Nayna continued, “They’ve got the oven and the heat on. I pay that!” The lighthearted tone with which Henry and Nayna swapped stories does not do justice to the seriousness of the situations they joked about. Nayna, for instance, struggled with regular stays by siblings and adult children who had all grown up at Horner. Only a few of them held leases in Westhaven, yet their sympathetic attachments to Horner as a hot place persisted in ways that made her ongoing obligations to them serious liabilities. Nayna took to calling them “heat suckers.” But her frustrations canceled neither the obligations she felt toward them nor the enormous pride she took in meeting those obligations. In early 2007, either an unusually heavy load or faulty construction put her apartment’s heating system out of commission for good. Lack of heat qualified her for an emergency move, and she ended up moving to the one original Horner building on site that still included abundant heat in the rent. A few weeks later, she bellowed on the phone, “I can have [my kin] over again. We sit riding the heat all day long.” Others did not have such an easy time resolving such tensions. The threat or reality of not being able to meet household demands for heat pushed them to stretch and supplement available heat and even to attempt to replicate project heat’s lost comforts. Some efforts were safer than others. Some visited relatives known to have steady and good heat, rotating between hosts so as not to overburden them. Others wore coats and hats indoors, slept in sleeping bags with blankets piled over them, and swaddled their children in fleece sleepers. Still others huddled all winter long in one or two rooms sealed off with plastic tarps and blankets. Almost everyone used the weatherization kits that usually began to appear on the shelves of the few stores in the area during the late fall. They would stretch rolls of thin film across windows, attached at the edges with double-sided tape, and then shrink them tight with a hair dryer. With any luck, this would keep the heat in and the high bills out. Others filled pots and bathtubs with steaming water to replicate the feeling of a slowly released, constant heat. But others took riskier steps. Tips traded among residents had it that paying electric bills before gas bills would guarantee that you could still plug in electric heaters or boil water in the microwave when the gas company disconnected your service. Some turned to portable kerosene or butane heaters; others, who preferred more intense blasts

of heat fired up their ovens and their stoves. Heat from the oven and the burners, some claimed, was cheaper and better than that delivered through the unit’s forced hot-air system and thermostat. Some resorted to more-desperate measures. Few would openly discuss tampering with their electric or gas service. But those who did almost always situated this practice within obligations to their family—for example, from a young woman who had vouchered into a private rental apartment: “Of course I did what it took to help my babies because nobody else cares. The [utility] companies won’t help you out. . . . My mother-in-law showed me how to fix the gas so it could circulate through a rubber hose. It was really dangerous, but it worked.” When I faced my own heat woes after moving in 2005, a number of my interlocutors shared their knowledge about heat reconnection. My private rental had been vacant before I moved in. Heat in the form of three steam radiators was included in the rent, but only one radiator worked. Since I did not want to sleep in the kitchen, I purchased an electric heater; electricity, however, was not included in my rent. And because the building stood in an area with a high rate of delinquent accounts and tampering, the electric company had removed the meters that corresponded to vacant apartments in my building. It was taking some time to get the one for my apartment returned and the service turned back on. Word got around, and it seemed like everyone was willing to walk me through the exact steps necessary to reconnect my electricity. Paraphrased from my notes:

Tinkering with rubber hoses, tripping currents, tampering with meters to slow registration—all of this might yield heat and light, or it might cause a fire. The immediate aftermath of a fire in Westhaven involved a scramble to replace ruined household basics, such as bedding and

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Get your hands on extension cords. They should be for outdoor use, in case you need to run them out of windows. String them together to carry electricity from the building’s hallways or a neighbor’s apartment to power your heater. If you have no friendly neighbors, you can still redirect the current as it enters the building from the grid. This is dangerous, so you should hire someone who is good. When you get your meter back, you should remove the lock and grind down its gears to slow down its count. That will save money. You can also “borrow” someone else’s account by switching out the meter assigned to your apartment for one taken from a building with vacant apartments.

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clothes, as well as avid speculation about the exact cause of the fire, the extent of damage done beyond any single apartment, and, finally, whom to blame for a botched tampering job. One local handyman who enjoyed an ironclad reputation for safe gas reconnections ruminated on such threats in late 2006 while discussing several botched reconnection cases with me. He had not performed them. “You can go to prison,” he observed. “But worse, you can cause a death. The people that you did this to, the survivors, do you think they are not going to tell when they learn who set [the heat] up and then [a fire] happened? Do you think their families won’t come marching [for you]?” When families “came marching” on the Near West Side—that is, when they came en masse to confront someone who had hurt or offended a member of their family— things most always grew tense. Sometimes, they got violent. Rumors flew about vigilante justice meted out by victims of fires, including beatings and fires set in retaliation. Such cases represent the most extreme situations that emerged when bodies attuned to intensely warm places began moving within a new utility context. Yet when situated alongside the other concerns about project heat’s aftermath that I have outlined above, they reveal the extent to which my interlocutors critically evaluated their displacement from a warm place in terms of their reemplacement within a field of compounding financial and bodily harms. I turn finally to the politicization of those harms.

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Sensory Politics Like any sensory experience, the feeling of warmth strikes us as a profoundly individual matter; some people like things hot, others do not. Project heat’s demise suggests something more: that sensations have a social history. On the Near West Side, feelings of adequate warmth and comfort varied according to how one had been incorporated into obsolete infrastructures of collective protection. But as much as sensations have a social history, they also have a material one. At the time of my fieldwork, transitioning Horner residents were wrestling with the fact that the warmth blown through ducts or coaxed from ovens would never feel like the warmth that moved via copper manifolds, concrete slabs, and underground pipes. As my interlocutors moved through buildings and rooms in which they longed for more heat, they experienced what anthropologist Nadia Seremetakis has called “sensory memory,” which she also terms “nostalgia.”23 For Seremetakis, waxing nostalgic over

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sensations located in the past does not involve a trivial or romantic sentimentality that splits the past off from the present. Rather, it initiates a momentary return to a past, a return that stretches the pain of losing that past across the present. At the same time as this estrangement makes the absence of a sensory experience clear, it also elicits active and ongoing reflections on that absence.24 Transitioning Horner residents’ encounters with a kind of heat that paled in comparison with project heat and its sublime qualities underscored, as Mark had put it, that “no heat can ever be like that again.” They also ignited individual reflections, arguments, and actions concerning what would constitute adequate comfort and protection in project heat’s sensory aftermath. Remembered sensations of winter warmth haunted individual residents. More than that, though, they ignited a sensory politics that insisted on inflexible bodily differences even as public housing reforms promoted sympathetic contact between buildings and bodies as the means to build sensibilities that would help impoverished people transcend past welfare failures. By the 2005–6 and 2006–7 winters, transitioning Horner residents and their leaders, as well as site managers, developers, and social service workers, had all come to terms with the seriousness of heating issues in Westhaven. When faced with intractable bills or utility disconnections, transitioning Horner residents could reveal their problems to those tasked with helping resolve them. A resident might access charitable funds that would take a dent out of utility debts. She might attend workshops sponsored by the utility companies and leave with brochures, tips, and energy-efficient light bulbs. She could constantly remind herself, her children, and her streams of winter visitors that it “didn’t make sense” for anyone to feel cold when the thermostat stood at recommended settings. She could do all this and more but still feel cold. During these winters, dark and chilly units and delinquent utility bills revealed the insufficiency of measures available to help transitioning Horner residents manage the “growing pains” of a new utility context. When they could not resolve their utility problems through charitable funds or special payment plans with the utility companies, many transitioning Horner residents petitioned members of their representational body, the Local Advisory Council (LAC), for help. Elected resident leaders would, on a case-by-case basis, mobilize ties to resolve disconnections and facilitate applications for utility assistance. Adequate winter warmth thus entered patron–client networks that had long characterized resident politics within Chicago’s projects. More than patronage was at stake in the politicization of project heat’s demise.

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Throughout my research, Westhaven’s developers wielded increasingly effective arguments that Horner’s transformation into a mixed-income community rendered its LAC obsolete. They argued that if those transitioning out of public housing continued to lean on tenant leaders to broker critical resources, they would never become like other Chicagoans. They would never become self-sufficient, and they would never learn to voice and resolve their concerns through mainstream political channels. How would public housing residents ever become integrated into the city, Westhaven’s developers put it to me, if they could only navigate these fairly limited political networks? It was within this context that an LAC under a new leadership looking to consolidate and extend its authority began calling attention to problems with heat. Through a series of disjointed criticisms and actions, they began to insist that when it came to heat consumption, transitioning public housing residents were not like other Chicagoans. Their criticisms and actions did not get much traction beyond a case-by-case reduction of residents’ utility bills, unit repairs, and the implementation of more energy efficient designs for later redevelopment phases. Nevertheless, examining this sensory politics can shed light on the forms of recognition available to citizens of a city coming to terms with the material harms of segregation and discrimination. Resident leaders pursued several avenues of action in their efforts to secure and expand utility access for their constituents. First, they sought to root out evidence of faulty building conditions that might be exacerbating high levels of heat consumption. They dispatched allied residents to scour the development and note all the telltale signs of heating issues: shrink-wrapped windows, missing storm doors, and gaps around window frames and doorjambs. They followed up with informal audits that scrutinized the intensity of heat outputs and drafts and the condition of windows and doors. Leaders began to suspect that Westhaven’s hasty construction had resulted in substandard weatherization and crossed utility lines. All this, they worried, compounded residents’ incapacity to manage their utility bills. Pointing to the Mothers Guild case, LAC members began to murmur that faulty construction and heat problems might well be cause for “another lawsuit.” They imagined a class action and a settlement in which residents would never have to pay another utility bill in their lives, on the grounds that the effects of harmful building conditions continued past Horner’s demolition and now adversely affected life in Westhaven’s units. Several of the most senior members of the LAC evoked the past publicity of building decay at Horner when they suggested that the group should “go public” with Westhaven’s heat

Horner, like other Chicago projects, had been “built to fail.” It had also been built by the CHA and utility companies to make its residents “need lots of heat.” The utilities

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troubles. One insisted again and again that the best course of action would be to stage “heat marches” on City Hall and the CHA offices. She explained to me in late 2006 that the idea came to her one night while watching television. Her favorite show—the police procedural Law & Order—was running repeats, so she watched a documentary about the Warsaw Ghetto. Grainy images of interned Jews “wearing coats” indoors and huddling over makeshift fires while “it snowed all around, even in the houses” leaped out. They helped her see just how much “they” were like “us.” The LAC never did go public or proceed with a legal case against the developers. Nevertheless, all these proposed actions speak to the larger picture of which residents and their leaders saw themselves a part. Their mobilizations around inadequate heat dovetail with familiar histories of political and legal action on and beyond the Near West Side. Faulty building conditions and the harms they inflicted on bodies had anchored the legal complaint that put Horner on the national map and launched its redevelopment. Moreover, proposed “heat marches” echo the tactics deployed by housing activists on the West Side during the civil rights movement. In the 1960s, activists led by prominent civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., organized high-profile marches on the West Side to call attention to racial segregation and poor living conditions for blacks in northern cities. This elderly woman had witnessed them. Note, too, that she folded the heat struggles of transitioning Horner residents into one of the most recognizable instances of state-mediated racism in the twentieth century, the persecution of European Jews. With these disjointed criticisms, imagined actions, and loose citations, resident leaders shored up a group identity whose political efficacy turned on demonstrating the many harms inflicted by state-mediated racial discrimination and abandonment. The sensory politics emerging around project heat’s demise mobilized familiar histories, strategies, and identities to unlock resources that might mitigate the fallout of discrimination and abandonment. Yet what is so challenging about this sensory politics is that it critiqued discrimination and abandonment at the same time as it rearticulated one of the most fraught gestures of racialist politics: the assertion of inflexible bodily difference. This assertion became clearest in the conspiracy theories swirling around project heat. Here is how such theories usually spun out:

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companies knew that when the housing projects failed and its “heat-addicted” residents eventually moved out, they would be forced to spend massive amounts of money on the private utility market. Once transitioning public housing residents had run their utility accounts into the ground, lost their leases, and with them any further claims to subsidized housing, they would only be able to find affordable housing in less desirable regional cities like Gary, Indiana. Some would have to leave the region, and their families, behind altogether.

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Such theories emphasized that bodies that “needed” heat would also go after it in ways that would lead to their physical displacement and social alienation.25 They draw on Chicago’s history of race-based residential segregation in urban space, yet they also advance a different proposition: project heat had built the bodies of public housing residents to fail outside public housing. Bodies made haywire through their contact with haywire infrastructures would, when they left the projects, destroy the physical and social worlds around them. The conspiracy theories circulating around project heat supported the claims made by some residents that they could not sever their attachments to public housing’s ambient worlds because it had become physically impossible to do so. These attachments were indelibly ingrained across their skins, their tastes, and their very sense of physical and social wellbeing. “If you were raised all your life in a building that’s always hot, you just always love that heat. You love it no matter what.” A sensory politics that would anchor demands for critical resources like winter heat in claims about inflexible bodily orientations toward intense heat cuts to the quick of two related strands of thought in contemporary social science concerning bodily difference. The first concerns practice-based theories of social life that have emphasized the way that bodily practices make group meanings or values concrete and durable. Ethnologist Marcel Mauss, for instance, observed long ago that while his generation had learned swimming strokes that resembled the awkward sputtering movements of steamboats, younger ones had learned a much more elegant and efficient crawl.26 Mauss lamented that he could not get rid of his “stupid” swimming technique. It had become part of his muscles, his limbs, his whole orientation to water. At the same time, Mauss outlined the authoritative contexts in which extreme discipline might revise habitually ingrained bodily movements.27 A sensory politics that insists on intractable bodily habits, tastes, or dispositions, how-

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ever, pushes against expectations that an individual could learn to control her consumption of heat with enough forceful guidance, education, or self-consciousness. The second strand of thought involves assertions that perceived bodily differences are best understood as the effects of culture, not nature. That is, differences understood to be grounded in biology are the effects of the way groups come to recognize, interpret, and perform signs of difference associated with superficial physical distinctions. My interlocutors’ claims that black men had a lower tolerance for the cold or that their bodies had been overheated in ways that made them incapable of self-regulation could be interpreted as folk theories about racial difference. And one need only examine the difficult history of racialist science to understand why questioning such theories is important. For instance, many Enlightenment thinkers might have agreed with Victor’s explanation of heat love among black public housing residents. Many of these thinkers were convinced that the physical differences they observed among different human populations—the tone of skin, the texture of hair, the slope of noses, and the like—corresponded to biologically ingrained differences in intelligence, vitality, temperament, sensitivity to pain, and even sensitivity to freedom. And like Victor, they treated these bodily variations as the outcomes of natural variations in climate. Race, nature, and climate collapsed into each other in arguments that a perpetually scorching sun or constant cooling rain made all the difference in the look, the productivity, and the political destinies of different human populations. “The Negro is produced well suited to his climate,” philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote long ago in his racial geography, “strong, fleshy, supple, but in the midst of the bountiful provision of his motherland, lazy, soft and dawdling.”28 Such ideas are difficult to stomach; they justified the violent treatment and dispossession of populations understood to be “naturally” averse to work. A sensory politics anchored in inflexible bodily dispositions and collective sensory attachments, then, is likewise suspect, because it calls to mind histories of racial essentialism and imperial domination. But we do not have to endorse the essentialisms that hover around my interlocutors’ claims to recognize the challenges their sensory politics pose to contemporary thought about the embodiment of social difference. Many of my interlocutors understood that winter would never again be a season for “being sweaty, with the fan on.” And some did brace themselves for the discomforts that came with project heat’s demise. They did begin to turn off lights, to turn down the thermostat, and to don socks and sweaters. Just

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as many, though, claimed that their deeply ingrained tastes for heat had no straightforward resolutions, because bodily dispositions built through institutional segregation, neglect, and abandonment were not infinitely malleable. Access to better housing, better heating infrastructures, energy workshops, efficient light bulbs, and advice that it “didn’t make sense” to feel cold when a thermostat stood at recommended settings would never be enough. For them, tastes pressed into flesh and nerves could not be undone, even under the most forceful conditions. Rather, in their discussions of heat addiction and their conspiracy theories, they insisted that their bodies would continue to resonate with haywire housing and its ambient worlds. But unlike haywire housing, the bodies could not be torn down and built to new, less harmful specifications. They would continue to love heat, no matter what scourges it brought upon their finances, their families, and their neighbors. As much as their sensory politics built upon past legal experiments that had distributed critical resources like new housing alongside the recognition of harms caused by decrepit buildings, it also proposed different remedies. Permanent dispensations, like the cancellation of all past and future utility debts, would be necessary to counter the permanent physical damages of neglect and abandonment. A neoliberal climate of welfare provisioning that positions bodily comfort as the reward for hard work rather than the right of every citizen can easily dismiss such claims. After all, heat is necessary to keep a body alive, but its consumption can also have luxurious overtones. Individual citizens are free to consume whatever they might desire, these political sensibilities might suggest, provided they have earned the means to do so. If they have not earned the means to consume freely, their biological needs would become the very vehicles of self-regulation. In this view, transitioning Horner residents did not suffer from heat addiction. They suffered from the growing pains of weaning themselves off their excessive and wasteful heat love. They would come out the other end more independent, more responsible, more productive, more free. Such responses build on a much longer conversation within classic liberal thought that positioned physical discomforts as a natural check on poverty. “Poverty was nature surviving in society, ” economic historian Karl Polyani wrote in his overview of such thought; “its physical sanction was hunger.”29 Yet if liberalism, as political philosopher Michel Foucault suggested, has also long been an art of government that arbitrates between the freedom and security of individuals and communities by

exposing them to dangers that instill fears alongside desires to ward them off, then my interlocutors’ sensory politics deserve a second look.30 The fear that this politics instills—that a body has been built in such a way that it cannot be rebuilt into something else—reworks some of the most difficult gestures of racialist thought. Our bodies are physically different, and those differences will have real consequences for how we live. Yet the consequential differences that accrue on bodies do not accrue there because of something fixed in our biology. They accrue there because societies situate bodies in very uneven ways. Differences that matter are fates of inequality, not of race. Warding off fears about such differences, then, would require a very particular set of remedies, remedies that foreground the material scars of inequality. In this sense, a sensory politics fixated on the unshakable resonances between dangerous buildings and bodies might be the very thing to follow to understand how arguments about the embodiment of inequality in place might also launch a viable critique of market disciplines and their limits. It provides a lens through which to examine how bodies will live, thrive, and waste within and beyond the built environments raised to protect them. And it provides a lens through which to examine how we might rework long-standing conceptual investments in racial distinction.

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PART II

Civics

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Radio Rumors

In late spring of 2006, a rumor was making the rounds in Westhaven. Again and again and again, transitioning Horner residents who had relocated to Westhaven’s replacement homes or in private rentals nearby spoke of “the young man.” You know, the one who had to leave his new apartment for “sharing his music.” This young man, it was said, hailed from the Robert Taylor Homes, a massive high-rise public housing complex that once stood on Chicago’s South Side. By 2006, its demolition was nearly complete. Some said he had found replacement housing in one of the Chicago Housing Authority’s mixed-income communities then rising on the city’s South Side. Others said that he had taken a Section 8 voucher and relocated to a private rental apartment in Hyde Park, a neighborhood several miles to the east. Hyde Park is home to my alma matter, the University of Chicago. In the years I studied and lived there, I often heard its longterm residents boast about its identity as one of the few neighborhoods in Chicago with a history of racial integration. But others glossed that history in a more cynical fashion. Hyde Park: black and white together, against the poor. Regardless of where the young man landed, he found trouble when he got there. This young man “loved the music.” When he lived at Taylor, he would set up his stereo system outside his front door and “share” it with his neighbors. There on “his ramp,” the semi-enclosed corridor that ran along the floors of his building, he would play the DJ, moving through favorite albums and radio stations. The young man’s new apartment did not have a ramp. But it did apparently have front windows that opened onto a semi-enclosed courtyard, a common feature of Chicago’s multiunit apartment buildings. So, one woman explained, he set up that stereo system by the window, speakers pointed outward, “so his neighbors could listen, too.” After a month of such sharing (or, depending on the telling, a week or just a few days), the young man was evicted. 135

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The rumors I heard harped not on how loud the young man was but on the fact that his new neighbors failed to appreciate his efforts. To add insult to injury, those neighbors had complained to the landlord, to “housing” or to “management,” instead of “telling him to his face” to “cut the music down.” The young man “didn’t even know [there was a problem],” one man noted incredulously to me, “not until they came with the [eviction] papers.” To hear my friends and interlocutors on the Near West Side tell it, the young man’s new neighbors rejected his neighborly gestures. Even worse, that rejection deprived other neighbors of the chance to enjoy the music. And worst of all, those who complained had brought outsiders in to settle a matter that could have easily been settled among themselves. For them, neighbors should be dealt with as neighbors; neighbors should not be dealt with as strangers. The young man’s eviction unfolded on the other side of the city. Yet in 2005 and 2006, worries about impending trouble at the hands of those in one’s immediate vicinity—one’s neighbors—preoccupied transitioning Horner residents and newcomers alike. In the case of transitioning Horner residents, the matter was complicated by the fact that one’s neighbors were also likely to be old friends, acquaintances, even relatives. Newcomers and transitioning Horner residents struggled to figure out whether they should feel annoyed, indignant, frightened, or even compelled by the people around them. They watched and listened for clues about the nature of their neighbors’ associations, about with whom, or with what, they might be passing their time. And they watched and listened for clues about how they should, in turn, engage and associate with them—if they should engage and associate with them at all. In a place where worries about theft, drugs, violence, and property values ran high, it was hard not to lump this generalized climate of uncertainty in with the general criminalization that affects poor people and their neighborhoods. But the rumor circulating about the young man suggested something more. It suggested profound consternation about how to relate to those with whom one shared everyday space. Transitioning Horner residents and newcomers did not just worry about appropriate orientations toward the strangers they collided with every day. The daily rhythms and uncertainties of what some called “mixed living” caused many to scrutinize their own intimate social worlds. They wrung their hands over the collective affections and obligations that those worlds nurtured and sustained, as well as over the ones they could not. In the process, they began to learn new ways of navigating strange and familiar social worlds.

4

Experiments in Vulnerability

“Vacancy in Their Eyes” Longings, laments, and hopes for lost and future cities run throughout the Bible, a fact I learned while sitting through Sunday sermons on the Near West Side. These sermons offered many lessons about life in a changing urban context. Nehemiah, a governor credited with rebuilding Jerusalem in the fifth century bc, appeared often enough, as he did in a January 2006 sermon delivered to the congregants of St. Stephen’s African Methodist Episcopal Church: When Nehemiah “the Chalice Bearer to a King” returned from “exile” in the “suburbs of Babylon” with rebuilding on his mind, he found a city destroyed, its gates in shambles, its houses laid to waste. Even worse, Nehemiah landed in the midst of people who “walked the streets” with “vacancy in their eyes.” But Nehemiah, he was not intimidated by Jerusalem’s wreckage. He took these wanderers by the hand and showed them something else. He showed them gates that could be mended. He showed them schools that could educate their children. He showed them houses to “make into homes.” And he showed them “businesses to bring back to life.” Nehemiah also looked around and saw “doctors and lawyers and skilled tradesmen making their way back into the city,” so he enlisted their help, too. And his vision of a rebuilt city spread by “taking up residency” in the “eyes” and “hearts” of all those he encountered.

The Reverend Albert Tyson’s sermon that cold morning transposed an Old Testament tale to familiar scenes of urban disorder, decay, and disinvestment. In 2006, the congregation of St. Stephen’s still 137

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relied on other local Christian denominations to host their services: their church, a historic building that had once stood on the corner of Damen and Washington, had burnt to the ground in 1999. Prostitutes and drug users still sauntered and staggered across local streets, sidewalks, and alleys with glassy-eyed stares that seemed to take in nothing and everything. While vacant and sagging buildings still dotted the landscape, young professionals seemed to be arriving en masse to renovate the area’s worn but handsome graystone residences and two-flat apartment buildings and to purchase new condominiums in buildings rising over weedy lots. Nehemiah’s vision may have been sent from above, but Tyson’s resonated with plans that the Near West Side Community Development Corporation was busy fleshing out for Westhaven and its surroundings. The plans would make it a neighborhood where “people of different socioeconomic classes and ethnicities mixed in close proximity.”1 This was no coincidence. Tyson headed up its board. He closed his sermon by directing his congregants to go, as Nehemiah had, and spread a vision among their neighbors. Together they could rebuild the West Side. And together, they would “look out for the welfare” of “the citizens of the City of Hope, the City of Faith, the City of Chicago!” Despite the enthusiasm of Tyson and his congregants, proximity among “people of different socioeconomic classes and ethnicities” was, at the time of my fieldwork, more likely to spread ire and uncertainty in Westhaven than hope, faith, and commitments to collective welfare. The numbers of “doctors, lawyers, and skilled tradesmen” making their way to the Near West Side over the previous decade had indeed picked up with a swelling housing bubble. Young and middle-aged African American, white, and Latino professionals were gambling on an area that was still more than a little rough around the edges. And they were becoming increasingly frustrated with the way transitioning Horner residents congregated in what they called “open” or “public” spaces. Thanks to the consent decree that governed Horner’s redevelopment, there were enough former Horner residents still in place, with enough access to the dense socializing associated with the remaining Horner buildings and enough time on their hands at odd hours, to make “being in public” a point of serious contention. Morgan, a middle-aged African American newcomer, captured these tensions in early 2006 while explaining his objection to plans to bring an Aldi to Madison Street. Aldi is a chain grocery store famous

for cramming imperishable foodstuffs into tiny stores set far back on their lots. Morgan rented in the area, but he hoped soon to buy a condo there. Like other newcomers, his objections went beyond the insults that this down-market grocery posed to property values and palates. Morgan noted that Aldi’s low-income clientele typically did not own cars and arrived on foot or by bus. This left parking lots open for socializing and for a brisk trade in food stamps, DVDs, socks, T-shirts, and snacks. Morgan worried that the planned store would provide “another public space” for transitioning Horner residents to gather and make scenes in. “Aldi doesn’t cater to me and my fiancée,” he observed, “but to families where everybody is together, all the time. Everybody goes to the store. Maybe the teen watches the kids in the lot while Mom shops.” In a tone that oscillated between frustration and marvel, Morgan continued, “Aunties, friends, old neighbors just happen by. Before you know it, there are twenty, twenty-five people outside!”

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On the Near West Side, transitioning Horner residents and newcomers moved through open spaces whose physical and social dimensions morphed rapidly. The pouring of a sidewalk, the opening of a new building, the closing of a favorite park, the arrival of a new household or an emboldened drug dealer, the repositioning of a security camera—each of these events could alter the character of shared spaces and the type, density, and reach of the activities that unfolded within them. And with the changes came complaints from new and old residents that “being in public” just did not look, sound, or feel quite as it should. This chapter takes up such feelings in a place where a sidewalk, a street, or a vacant lot, as well as a yard enclosed by a fence, a private bedroom that fronted the street, and even a lobby protected by private security, could all become “another public space.” They were all places whose changing dimensions could render neighbors a palpable presence that demanded to be reckoned with. The neighbor is an important figure in Chicago’s civic imagination. This is not just because politicians and tourism offices bill it as the “City of Neighborhoods.” It is also because its earliest social reformers held up the act of neighboring within ethnically and racially diverse residential areas as the best hope for building a more inclusive and democratic city. A hundred years before Tyson delivered his sermon, Jane Addams expressed similar ideas about her own work in the then-immigrant Near West Side. “It is possible we shall be saved from warfare by the ‘fighting rabble’ itself,” this Progressive Era social crusader stated in her 1907 book Newer Ideals of

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Peace, “by the ‘quarrelsome mob’ turned into kindly citizens of the world through the pressure of a cosmopolitan neighborhood.”2 For Addams and Tyson, the pressures of everyday interactions among diverse urban neighbors would build more tolerant, cooperative, and peaceful citizens, disposed to lend their efforts to mutual aid and civic improvement. Sociologist Georg Simmel’s concept of sociability as selfconscious “play” with the maneuvers that dissolve solitude into togetherness helps illuminate the tense reconfiguration of neighborliness in Westhaven’s emerging public spaces. For Simmel, this play orients social actors to those whom they encounter everyday. Yet this play is also crucial for understanding how urbanites might become oriented toward those whom they might never meet but whom they nevertheless imagine to be present when they invoke expansive social entities like “the city,” “the neighborhood,” or “the public.” Newcomers and transitioning Horner residents could not imagine themselves to be part of the expansive wholes that were anchored in the spaces of their city without learning to feel related, bound, and obligated to others also imagined to be “in” them. That education was a sympathetic one. Residents all found themselves living in a place where they could not but “mix in close proximity” with “people of different socioeconomic classes and ethnicities.” Collisions with these others became the grounds of a sympathetic civics that forced many to reflect on and experiment with becoming more or less vulnerable to those in their immediate vicinity. Reflection and experimentation compelled some to consider becoming more or less neighborly by reworking their approaches to strangers and intimates. In the process, some began to reimagine the potentials of collective obligation in a city struggling to get past the failed housing projects of the midcentury welfare state.

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Public Spaces and Public Sociability Publics are mass subjects that emerge through shared attention to communicative forms in circulation. These forms circulate across distance, and for that reason, publics are characterized by relations among strangers.3 Because publics emerge through the circulation of media, such as books, magazines, television programs, or national curriculums, scholars of publicity have tended to shy away from implicating discrete public spaces in the formation of publics.4 “Civic practices—and public culture in general—are shaped in circuits of flow and association that are not reducible to the urban,” geographer

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Ash Amin notes, “let alone to particular places of encounter within the city.”5 In this way of thinking, public spaces are not transparently the stages of publics. Scholars of contemporary cities, however, do not agree. They argue that the quality of publics—along with the collective identifications, sensibilities, and commitments they nurture—varies according to the openness and accessibility of public spaces. Pedestrian malls, festival marketplaces, and plazas developed and managed through public–private arrangements may evoke the look and feel of classic public spaces even as they exclude specific users and uses.6 When particular bodies fail to appear in public because they cannot, for instance, linger comfortably in parks where cameras track their every move, they cannot be seen. If they cannot be seen, they cannot be heard; their concerns will remain unvoiced. Diverse strangers who brush past each other on streets or in plazas may never, as political theorist Iris Marion Young notes, become unified into a political “community of shared final ends.”7 Still, for those writing in this vein, moving freely alongside strangers who embody difference does much to nourish liberal values like tolerance. Here, accessible and diverse public spaces are the material artifacts and the engines of robustly democratic publics.8 Studies of urban public spaces helpfully implicate the material dimensions of everyday urban life in the processes by which citizens come to appreciate the diversity of their polity. Yet they also risk valorizing accessibility and the visibility of different bodies at the expense of understanding why scholars of publicity have taken such pains to distinguish between physical gathering spaces, like a plaza, and more remote ones, like a newspaper’s pages. These latter accounts focus on the communicative genres and interactional styles that summon strangers and knit them together across geographic locations. At the same time, more than a few accounts of publicity make brief mention of the fact that such communicative styles and dispositions are acquired and reinforced as people move through particular configurations of space.9 These cursory discussions suggest that we need to pay attention to the way spatial experiences shape the interactional styles that allow people to both imagine and practice belonging to expansive entities like “the city.” Yet it is not at all clear why the experience of being thrown together with diverse others in urban spaces should ignite imaginations of these expansive wholes. Seminal writings about cities have, after all, long singled out anonymity, indifference, and distraction as defining features of urban modernity.10 Without an account of how given spaces bear upon the

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ways urbanites learn to navigate and interact with the presence of others and to recognize that presence as an important feature of their lives in common, we will remain at a loss to understand why being in any space should ignite even the most fleeting commitments to a civic realm. One way to examine the emergence of such commitments is to consider Simmel’s discussion of the play of sociability in public. Sociability is often construed as the quality of being sociable, of a general willingness to engage others. Simmel, however, defined it as the play of association “related to the content and purpose of association in the same way art is related to reality.”11 Here, sociability is not the willingness to exchange words but, rather, artful experimentation with the social maneuvers that draw individuals into togetherness. For Simmel, conversation is just one among many maneuvers— looks, sounds, or gestures—that make an exchange lively or gripping enough to incite and prolong togetherness. For him, speech paled in comparison to the “purest” form of sociability: the “looking-eachother-over.”12 Sociability is not the public performance of a fabricated self but, rather, a creative endeavor capable of transforming the self alongside a collective social entity.13 Consider an exchange involving Tanya, one of my neighbors in Westhaven, a middle-aged woman who grew up in a Horner highrise and relocated to a Scattered Site building in 2004. Tanya’s building opened onto an ample backyard. Westhaven’s maintenance staff came every few weeks to clip and rake this lush expanse of green. Even so, she never used it. In fact she called it “the alley”—in Chicago, the place you put out the trash, and on the West Side, the place associated with unsavory activities like scavenging and drug use. Any warm weekend, Tanya would drag an armchair from her living room to the sidewalk that fronted her building. There she would spread a blanket across “the concrete,” deposit her infant granddaughter on it, and take in friends and family as they happened along. One spring afternoon in 2006, I passed by to find her chatting with her friend, Deborah. They had grown up on either end of the Extension and had known each other for over two decades. Deborah and Tanya barely looked at me or at each other as we spoke. They kept their eyes fixed ahead. But I had learned that these were not the looks of avoidance or rudeness. Their gazes kept us primed to the street, to whoever might soon be happening along and to the scenes that might soon be unfolding. We began chatting about a recent mandate from the management office. It targeted socializing practices and required transitioning Horner residents to retreat to the back-

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yards if their units had them or to nearby city parks if they did not. I remarked that it was lucky that Westhaven was situated between two major city parks, where people could barbecue and kids could play. Tanya laid into the mandate, and into me as a stand-in for newcomers who were complaining about people socializing “on front.” My friends and interlocutors leaving Horner used the phrase to indicate socializing that unfolded within spaces that fronted residential structures, including sidewalks, yards, streets, and berms, as well as interior hallways that ran along the front of apartments and the lobbies and entrances of multiunit apartment buildings. “You grew up all your life but never hung out in the front,” she accused. “The only time you hung out in the front was when you went to go to get in the car to go to school, or whatever the case may be. . . . All of your activities was held in the back.” Noting that she came from a place of “only fronts,” she continued, “We didn’t have backyards, not down South. And when we moved into the project, we didn’t even have backdoors. So naturally, we took our chairs, our recliners, sometimes our TVs, and if it got really hot, we took our little cots and we laid out there, on the front.” Deborah laughed, “Yes, I had mine on the ramp!” “So when you talk about people moving out of the [pro]’jects into the broader community, they don’t lose that. They still know that they sit on the front. . . . What would I go to the alley for?” Tanya asked. “Ain’t nothing to look at. But on the front, you see cars driving by.” She then looked up the street at approaching cars, pressed the heel of her palm on an imaginary car horn, and mimicked the sounds and drawn-out greetings that transitioning Horner residents often cast on front to slow down and reel in passing motorists and pedestrians for socializing. “ ‘Bump, bump!’ Then ‘h-a-a-a-a-y’ to the people going by. People like you,” Tanya pointed an accusing finger at me, “go on your back porch, and do whatever you do in the house. But for me, I go outside in the front and just chill out. Because when I was raised in the projects, you couldn’t walk on the grass.” “Thank you!” Deborah shouted as she shot an open palm into the air. More common to church, this gesture could, in everyday settings, also convey strong agreement. “You got a fine for walking there.” Invoking our childhoods, Tanya continued, “Little Cassie, she goes in her yard and tears the grass down, but I can’t. So what do I do? I can’t go on the grass and play, so I sat on the ramp. Now, I—” “Sit on the concrete!” Deborah interjected, finishing Tanya’s sentence.

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“I sit out on the concrete too. Think about it,” Tanya added, connecting the fronts of sidewalks and the fronts of ramps, “we sat on the ramp.” “And [we used it] for clothes hanging,” Deborah continued, referring to the practice of hanging clothes out to dry on Horner’s ramps or Westhaven’s front fences. It was considered a particularly “country” thing to do, something you did if you were old and from the South, or if you were less sophisticated. “Maybe there should be a program to screen [residents transitioning into Westhaven], so they don’t hang the clothes out front?” “No,” Tanya insisted. “They just didn’t sit down and watch how we interact. Ain’t nobody said, ‘Well, these people wash their clothes and hang them on the ramp,’ [or] ‘Well, all of them bring their chairs out on the front porch and sit on the ramp.’ They never thought, ‘What if a person moved into the broader community? Would they hang their clothes on the fence or the ramp? Would they sit out in the front to congregate and lollygag?’ ” For people who did not have reliable access to air conditioning, dryers, or telephones, being on front served functional purposes. Fronts became spaces in which to dry clothes, to cool down, and to talk with friends. Beyond that, though, frontward gazes, blaring car horns, raised voices, sweeping gestures, and flying rocks allowed them to amplify and expand their own and others’ physical presences into space in ways that made being on front an important and pleasurable part of renewing existing social ties and extending new ones. Fronts were places saturated in ever-present social potential. For Tanya and Deborah, prohibitions against being on front meant missing friends and family and, as they pointed out, the chance to associate with new people. Such expectations carried over into Westhaven. And as Tanya’s defensive tone might suggest, they carried over in ways that ignited enormous tensions concerning who was on front versus the back, and how they were there. These tensions speak to Simmel’s claim that the play of sociability, which for him has an essentially democratic structure, does not unfold across classes. For Simmel, sociability is playing at entering associations as “human beings.” In its purest forms, that play requires proceeding as if differentials and inequalities do not matter, as if they can be set aside for the purposes of entering into an association in which everyone is esteemed equally and in which everyone receives the pleasures of sociable values.14 But members of different classes have different senses about what makes for pleasing sociable values, about what makes for a joyful, vivacious, or diverting encounter.

Rather than being pleasing, for Simmel, cross-class encounters feel only “burdensome and painful.”15 They cannot contribute to the joy of others, and those involved cannot guarantee each other sociable values. Nobody involved can “play at” and perfect an association predicated purely upon the pleasures of human association. Tanya, Deborah, and newcomers had different ideas about how to interact with their neighbors, but their ideas were not altogether incommensurate: Tanya and her friend linked the pleasures of the front with the prospect of meeting newcomers, while some newcomers, as we will see below, criticized themselves and each other for failing to greet “CHA people” when they passed them on sidewalks or in hallways. Simmel misses something that all these residents have not: The burdens and pains of cross-class encounters are no less generative of transformative play or experimentation with association. Perhaps they are even more so in places whose changing material dimensions create and foreclose specific sociable maneuvers and, in the process, rattle everyone’s expectations about what being in public should look, sound, and feel like. Before I delve further into the fraught play of sociability in Westhaven, I need to unpack the design interventions that guided its development and show how they shaded into surveillance.

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Civics and Surveillance In the 1980s, conservative politicians singled out the Department of Housing and Urban Development as a not-so-shining example of governmental inefficiency and mismanagement. Some began calling loudly for its abolition. As they did, HUD came under pressure to deliver evidence that it could turn around its troubled housing projects. During the early years of Bill Clinton’s presidency, HUD officials in search of bold ideas and collaborators found both in New Urbanism, an urban design movement that rose to national prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Proponents of New Urbanism worked closely with HUD to develop design principles that would guide HUD’s Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) program. Proponents hoped these principles would turn around troubled housing projects. Proponents of New Urbanism lambasted a previous generation of urban planners and architects for ignoring the wisdom of America’s golden age of city planning, which they usually put somewhere between 1850 and 1930.16 As they told it, this golden age had blessed the nation with cities and towns with strong civic identities. That is, inhabitants of these cities and towns committed themselves to

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collective life and duties and understood that life and those duties to be rooted in their immediate location. Automobile travel, single-use zoning, suburban development, and architectural styles that flouted the human scale (in particular, modernism) had decimated that golden age and its legacy. More specifically, New Urbanists took to task the postwar development of racially segregated urban cores that cut off the nation’s most destitute citizens from social and economic opportunities and the simultaneous construction of homogeneous suburbs that alienated its most affluent ones.17 “We planned carefully and won the war, but we did not plan carefully after that and thus lost the peace,” architect and planner Jaquelin Robertson wrote of this period. “Somehow, in the postwar binge, our original urban intentions were redirected; our architects very simply seemed to have lost interest or forfeited a role in town planning.”18 According to proponents of New Urbanism, that lost peace took a serious toll on civic life. That toll affected all Americans, regardless of whether they dwelled in decaying housing projects or sprawling suburbs. The movement’s proponents argued that the more physically and socially integrated citizens were within their neighborhoods, their cities, and their regions, the more likely they would be to identify with these entities and commit to their needs.19 To rebuild this civic realm, proponents of New Urbanism emphasized the affective ties of place and the types of dispositions toward collective life and difference that they could cultivate. Consider architect Douglas Kelbaugh’s remarks in 2000 before the Congress for the New Urbanism’s annual conference:

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Without community, without civitas, we are all doomed to private worlds that are more selfish and loveless than they need be. As our society becomes more privatized and our culture more narcissistic, the need . . . to belong to something bigger than our individual selves grows. . . . Belonging to a community or “polis” may be the highest expression of this spiritual need . . . [but] Americans have been quick to exchange the more raw and uncomfortable sidewalk life of the inner city neighborhood for the easy and banal TV life of the suburban family room. We have been too quick to give up the public life that American cities have slowly mustered.20

Kelbaugh’s solution was one that many proponents of New Urbanism shared: “a physical world of buildings, streets, plazas and parks

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that encourage and dignify human interaction among friends and strangers, rich and poor, black and white, old and young.”21 Communities of “propinquity and place” would mitigate the rampant individualism, the physical isolation, and the social homogeneity that had cut off citizens from one another and instead would nurture a respect for group norms and individual differences. With respect to public housing’s redevelopment, proponents of New Urbanism called for mixed-use, mixed-income, and pedestrianoriented neighborhoods. Their designs placed special emphasis on features thought to encourage casual, everyday encounters among neighbors. Meetings on sidewalks, across porches and stoops, or in small pocket parks would do much, they hoped, to instill the bonds of place and propinquity. Sympathetic encounters in public would teach unlikely neighbors to be more alike, or at least to be alike enough to approach their lives in common as a primary site of identification, interest, and commitment. And ideally such encounters would do all this while chipping away at spatially entrenched forms of racial and economic segregation. While Horner’s architects had set its concrete-framed buildings far back from the street, hewing close to modernist design principles that prioritized ample space for recreation away from the street’s dangers, Westhaven’s buildings hugged sidewalks to encourage regular and casual social interaction across sidewalks and yards.22 Whereas Horner’s walkways traversed vast open spaces that opened onto large recreational areas, Westhaven offered smaller parks and tot lots interspersed throughout the development. At Horner, households had made use of the wide hallways and semi-enclosed breezeways (“ramps”) that lined floors throughout the development, as well as the broad entrances of some buildings (“porches”) to roller-skate, play games, watch children, and share food. But anyone looking to replicate the life of porches and ramps in Westhaven would be hard-pressed to find obvious spaces to do so. Its designs made a pronounced divide between public and private space. Westhaven’s designs emerged from expectations that contact, as one HUD booklet put it, “with many guides, especially working families whose example can both instruct and inspire,” would teach public housing residents the value of regular work habits and schedules.23 As much as these designs dovetailed with the priorities and discourses surrounding welfare state retrenchment in the 1990s, they also emerged from New Urbanism and from two older, influential theories, adopted by HUD, concerning social control in urban space. In her antimodernist screed The Death and Life of Great American

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View of Horner Homes, looking west, late 1950s. Horner’s buildings and walkways were set back from the street. Planned landscaping was not yet complete at the time of this photograph, but gathering, playing, and socializing “on front” in spaces that would become designated recreation areas are already visible. The Boys Club, a center of recreation, is at the left. Photograph by the Chicago Housing Authority.

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Cities, Jane Jacobs famously attributed the insecurity of housing projects built during urban renewal to a lack of “eyes on the street.”24 Residents living in high-rise projects were so distanced from the street, she argued, that they could not properly monitor it, let alone bond with neighbors who might be passing along. Architect and planner Oscar Newman elaborated on these ideas in his book Defensible Space, attributing the crime and vandalism associated with these housing projects to designs that rendered their common spaces indefensible no-man’s-lands.25 Smaller buildings that abutted sidewalks and clearly demarcated public and private spaces amid a network of small parks would do much, HOPE VI proponents insisted, to encourage all residents to take an active interest in security. As they participated in community policing and security programs, residents might “deter the corrosive values of the crime and drug culture, and open the way for positive community values to flourish.”26 Invocations of the public–private divide, as anthropologist Susan Gal has pointed out, do not simply describe the world in a direct or

View of temporary pocket park, looking west, 2006. Transitioning Horner residents who relocated to the edge of this temporary park called it their “front.” They used it to play, socialize, and barbecue. In the late summer of 2006, this park was dismantled to make way for future development. At the time of this photograph, the fence and play equipment had just been removed, much to the chagrin of former Horner residents.

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straightforward way. Rather, they are “tools for arguments about and in that world.”27 New Urbanist design principles approached the public–private divide as a physical mechanism to model and make contagious normative expectations concerning property, security, work, and responsibility. In this sense, proponents argued that encounters with people and places organized along this divide would anchor a sympathetic civics of everyday life in a post-welfare city. From the New Urbanist perspective, modernist design had not properly enacted normative divides between private and public spaces, between individual property and collective endeavors to protect that property. Reasserting a firm public–private divide would distinguish between what should appear on front and what was best left to interior life. Contact with spaces and people organized along a firmly drawn public–private divide would check destructive behaviors while spreading particular approaches to sociability and security. Westhaven differed radically from the spaces that transitioning Horner residents had spent their lives moving through. Even so,

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many could not shake their expectations that any open space, no matter how small or how close it was to private spaces, invited socializing. “We used to meet in the hallways, on the ramps, or outside, just kicking it,” wistfully noted one middle-aged woman, Linda, who had moved to a Horner high-rise in her late twenties and then to a replacement apartment in 2004 in the Superblock. “Now we are separated. They’ve got some of us here, and some of us all the way down there [on the other side of the redevelopment]. So when we do see people, we want to spend some time.” Linda, like Tanya and Deborah and many transitioning Horner residents, spent that time on the sidewalks, in small parks, in lots, on streets, and in increasingly tiny yards that fronted their new apartments. Out came barbecue grills, lawn chairs, wheelchairs, strollers, milk crates, tables, dominoes, checkerboards, cards, dice, coolers, radios, televisions, bicycles, and cars, their windows down, their music streaming. And along came children, aunties, uncles, cousins, grandparents, nieces, nephews, grandchildren, and a rotating cast of friends, neighbors, and acquaintances to join in the eating, drinking, barbecuing, singing, playing, dancing, flirting, fighting, and people watching. From early spring through late fall, such scenes sprawled around the Near West Side’s residential buildings. Throughout my time in Westhaven, developers contracted to usher the site into its mixed-income phases increasingly worried that such scenes would unnerve and deter market-rate buyers and renters, whose buy-in was absolutely crucial for meeting financing targets. They directed the architects of later mixed-income phases to design outdoor spaces that would feel, in the words of one member of the architecture team, “less social.” As the mixed-income phase progressed, Westhaven’s newest buildings increasingly opened directly onto sidewalks. Mazes of parking lots and ornamental fences segmented most remaining open space. One middle-aged white developer, Michael, explained these choices to me in 2006 by insisting that “public spaces do not work in public housing projects.”

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The issue of not having public space in the last development phase may have been the wrong decision. But the assumption we had going in was [that] public spaces do not work in public housing projects. You could be in the most disgusting, horrible building, and then you walk into someone’s front door, and you’re in this beautiful oasis, with the room painted and nice furniture. How could this be? It puzzled me. But we thought, if a space is not owned by somebody,

then it’s owned by nobody and it’s fair game to be destroyed. And they were. It really made the whole environment untenable. So, our goal was to have every single person have their own door to the street. Your own door, your own address that you don’t share with anybody else, no common area that you have to walk through that’s dirty and disgusting. You control the front stoop, you control everything. If it’s somebody’s, they’ll keep it nice. If it’s everybody’s, it’s trashed. Our goal was actually to eliminate all public space. . . . We did as much as we could. We still have the issue of hanging out.

Why was “hanging out” an issue?, I asked. Michael continued, In a middle-class neighborhood it’s not considered appropriate . . . to have your business out in front of everybody. It’s not a middle-class lifestyle. People who’ve grown up in buildings where there’s no private space adapt by doing stuff in public space. But if they have a nice backyard, they’ll do what my family does: barbecue, picnic, play music, [ride] your Big Wheel, all those things everyone loves, we do in the backyard. Give more space in the back that’s private, that can be used by people who want to braid hair or what[ever] they want to do. So they don’t have to hang out on the front stoop anymore.

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For Michael, “nice backyard[s]” (like the “alley” that opened off Tanya’s unit) would inspire transitioning Horner residents to adopt the staid public demeanors of middle-class residents. Moves to rein in transitioning Horner residents’ gravitation toward the front got a boost from the Chicago Police Department. Beat officers encouraged all local residents to participate in the department’s Community Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS), a program that, according to its mission statement, “brings the police, the community, and other City agencies together to identify and solve neighborhood crime problems.”28 Newcomers flocked to two monthly CAPS meetings held in the area to relay concerns about noise, loitering, outdoor parties, and suspected drug sales. In 2005, police began installing observation cameras on utility poles throughout Westhaven in an effort to discourage drug trafficking and gang activity. Affixed to the top of them were flashing blue lights that resembled the ones that crown police cars. “Blue eyes,” as some transitioning Horner residents called the apparatus, flashed around the clock and

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View of Phase II, looking east, summer 2004. Developers of Westhaven’s mixedincome phases directed architects to design outdoor spaces that would feel less social to deter socializing on the front of buildings. These fronts are small and fenced. Property management and developers directed transitioning Horner residents to head to nearby parks or to the backs of their buildings, some of which included backyards.

cast streaks of light across buildings, through windows, and across bedroom walls. Several transitioning Horner residents complained that the lights awakened and frightened sleeping children. Officers shuffled them every few weeks for maximum effect. Once an “eye” had scattered gatherings in its line of sight, police would rehang it in

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a new location to disperse groups that had begun to assemble just out of range, several corners, stoops, or yards away. Jane Jacobs suggested that stoop sitting and sidewalk play would best improve urban security. Yet in Westhaven, the most powerful “eyes on the street” belonged to security technologies that criminalized citizens who enjoyed a social life that revolved around stoops and sidewalks—in this case, low-income people of color. The disparity between the vital and heterogeneous streets imagined in designs for places like Westhaven and the anxieties about security that have governed them has not been lost on scholars. They tend to treat New Urbanism as well intentioned but naive. “ ‘Community’ has ever been one of the key sites of social control and surveillance, bordering on overt social repression,” writes geographer David Harvey in his critique of New Urbanism. “Well-founded communities often exclude, define themselves against others, erect all sorts of keep-out signs (if not tangible walls).”29 Throughout my time researching, many transitioning Horner residents, other longterm area residents, and newcomers all complained about the surveillance that undergirded outdoor spaces. But many did this even as they demanded heightened surveillance. Class-based and racially inflected anxieties concerning crime and normative work schedules certainly suffused their complaints and demands. Yet I also found that many of the same people who complained about surveillance betrayed an intense fascination with their new neighbors and their use of open spaces. They filled my notebooks and recorder with endless commentaries concerning interactions between the people and things that appeared “in public.” And they never seemed to tire of speculating about what those interactions meant for the lives their neighbors led and the relations they formed. This fascination dovetailed with one of the central demands driving public housing reform: that residents learn to become responsible for the security of their own homes and neighborhoods. The Near West Side had, after all, been scourged by arson, crime, and gang-related violence since the 1970s. The most intense of these insecurities had subsided by the time I began my research in 2003, but long-term residents and newcomers still struggled with them.30 In such a context, the civics of everyday urban life could not but include many residents’ learning to see active surveillance as a collective duty. Yet as much as new and long-term residents’ fascination with their neighbors and their neighbors’ use of public spaces touched on anxieties about insecurity, they should not be reduced to them. Sometimes my interlocutors’ fascination with neighbors focused on

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monitoring criminal activities, with the aim of eventually dispelling them. But just as often, their fascination focused on the difficulty of figuring out the best way to engage neighbors in social interaction or the best way to understand the types of social engagement they witnessed their neighbors practicing. Over time, I came to understand that this fascination reflected a deep uncertainty over how much the realization of neighborhood—not just a place but a feeling of solidarity grounded in common residence—would require residents to become vulnerable to their neighbors.

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This Stone Face By 2006, Westhaven’s developers had come to understand that outdoor congregations bothered many newcomers, especially seniors and middle-class African Americans. Many had grown up in or near Chicago’s projects and vigilantly guarded against the crime and violence associated with such places and their residents.31 Developers scrambled to head off anxieties about noise and security as they prepared for the opening that summer of a nine-story condominium building, the Westhaven Park Tower. This mid-rise would bring another 113 units to Westhaven’s ongoing redevelopment effort and would be the first building in Westhaven to include a broad internal mix of incomes. Instead of living one or two buildings over from nurses, teachers, accountants, even the odd lawyer, transitioning public housing residents would live just down the hall from them. Developers reserved the thirty-four apartments in this building that were set aside for residents leaving public housing for single people and seniors. They hoped that relocating public housing residents with fewer active kinship obligations in the Tower would keep it quiet. Presumably, these residents would see significantly fewer visitors than their counterparts in other sections of Westhaven. Developers also had architects incorporate ample outdoor private space to deter socializing around the building. Every unit opened onto either a private balcony or a patio, accessible only to its occupants. Finally, the company that managed Westhaven’s second phase installed an eagle-eyed staff member in the office that overlooked the Tower’s lobby. She watched for signs that there were more occupants in an apartment than were listed on its lease. Constant streams of “visitors,” an excessive amount of furniture bound for an apartment designed to house just one person—she knew the signs well. She had, after all, grown up in Chicago public housing herself. Even with these precautions, market-rate owners and renters began complaining al-

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most immediately about CHA neighbors’ noisy gatherings; about excessive traffic around apartments, halls, and the lobby; and about entrances propped open to admit friends and family without detection by the building’s security staff. At about this time, Mr. Green ran into trouble. Then in his mid-sixties, Mr. Green hailed from Savannah, Georgia, but he had spent most of his adult life in public housing. He numbered among the most steady and affable fixtures of Westhaven’s world on front. When at home in the Tower, he would perch on his balcony, which overlooked the building’s front entrance. He called it “my ramp,” invoking the breezeways of the demolished building in which he had lived. There he would stand most afternoons, waving to everyone who entered the building below. Sometimes he would carry on conversations with old neighbors out on their balconies. Shouted pleasantries, small talk, and remarks about the weather moved up, down, and across the building’s facade. Under doctor’s orders, Mr. Green also began that summer to visit the building’s gym to lift light hand weights. “Gym” was a misnomer. This was a small room given over almost entirely to an exercise mat, two elliptical machines, and a treadmill. Basically, anyone who used it had to be comfortable with exercising on top of another person, with the physicality of another body and its exertions. When Mr. Green’s own exertions proved too much, as they often did, he would stretch out on the mat and nap. One afternoon he awoke to the hum of an elliptical machine. A young white woman huffed away at its helm, not three feet away from where he lay, her ears plugged with headphones, her eyes fixed on the television that hung from the corner. Mr. Green recognized her immediately. They had never “met formally,” as he put it, but they had exchanged friendly waves and nods several times from his balcony. Recently, they had smiled at each other in the elevator. He sat up and leaned in to catch her eye. When that elicited no response, he stepped up to speak. But she “stared right through” him. He found “this stone face” baffling, so he finished his routine and left. A “security notice” posted the next morning on the building’s front door shook him even more. A friend read it to him: yesterday, it says, a homeless man had wandered into Westhaven Park Tower and, the friend added after reviewing the description, it says “he looked just like you.” Relaying the episode to me a few days later, Mr. Green and his friend kept looping back to the same point. Not the indignity of being misrecognized as an intruder in one’s own home but a far more dreadful possibility: had Mr. Green actually been hurt and passed

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out on the mat, his neighbor would probably have left him there. Mr. Green mused that on his walks “out west,” that is, farther on the West Side, where the housing market had yet to heat up, “even strangers” slowed down when they beheld seniors like him pausing to sit or lean against “fire plugs and light poles” for “a rest.” “Old Timer,” they would ask him, “you okay? You straight?” Mr. Green was never one to go in for overt criticism. He left it to his friend to drive home the point: “You’d be crazy to move somewhere and not want to know anyone, because you never know which one of you might need the other. It’s good to get on a speaking basis.” Fear and misunderstanding suffused this encounter, as did what anthropologist Danilyn Rutherford discusses as social interaction’s “foundational predicament.” “The interpretation of more or less inscrutable sounds and gestures,” she observes, “incites felt bodily experiences that people only imperfectly translate into passions: love, fear, shock, relief.”32 The elliptical woman may not have known exactly what to make of that sprawled-out body, and Mr. Green was equally confounded by the person sweating silently on a machine. And in a context overdetermined by race- and class-inflected anxieties surrounding insecurity, crime, and the relationship of both to black masculinity, inscrutable sounds and gestures had hardened overnight into imperfect translations that rendered Mr. Green’s nap a threat and the young woman’s focus callousness incarnate. Looks, sounds, and gestures that failed to align and draw these two together erected a social impasse that shored up the firmly drawn and familiar divides. Yet as Mr. Green and this woman’s other exchanges across entrances, ramps, and even the elevator suggest, spaces that were less intimate, less private, and therefore less associated with physicality had rendered Mr. Green’s sociable maneuvers less a threat. An elevator or an entrance allowed these two neighbors to experiment with extending themselves across racial and economic divides and, in the process, to show how the divides might bend and buckle depending on the expectations of intimacy associated with different kinds of spaces. I turn now to newcomers as they struggled to fend off what struck them as the invasiveness of their new neighbors’ sociability but also, to a certain extent, to take inspiration from it.

“It Was Care” Most residents of the Near West Side understood that living in a redeveloping area that retained a high concentration of subsidized rental housing meant that they would have to interact across socio-

economic lines. These interactions might well prove “burdensome” or “painful,” but they could not be avoided. As they unfolded, residents began to come up against the limits of a sympathetic civics. While transitioning Horner residents worried over neighbors’ vacant eyes and deaf ears, newcomers worried over their neighbors’ constant revelry—it seemed to pervade all spaces, at all times. By the summer of 2005, Elaine and her husband John had lived on the Near West Side for over a decade. Though in the context of my fieldwork they can be categorized as newcomers, they in fact considered themselves early pioneers. Both African American professionals, this middle-aged couple took pride in the friendly terms they had established with the two dozen to three dozen “neighbor kids” staying at any given time in the replacement Horner buildings that sandwiched the couple’s graystone. They were especially pleased that the children had given them nicknames and regularly popped by to say hello. Elaine had grown up in Chicago’s public housing when it was “more mixed,” and she appreciated that for her neighbors, “keeping” others’ biological children helped parents taken away by an illness, a prison stint, or a job. She regularly lauded such care, and one afternoon in 2006, as we planted flowers along the berm, she explicitly contrasted it to the sociability of newcomers:

For Elaine, being a presence in the neighborhood meant dipping into the world on front. Yet as much as Elaine and John admired their neighbors’ sense of “community,” they never got used to the number

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There are seven condo owners on the other side of the street. We know them and they’re nice, but they never come outside. They live inside their house. They have a parking space in the back and friends come and go from there, but they don’t have a presence. A lot of these condos weren’t built to have outdoor spaces. Maybe they’re on the deck? But that’s in the back. So they are not a living part of the neighborhood. But there’s such a strong sense of community within those [Horner replacement] buildings. Their community is such that there is no private space. They go in and out of each other’s house, and they don’t knock. It’s more like an extended family. They may fight like cats and dogs one day, but then they come back together. People that they knew when they lived in the projects, they still see them as family. So they walk down here and they go down there. I like the way that it’s exhibited, that strong connection.

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of people coming and going. And they struggled with what that coming and going brought into their home. As we ate dinner one evening that spring and talked about her daughter’s upcoming wedding, Elaine interrupted our conversation to pull back the window curtain. The building next door, which included three Horner replacement units, came into view. John counted three dozen adults and children milling in the tiny yard and on the sidewalk that fronted the building. Laughing, singing, and dancing had commenced around a radio connected to an extension cord that snaked into an upstairs window. “Their space is not just their own. The space that’s here,” John sighed as he swept his arm around the living room that opened off the dining room, “appears to be theirs as well. People are playing the music or talking loud, staying up to three or four o’clock in the morning, without any real concern for keeping things quiet for someone living next door [who has] to work [in the morning].” For the newcomers, loudness and noise seemed to radiate from the bodies of long-standing residents. The loudness and noise were amplified by all manner of devices that further expanded their physical presence into the most private of spaces. Worst of all were the contraband fireworks that punctuated any warm evening in the area. Consider the rash of e-mails that moved across a Listserv maintained by a growing home-owners association in late June 2006. Its members had met through community policing meetings, and they had formed the group to address their collective concerns. The first e-mail in the thread “nightly fireworks display” landed on a weeknight, at 3:45 a.m. It came from Fred, a young white lawyer who hailed from Chicago’s North Side. He had moved to the area because it allowed him to be closer to work and to make what seemed like a sound investment in housing. He complained of a firework manufactured to look and sound like dynamite. (Only low-level-explosive fireworks were legal in Chicago, but fireworks designed to mimic the look and sound of dynamite or rounds of artillery fire flowed in from across the Indiana border). “We need some help over here,” his post began. It seems the nightly fireworks show is getting more intense lately. Last night I swear a ½ stick went off in the alley. I have called 911 regularly, but I fear little is being done. As the parent of a 10-week old human and two neurotic hounds the noise is more than a mere nuisance. It wakes up all the beings under my care and it can take an hour to get some peace in the house. . . . Nightly fireworks displays are illegal

and unacceptable. I encourage everyone to call 911 when they hear the first snap, crackle, pop.

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More e-mails landed at odd hours. Their writers complained about explosions that shook them from their sleep, terrified their children, and filled their bedrooms with acrid smoke. All echoed Fred’s plea to contact the police. After all, police officers had emphasized again and again in CAPS meetings that their response to any “quality of life” complaint would vary according to the volume of phone calls logged by emergency centers. One African American newcomer wrote in about a group of children who seemed to be playing dangerous games with fireworks. “The kids are aiming foot long bottle rockets at each other and our cars. They hide behind vehicles and buildings and have a shoot out with fireworks! At this point, we need a paddy wagon and arrests to stop it,” she lamented. “Are people going to pay $400,000 to live in this war zone?” She urged everyone to call in fireworks complaints as “weapons violations.” Now surely that would get the police’s attention? The litany of frustrations on the Listserv speak to a prevailing folk theory that sound has pervasive qualities that carry in ways hearing humans cannot avoid. Underscoring its shortcomings, historian Karin Bijsterveld notes that understandings of what constituted “noise” and its ill effects shifted in the industrializing cities of twentieth-century Europe and North America; noise complaints emerged as a vehicle for managing working-class manners and schedules.33 Observations that sensory experience is subject to historical change and is a tool of social differentiation are important.34 Yet glossing over newcomers’ preoccupations with the spatial qualities of their neighbors’ revelry misses something important. Newcomers experienced their neighbors’ robust sociability as relentlessly expansive, especially in its capacity to reach into the most private of domestic spaces, their bedrooms. For newcomers, the sounds, densities, and forces of this ballistic sociability were more than a “mere nuisance”; rather, they extended the presence of transitioning Horner residents across fences, walls, windows, and yards in ways that interrupted the protection of “all the beings” under their “care.” For newcomers, transitioning Horner residents’ all-hours, allspaces sociability was a threat to a model of protection built through policies that made home ownership a cornerstone of middle-class stability. This model situated the care of the self and its immediate charges within the nuclear household and within the financial arrangements through which the household’s members gradually

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amassed equity to care for themselves and each other. This household did not open easily onto the demands of friends or more-removed kin. Of those beyond its windows, doors, fences, and thresholds—in other words, of the neighbors—it asked only a mutual investment in securing homes and property values. Many newcomers subscribed to this model and sought to police it into being in Westhaven. Even so, more than a few engaged the expansive spatial qualities of transitioning Horner residents’ sociability as incitements to reflect on and experiment with their own vulnerability to those just beyond their households. Such reflection and experimentation hover over John’s and Elaine’s comments, but they become even clearer in another newcomer’s preoccupations with her neighbors. When I met Annika in 2006, she had already spent three years shuttling between her upscale suburb and the Near West Side to visit her daughter. This middle-aged, white, Dutch expatriate had purchased a condo in a private building for her daughter to live in while attending a nearby university. Annika planned to move into the condo with her husband after her daughter had graduated; she longed for urban life. The building stood catty-corner to several buildings occupied by transitioning Horner residents, and while Annika vehemently supported “mixed living,” she found her stays on the Near West Side confusing. CAPS meetings and their constant talk about drug trafficking had made her equal parts vigilant and uncertain. By 2006 she had become preoccupied with several young African American men who seemed to live in the replacement buildings on her block. They passed endless hours out front. “When I stay over here,” she lamented to me one evening after a CAPS meeting, “I am never sure about how to behave to the people in front. Are they being friendly? Or are they selling drugs? It could be both, you know.” Annika kept careful track of all the times the men’s attentiveness had proven helpful, and she would tell me about them whenever I ran into her. Here is one encounter that she and her daughter relayed to me in 2006 over tea. We had met up in a coffee shop closer to the university. As Annika’s daughter pointed out, there were no places near her building where one could just “sit and talk” (at least not any that she felt comfortable just sitting and talking). “Last month, when I was walking up the way,” Annika began, “I fell flat on my face. I had this basket with me. And these guys were also across the road. They were out, like always. In a second they were with me. They ran over and helped me up. That would not happen in [my suburb].”

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“People would look the other way!” her daughter interjected. “They’re so scared. Maybe that they could be sued? Or injured?” Annika speculated. “There is just so much fear—of being, well, being obligated.” “Because,” her daughter continued, “there, you’re just with your family. If you don’t want, you don’t have to talk to anybody. You’re going to be lonely living in that place.” “But these neighbors, they know everything, don’t they?” Annika marveled. “They just look! But I like being noted, and I have a feeling that they look after her. That’s something we can actually learn. It gives me a feeling of security, that you won’t rot a week at home when you die. It’s more how I grew up [in Europe]. It was safe and it was care.” Like other newcomers, Annika gravitated toward institutions that supported her property interests. She cautiously navigated interactions with her neighbors and continued, even through her confusion, to report her suspicions. “When I go to these [CAPS] meetings,” she observed one evening as we filed out the door of the library where they were held, “they keep saying, ‘Call, call, call.’ I think, ‘Yeah. Call, call, call.’ I actually do call quite a bit. Even if it’s only one person who I don’t recognize. Because drugs just brings all the rest with it in their wake,” she explained, painting a more sinister picture of her neighbors’ sociability. “They bring people who have no money, sick people, people who are wasted, guns, they bring the lot.” Even so, Annika and her daughter sensed that the looks that extended these men across the gulf of a street were an antidote to places where households had closed entirely in upon themselves. And Annika admired such extensions. So did her daughter. That spring, when I began to see the pair out on weekend mornings picking up trash on the surrounding blocks, Annika often spoke of her desire to volunteer, perhaps tutor, at a local Boys and Girls Club. For newcomers like Annika, “being in public” and its disorientations compelled them to imagine becoming vulnerable to strangers in ways that anticipated the “communities of propinquity and place” heralded by New Urbanism. Annika’s engagement with surveillance shaded into other civic commitments that she thought would improve her neighborhood. In this respect, her sociability experiments spoke to welfare reforms that would mobilize citizens to care for those in their midst. At the same time as some newcomers considered the virtues of extending themselves, transitioning Horner residents cast both critical and admiring eyes at the sociability of Annika and her ilk—a sociability that seemed to have few openings.

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“Only Dogs” Throughout my years on the West Side, transitioning Horner residents grew increasingly frustrated with newcomers’ efforts to hem in their use of public spaces. They worried that vigilance around their noise and the comings and goings of friends and relatives would make outdoor socializing a thing of the past and at the same time bring unwanted attention to their households. They especially worried that this attention would reveal the presence of off-lease household members. As they had at Horner, many households continued to shelter relatives and friends off lease, especially when a criminal record made it nearly impossible for a loved one to secure his or her own rental housing. Though common enough, such presences jeopardized leases. But transitioning Horner residents also watched their new neighbors and speculated intensely about how they might be related to the people and things they appeared with—or didn’t appear with—in public. A striking manifestation involved speculations concerning newcomers’ pets. To start with, transitioning Horner residents complained, newcomers refused to greet them on the streets and sidewalks. Many took such disregard as a racist snub when it came from newcomers who were not black and as “bougie” snobbery when it came from those who were. Yet these same neighbors lavished incredible affection upon dogs in public! A woman named Jeanie captured this apparent contradiction in 2005. Then thirty-six, Jeanie had vouchered out of a Horner mid-rise as soon as redevelopment began in 1996. She had since lived all over the West Side. When I met Jeanie in 2004, she had returned to the Near West Side to work as a teacher’s aide and rented an apartment southwest of Westhaven. She often made it up to Westhaven to visit her old friends from Horner. In fact, she frequently pointed out to me that what she missed about Horner was “the hanging out part.” “The kids can run around,” she explained one early evening as we sat on her stoop watching hers play, “and you be out there barbecuing. Like my friends, we used to be sitting [on the front] drinking—well, I don’t drink—but playing the music, barbecuing, playing dominoes or cards, and everyone going by. It was just so fun because everybody knew each other.” Jeanie smiled but then quickly tempered her reverie. “Sometimes it wasn’t good, because that’s when [specific gangs and families] want to get to shooting. You don’t want your kid to get hurt by no innocent bullet.” In 2005 Jeanie acquired new neighbors, a white-and-Latino couple, who were the first occupants of a condominium building next door.

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Like Jeanie, the neighbors were then in their thirties. Jeanie had four children; the couple, “only dogs.” “They park their cars and run inside,” Jeanie noted of them. “They come out when they want to jog or walk dogs.” She shrugged. “They don’t want to be bothered. They want to walk on the sidewalk and not have to say ‘excuse me’ to people standing out.” She grimaced as she jabbed her elbows to the side to mimic clearing the sidewalk, a gesture some former Horner residents made when they expressed frustration with having to move through crowded spaces. “But they do like playing with dogs,” Jeanie laughed. “That’s when they come out of the shell.” She continued, “[They say] ‘Dog’s man’s best friend!’ Maybe dogs really they best friends?” Jeanie’s speculations were lighthearted. Yet as redevelopment progressed and frustrations grew, such speculations took on sharper tones. Strange rumors circulated about newcomers seen “hugging and kissing on dogs” as if they were children or dolls. Pampered dogs seen through the large front windows characteristic of new residential buildings were spied lounging on sofas and eating at tables with their people . . . from plates! Preoccupations with dogs were not limited to fantastic hearsay. During the warm season of 2006, CAPS meetings saw more transitioning Horner residents. These residents suspected, correctly, that police and Westhaven’s management staff looked to complaints voiced at these meetings for guidance about which specific households to monitor. To newcomers’ detailed reports about fireworks or about the makes and models of cars that idled out front and rattled windows with subwoofers, transitioning Horner residents shot back with lists that detailed the makes and models of dogs that ran roughshod over parks and sidewalks where children played. As tensions mounted, some speculated that the newcomers complained because they were jealous because they lacked meaningful relationships. After all, observation and hearsay had it that nobody ever visited them. (Newcomers did indeed have visitors, but they tended to come and go from the back—new residential buildings located parking spaces in the rear, off the alley). As these debates suggest, a sociability that seemed open only to dogs captivated a vocal minority. Consider the vigilance of Warren, a middle-aged man who had relocated from Horner to a unit overlooking a small park. Transitioning Horner residents favored this park for grilling and playing; newcomers, for walking their dogs. Warren spent most of his mornings filing applications for any and every job notice that came across the desk of a local employment service. He passed most of his afternoons and evenings at home, reading, watching television, or barbecuing

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on front. He also used his prime position—he had a corner unit—to police owners who let their dogs “tear up” the park with their paws and their messes. In fact, he seemed to have committed all newcomers, their dogs, and their walking schedules to memory. He would sit expectantly at home. As soon as he heard the faint jangle of a dog collar, he would leap to the window and begin shouting disembodied commands from behind the blinds. To the startled dogs, he would yell a playful “Sit!” or “Roll over!” To the startled owners, a sterner “Pick that up!” or “Bring a bag!” Warren credited himself with single-handedly reforming several newcomers. One afternoon we sat in his living room reading gossip magazines. Warren, as always, kept one eye on the window. After a while he called me to it to see one such reformed pet owner, a white man in his late thirties who Warren knew lived in Westhaven Park Tower. He proudly pointed out the leash and noted the “poop bag” that this man carried. He then admired the man’s crisp summer suit and speculated about his life in the Tower. “Visitors sign in downstairs,” Warren began as he imagined what happened when one walked into the lobby. “Then [security] calls up and says, ‘It’s some people here who want to come up. Do you want to be bothered with them?’ ” Warren imagined the man’s response: “ ‘No.’ Then security says, ‘‘Sorry. Mr. So-and- So’s busy right now. Come back another time.’ ” Warren paused and savored the scene of a visitor rebuffed. “That’s great! He goes out when he wants to meet friends and when he comes in the house, nobody bothers him. He has that dog, too. He always has someone to talk to.” Warren often worried about the “rowdy crowd” that frequented the park. Its ranks included old neighbors and friends. Because he lacked the phone necessary to buzz them in—some of Westhaven’s replacement buildings required tenants to have a phone and phone service to operate the security system—they would shout and throw rocks at his window until either he came out or he relented and let them in. He would deny them entry whenever possible. “They won’t take care of your furniture like you would,” he cautioned. “There’s some that will cut and scratch and tear it up. It’s like jealousy.” Late that summer Warren took to passing his evenings glued to his unlit window. Like many transitioning Horner residents who could only find irregular work, Warren was worried about an unwieldy electric bill. But he also insisted that this practice allowed him to take in the excitement on front while keeping his old neighbors and friends at arm’s length. Like many transitioning Horner residents, Warren struggled with visitors who could—and did—descend at any hour. Many took

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social calls outside when possible. Because, they would advise me, visitors who came inside might steal your decorating ideas. What if they “tore up” your possessions or gossiped about what they saw inside your home? For instance, they might tell everyone you had a “nasty” house. Or they might take note of everyone who was staying with you off lease. These rumors sometimes reached management, especially if someone was looking for retribution for an offense or felt jealous about a leaseholder’s possessions or love life. Or a visitor could come in and simply refuse to leave, claiming a free sofa or space on the floor as his or her bed. And visitors could engage in activities criminal or rowdy enough to get noticed by neighbors or the police—such attention could and did lead to eviction.35 Warren and other transitioning Horner residents criticized their new neighbors. But as much as the newcomers’ excessive pet love provided one more point of criticism, it also inspired some transitioning Horner residents to fantasize about taming the expansive and invasive sociability of their friends and family. A play of sociability that would make residents vulnerable beyond their “nice backyards” and their nuclear households without exposing them to relentless obligations speaks to what anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli characterizes as late liberal society’s investment in intimacy.36 She argues that in societies like the United States, intimacy fuels the fantasy that love strips away the social skin, that when love strikes subjects confident in their autonomy, like a Annika, they invest intimacy with the capacity to help them bridge entrenched social divides. Here, autonomous subjects experience intimacy as a pleasurable feeling of vulnerability that opens them onto a range of interdependencies. These subjects invest intimacy with the capacity to make race, class, gender, age, or any other familiar social divides no longer matter. But as Mr. Green’s and Warren’s debacles suggest, for those subjects who cannot command such autonomy, for those who seem mired in interdependences that confine them, events of intimacy redraw these divides. Intimacy and its promises cut both ways, enriching some, endangering others. To hear an Annika, Warren, or Reverend Tyson tell it, in the first years of Westhaven’s mixed-income phases, residents’ capacities to become citizens of a more inclusive, more caring city depended on how open they were to the play of sociability, to how vulnerable that play made them to those in their midst. The disorienting sights, sounds, and people encountered in public compelled some to imagine and experiment with maneuvers that would draw them into intimacy. Others began to imagine and experiment with maneuvers that would

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fend off surrounding bodies. In the context of welfare retrenchment, the invulnerable, silent, and autonomous person could not become a viable neighbor or citizen because her strangeness was totalizing. It would not open to the persons, sentiments, and obligations that surrounded her. Yet an equally unviable neighbor and citizen was the person who was too vulnerable to that which surrounded her, one who expected that the demands of neighborliness would not only obligate her broadly but also make strangeness entirely moot.

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Strangers and Intimates Westhaven’s public spaces threw unlikely neighbors together in ways that made clear just how much the sociability of those who had spent lifetimes “on front” diverged from that of those who had passed them in “nice backyards.” As many residents struggled to make sense of the disorienting experiences of moving through emerging parks, sidewalks, yards, and even lobbies and bedrooms, some began to experiment with becoming more and less vulnerable to those around them. Their experiments fired the imaginations of urban publics animated by commitments to neighborliness and mutual care. Inasmuch as these imaginations prodded newcomers and transitioning Horner residents to reconsider the obligations of belonging to a place like Westhaven, they constituted a sympathetic education in the civics of post-welfare collective life. What they taught was that virtuous citizens of Westhaven, of the CHA’s “new communities,” or of Tyson’s “City of Hope” and “City of Faith” would have to learn to care beyond the confines of nuclear households without becoming mired in indiscriminate obligations. Imparted through sociability, these lessons had transformative potentials. They allowed newcomers and transitioning Horner residents to “play” at an association driven by the pleasure of an expansive togetherness that was nevertheless rooted in the textures of place and local affections. But this play, its pleasures, and its risks were not distributed evenly. Mounting frustrations around emerging public spaces had serious albeit uneven repercussions. Some stood to lose a good night’s sleep. Others stood to lose their lease and, with it, their subsidized housing. During my last years in Chicago, the Tower became an increasingly tense place. Newcomers organized around excessive socializing and unsavory characters coming and going from the apartments of “CHA people.” “CHA people” petitioned their leaders to defuse those tensions. Yet the demands of the newcomers held more sway. They had recourse to other ways of managing everyday life, ways that

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were not confined to the boundaries of Westhaven. Through their organizing, they managed to extract funds from the CHA to pay for additional security personnel in the building, an unusual concession given that the Tower was essentially a private building under private management. They also put pressure on local police and political representatives to address their concerns. Tensions mounted further as police and private security ratcheted up antiloitering campaigns. Market-rate renters and home owners demanded that lease restrictions barring “antisocial” behavior, such as making too much noise, be enforced. Tensions exploded in 2009 when the Tower’s condo board, on which former Horner residents could not sit, carted off the couch and armchairs from the lobby and locked them up. Furniture intended as decoration had, they claimed, become an invitation for “CHA people” to loiter. Former Horner residents seemed more pessimistic than ever about their long-term tenure in the building. Such tensions provided more fodder for arguments advanced about Chicago’s public housing reforms. As sociologist Mary Pattillo aptly put it in 2008 to an audience gathered at the Chicago History Museum to discuss Chicago’s public housing reforms, a “tyranny of the middle class” had come to govern life in the CHA’s new communities.37 Yet there is something more to be said, especially if we want to understand not just how familiar, class-based inequalities are being reproduced in space but also how they might be taking on less familiar forms. More than a few of my interlocutors experienced the disorientations of being in Westhaven’s emerging public spaces as demands to address the social fallout of postwar housing projects. These housing projects had shut some citizens up in wasting urban cores where the density of obligations could be overwhelming, and they had “exiled” others to suburbs where it could prove impossible to fashion extensive obligations. Some citizens’ lives had been rendered overdetermined by people and obligations that could descend at any time; other citizens had been alienated from place-based intimacies. Neither mode of reckoning vulnerability and obligation would do within a welfare-reform project that sought to rescale social protection and root it in a civic realm. Interpersonal bonds and obligations among strangers and intimates needed to be reworked, and that reworking would hinge on neighbors whose palpable presence needled them on streets and sidewalks and leached through windows and walls. In a redevelopment context financially sensitive to the comforts of market-rate renters and home owners, better-off residents could experiment with feeling and acting differently around neighbors,

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and these experiments could fuel new orientations to strangers and intimates. Yet the minute such experiments became annoying, that is, the minute that sympathetic encounters became collisions that extended the presence of others in ways that threatened to put a dent in their property values, their sleep, their cars, and their bodies, they could and did object. And they retreated to a world of neat backyards, nuclear households, and the associations that protected the boundaries of both. Transitioning Horner residents had no such luxury. Hopes for expansive social entities—a cosmopolitan neighborhood, inclusive urban publics, a “City of Faith”—were a distraction from the work of maintaining relations with old friends and family. They leaned on these relations to maintain themselves and their loved ones. Stricter enforcement of leases and dwindling resource streams caused them to take stock of those in their most intimate social relations and amputate any troublesome appendages. They had to juggle the destructive potentials of sociability with strangers and intimates. That task could become akin to juggling knives.

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5

The City, the Grassroots, the Poverty Pimps One morning in early 2006, a refrigerator washed up on my doorstep. On the West Side, the unfurnished private rentals within reach of lower-income people are just that—absolutely unfurnished. Public housing units come with a stove and refrigerator. Yet tenants in private, unsubsidized rentals must move in with their own appliances. I had not accounted for such an expense, so when I first moved in, a friend taught me how to make do with a mesh bag suspended outside from the windowsill. This worked well during the fall, but it was no permanent fix as the weather got colder and milk and eggs began to freeze. When word of my problem got around, another friend offered to sell me a cheap minifridge. But there on the icy sidewalk, strapped to a dolly, stood a large white refrigerator. The four men beside it insisted that I accept it as a loan, a token of appreciation for helping men in “the community.” For several months I had been keeping minutes for a group who called themselves “Prisons-to-Community.” They met regularly to hammer out proposals for a social services program that would address the housing and health needs of local ex-offenders. Criminal convictions barred such men from Chicago Housing Authority leases, but many nevertheless stayed off lease with friends and family in Westhaven.1 I hesitated to accept the refrigerator. It was much larger than I needed, and I could not imagine how I would ever move it from the apartment. But they insisted. They promised to return when I left to cart it off to someone else “in the community” who was “needy” and “deserving.” This refrigerator belonged to no one. This refrigerator belonged to everyone. It also belonged to a federally sponsored program that gave needy children something to eat during the summer when they no longer had access to free meals at school. I learned this months later at a planning meeting convened by the Near West Side Community Development Corporation. Near West’s staff were updating a Quality 169

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Notice posted on an interior glass door of the Annex’s lobby, 2009. Leasing criteria prohibited renting to people with recent violent criminal offenses, but it was also difficult for Westhaven residents to shelter relatives who returned from prison.

of Life Plan for Greater Westhaven. They had received a grant from the Local Initiatives Support Council (LISC) to fund this process. The largest community-development support organization in the country, LISC provides financial and technical assistance to communitydevelopment organizations. But to meet the conditions of their grant, Near West’s staff needed to show that their planning process elicited broad “participation” from newcomers and long-term residents. That evening Near West gathered representatives of both groups to discuss

potential amenities. When the meeting broke up, transitioning Horner residents made their way to the refreshments table to load up on food and to “fix a plate” to take home. In a place where poverty could be a gnawing fact of life, one neighbor’s refreshments were another’s dinner. A middle-aged transitioning Horner resident active in development politics pulled me aside. She asked for the loaner’s serial number. “It’s a refrigerator missing from the Food Site,” Ollie explained in hushed tones. “People say ‘the researcher’s got it.’” My stomach dropped. A missing refrigerator could mean that the site that hosted the children’s meal program would lose its bid to continue operating that coming summer. Children would have to travel further for meals. Regular volunteers would lose their modest stipends and the chance to redistribute uneaten meals. The refrigerator occupied a critical node in a local redistribution network. A rumor that accused me of interrupting its work would reflect poorly on me. Exasperated with my panic, Ollie whispered that my loaner was not “stolen.” In a place where refrigerators “walked off,” this one had been safeguarded for those who needed it, as opposed to those who would sell it, or worse, scrap it. Ollie then walked through other accusations that might stick to the exchange. I was not “greedy” for accepting the refrigerator; I had not helped myself to too much of a thing that belonged to everyone. Nor were the men who loaned it to me “corrupted”—a charge that fell on those whose activities destroyed collective resources. Ollie saved the most serious charge that could be levied against an outsider for last. I was not a “poverty pimp” because I was not “taking something away and it never comes back.” I was not, added her eavesdropping friend, an outsider “living off poor people as raw material.” Of course, I should have added, that depends on how you see “research.” THE CITY, THE GRASSROOTS, THE POVERTY PIMPS

Proponents of HOPE VI expected that by fostering everyday sociability among a diverse set of neighbors, the program would promote, as one policy pamphlet from 2000 put it, “the evolution of real communities, which act to preserve their physical and social environment over the long term.”2 These ideas drew on a domestic policy climate captivated by the idea that citizens’ identity, their sense of collective obligation, and their capacity to participate in political mobilization would all emerge through civic engagement—that is, through activities that supported their city and its inhabitants. Neighbors so engaged would build deep horizontal networks, dense secondary associations, and commitments to reciprocity, voluntary participation, and interpersonal trust.3 However, prior to HOPE VI reforms, public housing residents did not lack the means to sustain

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their physical and social environments. As the refrigerator debacle suggests, they formed networks that stretched available resources and met local needs. Yet under the strain of shifting resource streams, the same networks could grow suspicious and corrosive. Transitioning Horner residents involved in local redevelopment politics gravitated toward externally funded but locally administered community-development and social services programs. When addressing any outsider associated with such programs, they typically adopted their language. They spoke of their “work with the community,” of their desires to “help” or “engage” the neighborhood. Yet in less formal settings, aspirants of “community work” relied on a different register to parse local obligations. You helped someone not because they were your “neighbor” but because they were “family” or “like family.” Such appeals suggested bonds of blood, but these blood and blood-like bonds were often born of place. A lifetime of sharing the same spaces and buildings and of stretching paltry resources within a resource-poor place had made Horner residents as alike as members of any family. Unlike the neighborly relations imagined by proponents of HOPE VI, obligations construed as family or like family could not be evaded. One might shrug off a pleasantry withheld on the sidewalk. Yet one could not shrug off obligations to family by going inside, averting one’s gaze, shutting the door, or closing a window. This chapter tracks political mobilization among transitioning Horner residents at a moment when reforms summoned them to become “grassroots” or “community” entities capable of voicing their own demands and meeting their own needs. Would-be tenant leaders faced a serious dilemma as long-established resource streams associated with federal welfare institutions like public housing dried up and unfamiliar ones required courting: without adequate resources to redistribute, these would-be leaders could not mobilize the resident base that might become recognizable as a “grassroots” or “community” force. That failure meant they could not attract support from nonprofit and philanthropic sources. In this unfamiliar resource context, the distribution of everything from holiday turkeys to school supplies ignited explosive suspicions and accusations. And they could tear apart people who had long considered themselves family.

“The Cause Industry” Chicago’s Near West Side fell under difficult economic times during the latter half the twentieth century as commercial enterprises and light industry left the area. Yet several burgeoning endeavors caught

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the attention of transitioning Horner residents throughout my fieldwork, stoking optimism that the area’s economic fortunes might be changing. In the manufacturing corridor just to the north, some found light assembly work or fell into “picking and packing,” that is, sorting and packaging items like tea and lotion. To the south, a growing hospital district held out the promise of medical assistant, orderly, and janitorial jobs, provided one had the right training and connections. Young men eyed the construction crews that seemed to be building and rehabbing at all hours. For others, though, the most obvious opportunities lay within a sector that had been thriving for at least a decade: a loose network of not-for-profit and philanthropic endeavors often summed up as “the cause industry.” The CHA had once provided direct social services to its tenants. Transitioning Horner residents who aspired to “community work” recalled them with fondness. “It used to be a program,” they would begin, before describing summer camps, literacy classes, training programs, midnight basketball leagues, and tenant security details. Each of these programs provided points of collective identification, and transitioning Horner residents wore them with pride. I would regularly see, for example, T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Tenant Patrol” and lapel pins featuring a young woman’s face and the words “Mama Said,” the name of a once popular but by then defunct mothering program. All these programs brought critical services to Horner residents. They also pulled some residents into formal leadership positions, and with those positions came the potential for stipends, longer-term jobs, and local influence. As the Plan for Transformation got underway in 2000, the CHA slashed funds for resident services and looked toward private or nonprofit partners and stakeholders to fill the void. This move was in keeping with the general tenor of public housing reform around the country. In the 1930s and 1940s, public housing authorities were incorporated as municipal corporations to develop and administer local housing projects. In subsequent decades, many began providing direct services to residents. Yet in the 1970s, HUD turned toward block-grant models to fund housing and related services. HUD funneled funds to states, urban counties, and larger municipalities, which then reallocated them according to local housing and economic development priorities. In essence, housing authorities had competition. At the time of my research, HUD was pushing authorities to scale back on funding direct services by pulling grassroots organizations into this work. An organization qualified as grassroots if it was headquartered in the area in which it provided

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programs or services and if it worked with a modest budget and small staff. Organizations that did not meet these criteria could still partner with local grassroots organizations to develop and implement programs to promote the self-sufficiency and community stability.4 Grassroots initiatives on the Near West Side tended to pursue two streams of funding. Community-based groups could vie for contracts from state or municipal agencies that administered federal funds for housing and supportive social services. Or they could compete for grants from private foundations whose funding priorities included disseminating whatever experimental or technocratic approaches to development and poverty alleviation the foundation happened to be supporting at that time. The history of the Near West Side Community Development Corporation provides a prime example of a communitybased agency modifying its operations over time to keep up with the changing protocols of the cause industry. Founded in the late 1980s, Near West had by the mid-1990s become a major player in local development politics. Before the Home Visitors Program (Near West’s social services arm) began receiving larger contracts from the CHA and the city of Chicago’s Department of Human Services, its staff provided basic direct services to transitioning Horner residents. With these contracts, the program changed gears to focus its energy on referring clients to external programs and agencies that served all of Chicago’s poor. Such contracts were just one funding stream for Near West. It also received support from LISC/Chicago’s New Communities Program. LISC/Chicago in turn received funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Based in Chicago, that heavyweight international foundation began in 1999 to devote substantial resources to making the Plan for Transformation succeed.5 In 2003, it began a ten-year, $50 million commitment to LISC’s New Communities Program. This program aimed to develop low-income neighborhoods according to the priorities of their residents. About half the agencies receiving funds through this program, including Near West, worked in areas affected by Chicago’s public housing reform.6 With MacArthur’s support, LISC aimed to demonstrate the value of community-based planning processes for a city. MacArthur and LISC had company on the Near West Side. In these same years, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, based in Baltimore, selected Near West to host an experimental financial literacy program that it was busy unrolling throughout the country. That program drew on lifecoaching techniques to coach low-income people into becoming better managers of their limited funds.7 In urban theory and politics, invocations of “the grassroots” once

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suggested social movements that welled up in the face of dominant interests and ineffective state institutions, movements that granted urban citizens greater autonomy and self-determination.8 Yet on Chicago’s West Side, the concept had become enmeshed in translocal processes that devolved social provisioning from federal to state and municipal actors and privatized services for poor people. Those working in the outposts of the cause industry in Westhaven constantly scrambled to reframe, rethink, and expand their work to keep up with the stipulations of grants, contracts, and new requests for proposals from granting agencies. The result was a patchwork of services and activities that could shift like the weather, according to the changing trends, assessment procedures, funding priorities, and theories being touted by external agencies or foundations at any given moment. From the outside, the term “industry” might seem an inappropriate one to describe this scenario, lending it an air of coherence that it lacked. And from the outside, it might be unclear exactly what the cause industry produced on the Near West Side, besides, of course, disjointed services and programs for those leaving public housing and never-ending paperwork and training sessions for local organizations seeking to attract and retain funds. The view from the ground, however, was an entirely different matter. What stood out to many transitioning Horner residents was the veritable wash of resources that the cause industry funneled through its grantees. The resources flowed to these community-based and grassroots organizations on the condition that local residents participate in their programs. But beyond the CHA’s stipulation that they sit for an initial needs assessment with staff of its contracted social services agency, transitioning Horner residents were not required to attend any programs mounted by local community-based or grassroots organizations. So their staff experimented with incentives to get residents in the door and to keep them active in the very programs designed to make them self-sufficient. Gift cards, door prizes, plates of food, and in the case of one especially well-appointed program, bicycles and furniture sets pulsed through the recreational events, bingo nights, workshops, banquets, and planning sessions coordinated by local grassroots and community-based organizations. Transitioning Horner residents could get access to all these goods and festivities once they filled out surveys and signed papers that served as evidence of their participation. Many had only a vague understanding of how these resources had come to the area and what role they played in the testing and implementation of novel theories concerning poverty and its alleviation. What they did grasp, though,

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was that the resources on offer could meet pressing needs. For them, the cause industry was a concrete entity that produced critical resources worthy of their utmost attention. Transitioning Horner residents who aspired toward community work watched with frustration. Most did not have a problem with the fact that welfare retrenchment and social service privatization had brought new resource streams to Westhaven. What bothered them was the fact that these resources, specifically their distribution, were largely beyond local control. A middle-aged man involved in the exfelons group, Prisons-to-Community, summed up this frustration in early 2006. Then in his late forties, he had grown up at Horner and eventually served a term in a downstate penitentiary. He spent it reading up on decolonization struggles in East Africa, and for that reason he insisted that I assign him the pseudonym Jomo, to honor Kenya’s first prime minister, Jomo Kenyatta. Jomo did not live with his wife and children in Westhaven because he knew his presence would put them at risk for a lease violation. He visited them often, even though he worried that their neighbors would mistake him for an off-lease presence or gossip about his inability to provide for his children. Jomo hoped Prisons-to-Community would bring jobs and housing so that ex-felons might become better husbands and fathers. One evening I listened as Jomo related his thoughts to another Prisons-to-Community member. The two complained about recent fighting among young people in Westhaven. Jomo’s friend blamed poor mothering, but Jomo vehemently disagreed. The real problem, he insisted, lay with misdirected funds and a lack of resources for “authentic and indigenous” service programs. By this, he meant programs developed and managed by local people, for local people. “When you see a village that’s in disorder, that’s fighting itself,” Jomo reasoned, “it’s because, ain’t no chickens coming in.” He took out the notebook he always carried around to jot down ideas, opened to a blank page, drew a giant chicken, and wrote in block letters underneath, “meat.” He then diagrammed two overlapping resource streams into Westhaven. One was a welfare program that had once— but no longer—funneled modest cash benefits to men (General Assistance); the other, a program that, though restricted, brought in some benefits to women (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families): All the chickens that came into this neighborhood the government sent through public aid. But public aid is only for women and children now. The money for men goes to prisons. But like public aid, it’s a two-way sword. The grand-

mom, her daughter and now her granddaughter, the dad, his son and soon, his son—it’s generations. Womenfolk, a lot of them want to break out of it because public aid doesn’t last very long now. The men, we have to break out of it too. But we should get money for programs, not those . . . mak[ing] money [on us].

Obligations and Scandals Many transitioning Horner residents explained to me that as Horner became increasingly impoverished and unstable in the 1970s and 1980s, the somewhat better off African American neighbors living just to the south and west turned their backs on the complex. So Horner residents turned their social energies inward. Blood ties— even if distant—were common: aunties, uncles, cousins, sisters, brothers, children, and parents remained nearby. The density of blood ties

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As Jomo worked over his diagram, he suggested that the “chickens” once funneled to local women and men now went to “nonprofits” and “prisons” that were more likely to use local women and men as raw material to amass resources for themselves. In other words, funds for prisons and nonprofits had supplanted those for public aid. For Jomo, nonprofits and prisons were two sides of the same coin, and it was a coin that transitioning Horner residents did not control. Jomo articulated a challenge that many transitioning Horner residents faced. Many had relied on federal welfare programs, such as cash benefits that had helped support parents of dependent children and indigent single adults. They knew these benefits were problematic. They were paltry, and their distribution reproduced gendered forms of poverty.9 Nevertheless, they had been fairly consistent, and households figured out how to pool and redistribute them in ways that helped meet their needs.10 As even modest public aid benefits dwindled, transitioning Horner residents became entangled in resources and distribution networks governed by less familiar institutions—nonprofits, foundations, and prisons—that seemed beyond their control. In an already resource-poor environment, Jomo warned, a shift in federal provisioning was breeding acrimony and rancor. For Jomo, the cause/prison industry and its unfamiliar way of moving about “chickens” had pitted “the villagers” against each other in ways that were destroying long-standing networks and obligations. To see this, I need to unpack the obligations toward family that were developed at Horner and complicated in Westhaven.

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was compounded by the fact that residents often had children with people from Horner. But to hear many tell it, regular encounters in space created bonds that were just as thick as blood. Two men affiliated with Prisons-to-Community captured this process in the fall of 2006. In a place where, as Matthew put it, buildings “stacked” “a bunch of people on top of each other,” so that, as Gerald put it, “you could go right next door to make a baby,” blood ties extended beyond nuclear households. But blood was just one vector of relatedness and obligation. “I met my wife,” Matthew recalled of a woman he had met over two decades earlier when they were both fifteen, “because my family stayed over near the [recreation center]. I could watch all the kids go by and go out to talk to them. That’s how I made all my friends. The first time I saw this girl, I told everyone, ‘I’m going to marry her.’ ” Just as Matthew had eventually married that girl, he also remained “family” with the friends he made through the center. At Horner shared movements and spaces were just as important as shared blood. This convergence of space, kinship, and obligation was so important, in fact, that when a former Horner resident met someone unfamiliar but also associated with Horner, the two would take a minute to place each other in a particular kinship network. That placement almost always involved an additional placement in space, across specific apartments, hallways, buildings, schools, recreational centers, and streets. More often than not, the two would find some common ground. The kinship bonds built within Horner still resonated in Westhaven. At the time of my fieldwork, calling someone “family” or “like family” was a means of expressing likeness, relatedness, and affection. It was also a means of asserting obligations. These endearments are not evidence of fictive kinship: material resources flowed to people who were called family or like family.11 The guiding principle undergirding these flows was to redistribute, as widely as possible, any and all resources to which one had access. For the CHA leaseholders I got to know in Westhaven, most such resources came through the vestiges of federal and state antipoverty programs. They shared food stamps, disability assistance, temporary cash benefits, and subsidized heat and shelter with their kin and friends, and they expected their kin and friends to contribute in turn to their households. For instance, women who ran hair-styling establishments, informal restaurants, or day-care services out of their sisters’ or mothers’ units set aside a share of profits for the leaseholders. Those who could not bring material resources to the table made other contributions. An underemployed cousin or brother staying off lease might

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prepare meals, watch children or sick and elderly persons, or take phone messages. Transitioning Horner residents did not have much. But they were rich in what anthropologist Carol Stack, in her study of poor people’s “survival strategies,” called “the fund of kin and friends obligated to them.”12 You contributed to this “fund” with the expectation that you would someday be drawing from it. But just as transitioning Horner residents expected primary recipients of resources to redistribute them, so too did they expect resident leaders to parlay their leadership positions into goods and services for their constituents. In fact, the main thing that recommended a person to leadership was a capacity to amass and redistribute resources. Around any local election a common joke brought these expectations to the fore. “Who we voting for?,” someone would ask friends and family. “Who got turkeys?,” friends and family would playfully reply. In a context of chronic resource scarcity, impoverished citizens and whoever aspired to represent them did not just need access to the vestiges of state-mediated largesse. They also had a moral obligation to redistribute that largesse in ways that renewed spatially circumscribed bonds and obligations, and with them, a precarious collective security. The expectations that surrounded the fund of obligated kin and friends still resonated in Westhaven, but they became complicated in a new resource context. As Jomo’s comments suggest, households could no longer expect public aid to deliver paltry, albeit steady, resources. The same was true for tenant leaders. With every resident who left Horner, either with a Section 8 voucher or for a unit in Westhaven’s mixed-income phases, resident leaders got fewer funds to cover discretionary spending on programs and resources for their constituents. At the time of my fieldwork, the CHA still passed on funds that supported events like an annual late-summer “Fun Day,” in which children played games and collected school supplies. Every year, though, these funds were less and less. But despite dwindling resources, friends and kin still expected leaseholders and resident leaders to redistribute everything to which they had access. At stake, then, as reliable resource streams began to dry up, was transitioning Horner residents’ certainty that they would be able to support and sustain one another. As my fieldwork progressed, such uncertainty ignited growing gossip, suspicions, and accusations that rattled intimate social and political networks. For instance, as indignant as Jomo was about the cause/prison industry, he also worried about gossip about his incapacity, as a man, to support his wife and children. And as my refrigerator debacle suggests, those residents who gravitated toward

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community work had a keen sense of the serious accusations that might stick to exchanges that advanced their efforts. Such ire was not in and of itself surprising. Anthropologists have long known that tensions, ambiguities, ambivalences, and rancor unfold at the center of intimate social worlds, alongside feelings and commitments more readily associated with intimacy (such as trust, reciprocity, and cooperation).13 It was not for nothing that anthropologist Max Gluckman quipped long ago that any town planners “anxious to turn housing [projects]” “into communities” had a “duty” to seed gossip and scandal within them.14 Institutions like kinship, or its spatial variant, neighborhood, are, as anthropologist Peter Geschiere has pointed out, situated at the “precarious interface of an intimate inner circle and an uncertain outside.” For that reason, both are characterized by tensions, by a latent negativity.15 I sensed throughout my fieldwork that accusations of “greed” were nothing new. They rolled off the tongues of long-term residents whenever any criticisms about redistribution arose. They could be bitter and rancorous, but they almost always blew over. What was noteworthy was the intense bitterness and defensiveness that surrounded accusations of “poverty pimping” and “corruption.” The “poverty pimp,” the person who “liv[ed] off poor people as raw material,” typified external interests and interventions, such as those advanced by social workers, legal advocates, and researchers. Yet as tensions about dwindling resources mounted, transitioning Horner residents invoked this figure by name or by the figure’s characteristic actions to condemn the distributional practices of people long considered family. In other words, as much as the “poverty pimp” was an external figure, I noted that transitioning Horner residents began deploying the term to criticize kin and other intimate relations who had, in their dealings with external people or institutions, compromised themselves. Accusations of corruption captured a similarly selfish, albeit more destructive, dynamic. Those accused of corruption had not simply started in their dealings with external entities to live off fellow poor people. They had also moved to do so in ways that destroyed collective resources—resources they should have recognized as belonging to everyone. Nobody seemed more vulnerable to accusations of corruption or pimping than those who aspired to community work.

Community Work and Its Corrosions Gossip and rumors are sometimes treated as a compromised form of political debate or discourse because they involve speculations, sus-

picions, and jealousies that can seem petty and unreasonable. But as in other contexts marked by political and social marginalization, they were a major mode of doing politics in Westhaven.16 Literacy levels varied, meaning that more than a few of my interlocutors felt ill at ease in venues that presumed facility with formal speech and writing. For them, rumors and gossip carved out important spaces for political expression. People took them seriously because they allowed everyone to put a finger on the pulse of local concerns. Yet they were also powerful forces in their own right. They could reduce adults to tears, even blows. And few paid rumors and gossip more heed than those who aspired to voice, broker, and facilitate the demands of transitioning Horner residents. Becoming Poverty Pimps

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In 2001, the CHA downsized its residential services programs and implemented the Service Connector program to put tenants in touch with services available to any impoverished Chicagoan, namely, with services sponsored through municipal or charitable agencies. The program expanded in 2006, when the Chicago Department of Human Services took over its administration from the CHA and contracted thirteen community-based agencies to provide and track service referrals for residents leaving public housing. One of those contracts went to the Home Visitors Program, the social service arm of the Near West Side Community Development Corporation. Throughout my research I volunteered at this agency under the unexpected title of “résumé specialist.” Staff needed someone comfortable with editing and reformatting hundreds of résumés for their clients. My facility with Microsoft Word meant that I fit the bill. When I first started volunteering in 2003, the agency provided direct services to residents leaving Horner, including professional counseling sessions with trained social workers and assistance with job placement. Over the years, its funders’ priorities steered staff away from such activities. As one visiting trainer from the city put it to the staff in 2006, people leaving Horner were “social-worked out.” She elaborated that poor people had learned to talk so much about their problems that the problems had begun to “own them.” The problems got in the way of setting and pursuing concrete goals, a practice that she claimed would lead public housing residents out of poverty. With the Service Connector contract, staff turned their attention toward the work of referral and the work of documenting that referral. This was a challenge, because the Home Visitors’ small

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staff usually numbered around six to eight people. Without more help, they would not be able to meet their contract targets. Supervisors responded by having almost every staff member take on referral duties, regardless of whether or not they had experience with such work. They also doubled the staff and shared the contract with another local services agency. The Service Connector contract tasked each case manager with establishing and maintaining a caseload of fifty-five clients and following up with them at least once a month for three months. Case managers would work with clients to set discrete goals, such as securing employment, and to then develop action plans to meet these goals. In 2006, 585 Westhaven households qualified for the Service Connector program. To meet aggressive outreach and accounting demands, Home Visitors sent its staff knocking on doors during most waking hours, and some case managers took on substantial evening and weekend hours. Transitioning Horner residents were not required to participate, but Home Visitors needed to document their participation in order to secure future contracts and funding. A two-prong strategy emerged. First, the agencies sharing the contract hired several new case managers who hailed from Horner. Second, supervisors instructed everyone to pay enormous heed to the paperwork that would capture every potential mark of participation. For the most part, the new hires who hailed from Horner were people active in local social or political scenes, people with especially broad personal networks. Supervisors expected that such figures could draw eligible households into the program better than case managers who lacked ties to their clients. This expectation also touched on class-related tensions. African American women made up most of Home Visitors’ staff and clientele. Nevertheless, outside case managers, who tended to be better off than their clients, sometimes struggled to appreciate their clients’ economic constraints and household configurations. They felt awkward knocking on their doors to “sell” “another program.” Clients sensed these hesitations, and some felt judged and patronized. Case managers who had lived at Horner would presumably avoid, or at least better navigate, these tensions. The Service Connector program’s intense documentation and accounting demands complicated the heavy workload of all case managers. Its metrics were still evolving in 2006 and 2007, and the corresponding paperwork was constantly changing. This left case managers and their supervisors scrambling to resolve a number of problems. What exactly constituted an appropriate goal for a client? What encounters would count as the face-to-face contacts that the

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contract required case managers to have with their clients? How should they recognize and gather evidence of residents’ participation? These questions especially preoccupied case managers who had lived at Horner. They had a much broader sense of what a client might consider an appropriate personal goal. And because they often knew clients well and encountered them in social settings, they worried that their face-to-face encounters would strike program assessors as too informal to elicit meaningful goals and sound commitments to them. For a client’s goal to count, it would need to be articulated within established program rubrics. Paperwork did record basic needs, but central administrators did not accept the expression of a basic need as a personal goal. Here, the argument was that a focus on such needs would distract a client from articulating and undertaking an action plan that would lead to self-sufficiency. Connecting residents to places where food was given out, it stood to reason, might be important. Yet it did little to motivate a client to figure out how to personally locate or put food on the table. As rubrics and metrics changed, central administrators sent paperwork back with the request that case managers work with clients to reformulate goals and action plans. These requests generated frustration among case managers, but especially among those who hailed from Horner. Demands for revisions made for more work in an already frenetically paced environment. More than that, local case managers worried that “coaching” clients in program rubrics distracted them from the necessary task at hand: helping clients meet their basic needs. It was in this fraught context that one middle-aged case manager, Tracy, confronted accusations of “poverty pimping” in the fall of 2006. Raised at Horner, Tracy had left decades before. She returned often to volunteer with a local youth program. Tracy’s standing as a respected volunteer had attracted contract supervisors, who hoped that she would have an easier time convincing households to enroll. I often tagged along with Tracy on rounds to meet clients at home or on the street. After such encounters, which did feel more like social calls, case managers with local ties typically jotted down quick notes to be fleshed out in further detail once they got back to the office. One such afternoon, Tracy and I stopped at a local corner store for a soda before heading back to the office to do another couple hours of paperwork. As we paused on the corner, we began to debate a goal offered by the last client: “I need to get some food.” Tracy considered securing food, or for that matter, carfare or clothing (also often given as goals), to be legitimate aims that should not be discounted.

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Having recently attended a training session with the staff, I pointed out that program administrators had been adamant: a goal was a “personal aspiration” that would push clients “beyond basic needs” toward something that might “really transform” their lives. “Getting food for your family. Now you tell me why that isn’t a good goal?” Tracy demanded. Before I could answer, she began brainstorming aloud about how to transform the client’s response into a goal that would make sense within program rubrics. “Her ‘weekly action’ plan could be something like ‘I’m going to make sure that my family has access to nutritious food this week.’ ” “They said feeding your family, that’s something you’re just supposed to do anyway,” I replied, repeating a conversation from the training session. At this point, Michael, Tracy’s close friend, approached in his car. Tracy had recently helped a colleague who had trouble meeting her own enrollment targets to open Michael’s case. In her words, Tracy had “given” Michael as a client to this colleague. Tracy greeted Michael with a wry rendition of the formal script that would have been used during Michael’s intake session. She slowly enunciated every syllable in a way that exaggerated the class differences between many of the clients and case managers. “When you think about it, Michael, what are your hopes and dreams for your family?” Such script questions were designed to elicit goals, which would then generate the action plans, whose existence would then apparently direct a client toward meeting that goal. “We will become the richest folks in public housing,” Michael gamely replied. Tracy turned serious, gestured to a clipboard that bulged with paperwork and complained, “This used to be an agency that cared about people.” Turning to me, “No offense, Catherine,” and then back to Michael, “all the people here after numbers and data are not even from here. We used to help people. Now we take their goals and signatures.” Referencing his recent session with Tracy’s colleague, Michael observed, “It’s one thing if people care and want to help those that come through the door. But it’s another when you come through the door and you feel like you’re a piece of meat.” Repeating the other questions scripted in the intake, he continued, “ ‘What’s your income?’ ‘What’s your social security number?’ Why do I have to give that out when there’s so much identify theft here? What do you do with that?” Michael voiced a suspicion common among transitioning Horner residents who saw the Service Connector as just one in a long line of

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programs that breached their privacy to extract information, which might be used to evict them. “It goes into the database,” Tracy shot back, defensively. “It’s confidential.” “But who does that database belong to?” Michael pressed. “That’s someone else’s numbers.” He began to sing, teasingly, slightly doctored but familiar lyrics of rap artist Jay Z: “We doing poverty pimping, we spending the g’s . . .” Tracy was not amused. She blanched and spat back, “You better believe if somebody comes to the door asking me for food, I make sure she gets it.” Like other local case managers, Tracy had heard transitioning Horner residents bandying about the term “poverty pimp” while discussing the Service Connector program. Several even used it themselves while muttering about specific colleagues who seemed to show no real interest or commitment to helping transitioning Horner residents, colleagues who treated clients “like just another number.” Yet in the mouths of old friends and family, a joke about poverty pimping darkened into an accusation that made explicit and explosive something that many suspected but had difficulty voicing: that the contract mobilized local case managers’ intimate standing among Horner’s transitioning residents to elicit a participation that would yield nothing of real value to those residents. The uncertainties that surrounded the Service Connector program had serious outcomes for its clients beyond worries that they were wasting time on a program that would not bring them critical resources. These uncertainties cast a suspicious light on case managers who sought to square familiar obligations to people who were “family” or “like family” with the hazy metrics and rubrics of community-based organizations. As much as their clients cast doubt upon them and their work, local case managers also internalized this doubt. Case managers like Tracy complained that summer and fall about the growing jokes, murmurs, and accusations they faced. She and others expended enormous amounts of energy to ward them off. Tracy, for instance, spent the entire weekend following our encounter with the hungry client, shuttling her around to emergency food pantries. She did not get paid for this work, nor did it do anything to help her achieve her monthly numbers. Such extra efforts left local case managers exasperated, exhausted, and warily bracing for the next situation in which they would be called to task by friends and family. In an unfamiliar resource environment, they worried that

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their work, their intimacies, and their obligations had become fodder for the extractive ways of the poverty pimp.

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Deflecting the Greedy

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In the 1970s, the CHA established a representational body for residents so that they could become involved in decisions that affected them. Residents at each development would elect members of their Local Advisory Council, and the president of each LAC would serve on the Central Advisory Council, a body that brought together leaders from all developments. This move unfolded within federal policies of the late 1960s and early 1970s that sought to democratize antipoverty programs by granting poor people a central role in their development and management. Scholars have argued that the democratic potentials of such moves dissipated as local leaders became brokers of resources rather than forces for reform. In short, moves to facilitate the “maximum feasible participation” of poor people instead seeded a bastardized kind of democratic politics—patronage—and such patronage has carried over into contemporary local development politics.17 In a similar vein, scholars of Chicago’s public housing argue that the LACs blunted the radical energies brewing among tenants at the height of the civil rights movement. “The basis of power for any local leader,” sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh notes of this time, “had moved from the capacity to mobilize residents in direct engagement with the state . . . to the capacity to fulfill the general needs of tenants in one’s building.”18 These arguments raise crucial questions about the limits of distributive politics, especially their inability to generate structural changes. Indeed, a politics that would hang critical services and resources on whether or not one shared an address, an elevator, or a hallway with a leader defies our understandings of democratic politics. Yet it is important to see that such redistribution practices nevertheless propped up a fragile moral order, one that condensed collective commitments to mutual support by concentrating the exchange of goods, favors, and services within a building or across several floors. Throughout my research, Westhaven’s developers and CHA officials argued with increasing effectiveness that retaining a separate representational body for those who held CHA leases defeated a central purpose of the reforms: to achieve a mixed-income development that would integrate former public housing residents into mainstream urban life. In Westhaven, the CHA continued to allocate funds to the Horner LAC. These funds, again, were tied to the number of original

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Horner residents who lived in Phase I or who stayed in the remaining Horner buildings while they awaited the construction of their new homes. As new homes came on line and Horner residents moved into them, LAC leaders received fewer and fewer funds to cover the costs of important distributions and events. They had trouble finding enough money to supplement the dwindling food and toy donations that came in from the CHA around Christmas and Easter. Annual giveaways of coats and school supplies, as well as youth talent shows and Mother’s Day banquets, became smaller affairs that served fewer and fewer people. In this context of resource uncertainty, established and aspiring tenant leaders did not only struggle to reassert their relevance and extend their authority. They also struggled to reinforce a moral order that had underwritten broad commitments to mutual aid and collective obligation. Discussions of greed were widespread over the years I spent in Westhaven, but they usually remained vague and general. However, these accusations began to thicken and become much more specific in late 2004, as an upstart group of younger residents attempted to wrest control of the LAC away from a group of older women who had sat at its helm for several decades. Horner’s redevelopment in Westhaven has, recall, been governed by a consent decree that is the outcome of a lawsuit that a group of Horner residents brought against both the CHA and HUD in 1991 (Mothers Guild v. HUD and CHA). This decree established the Horner Residents Committee (HRC) in 1995, a group of seven residents tasked with negotiating all aspects of redevelopment with the CHA. Everything from the number and size of rooms in redeveloped apartments to what ages and sexes of residents might be expected to share them to the screening of tenants themselves fell under the purview of this board. Members of the HRC were not elected. Rather, they were appointed by the LAC, and membership drew directly from the LAC. Unlike the LAC’s meetings, those of the HRC were not open to the public. Until 2004, the HRC’s membership had mirrored that of the LAC. It consisted mostly—though not entirely—of women in their fifties, sixties, and seventies who had long been involved in local politics. This arrangement raised some eyebrows among younger residents with political ambitions. They worried that members of the LAC and HRC rubber-stamped directions from their lawyers and consultants. There is no delicate way to write this: some grumbled that these older women had unwittingly become puppets to outsiders who did not always have residents’ best interests at heart. They grumbled that these women had become embroiled in the world of poverty pimping.

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In the summer and fall of 2004, an upstart group of tenants in their thirties and forties began organizing to gain seats in the upcoming LAC election. These tenants had encouragement from the Near West Community Development Corporation. Near West, which had granting and programming stakes in Westhaven’s ongoing development, had much to gain from a shift in resident leadership. To make matters more complicated, Near West’s leadership and Horner’s legal counsel had acrimonious relations at the time, with each claiming that the other had used local leaders and residents as pawns to advance its own interests in the worlds of nonprofit poverty law or nonprofit community economic development. The upstarts’ platform in the fall of 2004 consisted almost entirely of promises to improve the distribution of resources and services for residents. Numerous rumors circulated to the effect that the elderly leaders could not properly manage donations and other resources— that they were “too busy with the lawyers” to pay attention to what their constituents needed and when they needed it. The most scandalous rumors involved the destruction of donations that the elderly women had assembled for their constituents in a back room of the LAC’s office, which was then located in a large first-floor apartment of a remaining Horner mid-rise. Notably, the LAC’s elderly president lived in this building, and that back room was off-limits to almost everyone. It was also prone to flooding. One such rumor went like this:

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“Someone” had seen the back room of the LAC office. “Someone” saw “with their own eyes” “piles” of matted winter coats, warped notebooks, and dirty boxes of pens, pencils, markers, and crayons. Worst of all, “someone” also saw several boxed laptop computers. Those laptops, the ones that Hewlett–Packard donated to the CHA and that the CHA gave to the LACs to pass out to children who did good in school. Yet right there in that back room, the one that “everyone knew” flooded “all the time,” the room that “everyone knew” was not a good place to store “anything at all,” these computers stood sealed in their waterlogged boxes. The boxes were covered in mold. The computers inside must be ruined, too. No kids could ever use them now.

This was just one among several rumors circulating that alleged that the elderly women had failed to safeguard and distribute donated resources. In that fall’s election, approximately sixty of Westhaven’s

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estimated two thousand eligible voters showed up to vote for new LAC leadership. Many of the voters told me that “that thing about the computers” motivated them to come out. Even so, most of the old leadership remained on the LAC, albeit in less powerful positions. It was hardly a thundering victory for the upstarts, but it was a victory just the same. The new president, who took office in early 2005, was a middleaged woman named Crystal Palmer. She worried that she had inherited an organization with a shrinking budget and waning authority both within and beyond the redevelopment. But she remained confident that there would always be money for what she called “turkeys and kids’ things.” In other words, she believed that the CHA would always support the LAC’s provision of feel-good, media-ready distributions, including holiday toys, food baskets, and summer camps. She wanted what she saw as fairly reliable resources to be distributed widely. The previous president had allowed representatives from each part of the development to select households to receive food baskets and other gifts. In recent years the gifts had consistently gone to the same households, who lived in the same buildings as the leaders did. Critiques of this distribution alternately had it that the leaders could not be bothered to locate another worthy household or that they were deliberately funneling important resources to relatives. Now, most tenants did not consider it immoral for kin to be on the receiving end of a turkey or a bag of toys, as long as an effort had been made to distribute the remaining goods as widely as possible. Charges of “greed” emerged when no such effort was apparent. Overhauling the distribution of high-profile resources might, Palmer hoped, shore up the waning internal and external legitimacy of the LAC. To ensure fairness—to widen distribution circuits but also to extend their precarious influence—Palmer and her vice president decided they would draw names from a bag for the December 2005 holiday food baskets. They made a point of holding the drawing in public and handing over its management to an impartial figure—the LAC’s secretary, who had also served the previous president. Once a household was randomly drawn, Palmer explained to the crowd of twenty-five people crammed into the LAC’s new office, the slip that contained its information would remain out of all future drawings until every single household in the development had received something. This radical shift in the way the LAC redistributed its meager largesse upset the elderly members, so in a conciliatory gesture Palmer later asked them to name a household from their section of the

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Thanksgiving baskets containing turkeys, stuffing, canned greens and cranberry sauce, celery, and fruit punch, 2005. The Central Advisory Council helped organize and distribute donated holiday baskets to residents throughout the Chicago Housing Authority. The Local Advisory Councils distributed the baskets at their respective developments.

development to receive a special present from the LAC—that year, a gift card, a DVD player, household cleaning supplies, an iron, or a vacuum cleaner. A week later the elderly women turned in their names. Somehow word got around: “It’s some” who chose friends and kin to receive the special presents. As Palmer and her vice president reviewed the names, they noted that such picks would do little

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to boost the legitimacy of their LAC. To boot, such narrow redistributions would feed suspicions that the LAC consisted of “greedy people, dipping into the greens themselves.” Not to put too fine a point on it, the word “dip” here carried connotations of an illegitimate sexual liaison, and “greens” could refer to cash or to the canned collards that always came in the holiday food baskets. “It doesn’t look good.” “These things come here for all of us.” Palmer and her vice president scrapped the list and asked the secretary to draw new names for the special presents that remained. Through gift redistributions, the new president and vice president insisted that one of the few steady streams of resources that residents could still rely upon should be distributed as widely as possible. In their minds, broad circulation would encourage identification and commitment to “all of us.” Gifts that came for “all of us” and that were given to “all of us” would also ideally make residents indebted to “all of us” by encouraging them to support not only the process but also the representational body that kept something coming for everyone.19 Identification and commitment to this collective whole seemed critical as redevelopment barreled ahead and better-off newcomers gained more say in redevelopment politics. But the elderly women were livid. Their authority had been grounded in their capacity to redistribute resources, and this move effectively stripped them of it. New rumors soon began flying. “There’s some” who rejected the submissions of the elderly leaders so that they could keep special presents for their own families. A holiday banquet thrown by and for the LAC leadership in late 2005 turned out to be the closest anyone came to addressing the diffuse and unspecific charges of greed. Palmer had catered the banquet from a beloved local soul-food restaurant with the explicit aim of smoothing over tensions. The guests ate their main course at tables divided according to internal factions. When it came time to turn their attention to the cobbler, the secretary requested that everyone say what they felt grateful for during the past year. One elderly woman announced that she was grateful for the greatness of God; another, a young woman, that her mother had patience as she shifted her course of study at college, again. Finally Palmer stood up and launched into an impromptu speech. She acknowledged that the past year had been rocky, but thanked God that “we” could all finally sit in the same room and talk with each other without “all those” consultants and lawyers (each faction of the LAC retained both). Turning toward the table where her elderly colleagues sat, Palmer noted, “We’re out here trying to organize the best we can. We do not

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get paid for this work, just a small bit of money to cover gas for meetings.” Most nodded in agreement and she continued, “We do this work, we go to these meetings, we talk with the residents because we want for our community. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that and go in for the game: ‘What will you give me?’ We want everyone having and giving. So that anyone who wants to come develop here, they will see: We still here. We take care of each other.” Palmer’s exhortation kept with the unspecific murmurings around greed. It named no offending parties. It suggested that everyone had the potential to “forget” about the community. Yet as much as the “we” she appealed to might remain a locus of self-destructive greed, it also emerged as a potential locus of collective generosity. She suggested that a commitment to “everyone having and giving” would compel leaders to fold their desires, wills, and jealousies into a collectivity characterized by everyone having and giving. And that collectivity might represent itself as a viable “community” for outsiders to reckon with, be they developers, community-based organizations, or newcomers getting frustrated with loitering and noise. At the dinner public exhortations temporarily dispelled charges of greed, yet internal tensions brewing around the new LAC’s attempt to advance community work did not go away. Appeals to collective reciprocity would only find traction in a place where “having” and “giving” were both possible, where “these things” would continue to “come here for all of us.” Over the next year, even the regular supply of “turkeys and kids’ things” dwindled, and new LAC leaders scrambled to attract new resources. As the younger, newer leaders petitioned local businesses and politicians to fill in the gaps, the public deference once shown to their elderly predecessors vanished. Increasingly, newer LAC members began being singled out by name, and for explicit censure, for their dealings with external entities. “It’s the closest person that will shoot you down,” one of the newer leaders remarked to me one evening late in the fall of 2006, when she was suffering from one of her frequent headaches. She attributed the pain to the gossip circulating around her relationship to external entities, namely, businesses and politicians that had donated resources to the LAC. A small contingent of residents with their eyes on the next election had begun raising questions. It was one thing to work with collective resources provided through long-standing channels like the LAC; it was altogether another to bring unfamiliar ones into the fray. Who knew that greedy leaders might be keeping things for themselves? “They start despising you because you’re trying to make the community better,” she lamented, “Then they start

lying on you. After they lied on you, they walk away, but what they’ve done, they’ve tried to destroy you.” Encountering the “Corrupted”

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The cause industry received attention from those transitioning Horner residents who aspired toward “community work,” but so did another “industry” thriving in the area under conditions of poverty and disinvestment—what many called “the prison industry.” In 2005, 80 percent of the forty-two thousand inmates released by the Illinois Department of Corrections returned to Chicago’s South and West Sides; more specifically, they returned to just seven zip codes, all of them with pronounced African American or Latino populations.20 Westhaven extended into one of these zip codes. In Illinois, as in much of the United States, the carceral boom is neither color- nor place-blind.21 Local ex-offenders faced daunting challenges. Employers and landlords stayed away from applicants with criminal records, and CHA leases barred them from being on a lease if they had recent violent offenses. With little access to jobs, housing, or supportive services, half of those released in Illinois would wind up back in prison or jail within three years.22 Almost everyone in Westhaven knew someone directly entangled in the criminal justice system. More often than not, these entanglements stretched over many years. Prison and jail were revolving doors. As local ex-offenders put it, the ex-offender was the next-offender. In Westhaven, those who sheltered relatives and friends returning from stints in prison and jail worried that ex-offenders would go back to the activities that had landed them there in the first place. In the process, they would compromise a household’s security and lease. Neighboring households worried that criminal activities, especially drug sales, would plunge their blocks into disorder, all the while contaminating young people with ex-offenders’ shadowy worlds. If the cause industry carried new, albeit fraught, resources into Westhaven, the prison industry extracted men and women and returned them as liabilities. In late 2005, Prisons-to-Community convened as a group when several local ex-offenders started meeting to discuss these issues. They aimed to “call out” ex-offenders living secretly in Westhaven and organize them to demand the resources necessary to become visible and productive members of their families. Mostly in their thirties, forties, and fifties, these men had sophisticated critiques of the conditions that had cycled them in and out of the criminal justice system. Entrenched

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poverty, a lack of viable jobs, and gendered social safety nets—these were the culprits, as much as any individual misdeeds. Many had developed their thinking while incarcerated, studying materials provided by the Nation of Islam’s prison ministries. As much as they advanced systemic critiques of mass incarceration, they also focused on the characters of offenders, zeroing in on the compromised dispositions that led individuals to pursue short-term survival at the expense of everyone around them. Such “corrupted” dispositions were thought to be contagious. Children were singled out as especially vulnerable, as were buildings that sheltered the corrupted and in turn corrupted those who moved within them. People talked of specific buildings associated with the drug trade as “corrupted.” Accusations of “corruption” resembled those of “greed” in that transitioning Horner residents levied both against anyone who compromised collective resources. But unlike talk of greed, accusations of corruption almost always singled out particular people for censure, and they almost always referred to the wanton destruction of collective resources for personal gain. While I never heard anyone accuse themselves of being greedy, I did hear people accuse themselves of being corrupted, and that acknowledgment seemed critical to the ex-felons’ organizing efforts. Take Mark, a man in his thirties who, in 2003, returned to Westhaven from a short stint in jail. In 2006, he was staying at his fiancée’s apartment. He joined Prisons-to-Community hoping that its leaders might help him get on her lease, a possibility given that he had never been convicted of a violent offense. Like other men involved in Prisons-to-Community, Mark took pains to “own” his “corruption,” whether to other members of the group or to me, as he did one evening in 2006:

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Us men, we did the majority of the tearing down here. The women, they have children and responsibilities, and they look at us as not being here for they kids. We the reason why kids don’t have any values. I’ll be honest with you: I sold drugs. I was corrupted. I helped tear this place down. . . . But you can’t do negative things all your life.

Mark spent his days visiting local construction sites to inquire after day labor, which he hoped could lead to a full-time position. He also helped relatives with child care and accompanied young men to court, so that they would have someone behind them when facing charges of drug sales or failed child support. Mark put his corruption

in the past. Yet many transitioning Horner residents insisted that corruption was a permanent condition. To hear them tell it, the activities that landed one in prison and, to a lesser extent, in jail changed people. Ex-offenders could not help but continue practicing shortterm thinking that put their survival before everyone else’s needs, the thinking that caused them to use—and destroy—their friends and family along the way. Take an alderman invited to speak at a Prisons-to-Community meeting in the spring of 2006. In Chicago, aldermen represent their wards on the City Council. Walter Burnett Jr. had what his constituents called “a past.” He had once served as a gang leader in a nearby public housing project and he had also once served several years in prison for bank robbery. Prisons-to-Community members hoped Burnett might be able to direct them to jobs available with the city. Burnett explained that though he empathized with the men, their proposition was impossible. He explained that a federal monitor was reviewing all city hires with an eye to rooting out patronage. Whether they agreed or disagreed with the line the monitor drew between patronage and “helping family,” Burnett continued, Prisons-to-Community members would have to go down to City Hall and apply like everyone else. He urged them to disclose their criminal backgrounds on application forms. It was an impressively politic performance. Burnett then abruptly changed direction and spoke about the ways ex-offenders often made it more difficult for themselves and for others like them. He then singled out, by name, several local exoffenders for admonition. They were not present:

As Palmer had in her exhortation at the banquet, Burnett urged those present to keep each other in line and to subordinate their own

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These brothers are corrupted. They play the unemployment and compensation game. They get a gig. They work for a minute. Then, they play like they got hurt. So that the developer and contractor that gave doo [this guy] a job, now he says, “I don’t want those cats working for me, because I pay them not to work.” The city wants businesses and industries to hire exoffenders. They will subsidize to train you while you’re working. But the industries and businesses . . . can always say, “Hey, I hired this guy.” Then Old Boy robbed them blind, fell asleep in the [construction] latrine, or beat up a woman. So when you say “ex-con,” it’s everything negative. When brothers do that kind of stuff, it makes it hard [to advocate for them].

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desires to a localized collective good. Yet he also addressed something far more difficult to voice: that any utterance of “ex-con” unleashed “everything negative,” setting off suspicions that could spread to anyone nearby in ways that threatened to destroy their credibility. In this sense, the corrupt ex-offenders were not just greedy; they did not just destroy collective resources, such as jobs that might be available in the future to other ex-offenders. Their destructive ways reverberated through entire networks, corroding the reputations and opportunities of anyone associated with them. The diffusion of “everything negative” became especially apparent as members of Prisons-to-Community began a serious push for funding beyond the Near West Side. They had hoped to attract the cause industry with their proposals, but they worried that a sector dominated by women would not appreciate the needs of men. In the summer of 2006 they began getting traction with state-level politicians, who were starting to consider issues surrounding mass incarceration, particularly the high rates of recidivism that plagued places like the Near West Side. In order for this traction to expand, Prisons-to-Community would need to show that it had a constituency engaged in these issues. But attendance had begun to suffer at regular meetings and activities. This drop-off came to a bitter head as the group headed to the Illinois State Fair to attend a rally for then Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. The governor had not yet become embroiled in his own corruption scandal, an attempt to auction off the Senate seat vacated by president-elect Barack Obama. He was generally appreciated on the Near West Side for his commitment to children’s health care and his love of Elvis. Prisons-to-Community’s executive board approached the trip as an opportunity to debut the organization at a statewide political event; they hoped for a rainmaking impression that would launch them into a fall funding drive. Twenty members confirmed their attendance, and each committed to bringing ten people, in particular, their children, partners, and mothers. The executive board chartered two luxury coaches to ferry everyone to Springfield in comfort. The committee also arranged for several hundred Prisons-to-Community T-shirts to be printed in adult and child sizes. They anticipated that the sight of black men wearing shirts that clearly identified them as ex-offenders with their children and women gathered around them would create a stark impression. On the morning of the rally, twelve people showed up to board the buses. Half were children who had come because their uncle had promised them a pony ride. I rounded out the assembled majority who were

Banner of sponsors for Horner Reunion Picnic, 2006. Those who aspired to represent or have influence among transitioning Horner residents needed to be adept at piecing together a patchwork of potential resources. The picnic’s banner bears the traces of such mobilization, listing a disparate range of internal and external resource streams, including developers, the police department, and businesses located or working in the area.

T-shirts! We’ve got extra Prisons-to-Community T-shirts that you can wear when we get to Springfield. Wait, let’s throw away these T-shirts and get ones that say: “Stop

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not Prisons-to-Community members, pulled along to document what members had talked up as a show of “real grassroots force.” An hour of frantic phone calls and door knocking turned up enough men and teenage boys to fill one bus halfway. One member, Miles, angrily dismissed the other bus, and we began the trip to Springfield. Ever unperturbed, Prisons-to-Community’s middleaged president, John, towered in the aisle and cheerfully greeted the passengers. He thanked them for their support and promised a fun day of speeches, concerts, and animals. Miles, however, seized the microphone and launched into the surliest of speeches. “We’re going to Springfield to lobby for resources for the neighborhood. But, you see, the bus is not even three quarters full. So, you see the state of the neighborhood. Let’s just watch a movie,” he hissed as he switched on a DVD. The opening credits began rolling for a recent Spike Lee thriller about a bank heist. Miles dropped into his seat, then shot up:

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Prisons-to-Community T-shirt, 2006. This Prisons-to-Community member prepares to work the crowd at Governor’s Day.

Lying!” That’ll be a good start. Look, we can’t ask people to help us if we can’t help ourselves. People want us to help them get jobs, to help them get on the lease, woo, woo, woo [blah, blah, blah]. I won’t do it.

Miles stalked back to his seat muttering the names of no-shows aloud and disparaging them as “corrupted” and “dysfunctional.” John reminded him of the difficulties of an early-morning weekday event. Members might have found some last-minute work; their women might have needed them for child care; they might have gotten off

a night shift and needed rest. The no-shows did in fact later offer these explanations. Yet others blamed their absence on suspicions that Prisons-to-Community could not deliver on promised jobs and housing. They claimed that their participation would have been a waste of time. Over the following weeks, more members failed to attend events and meetings, including an important meeting with the governor’s representatives. Bitter accusations flew, even among the most committed. So-and-so had treated his participation in this “grassroots program” as “another con”; like every other one of his cons, this one “ruined it for everyone.” “He is so dysfunctional, he doesn’t even know it.” “We will never get funding because ex-cons . . . can’t stop being corrupted,” lamented another. Such accusations articulated the sinking feeling among the group that they would be the very people to ruin their earnest effort to organize ex-felons. Some complained of resulting stress, sickness, and disappointment. Others spoke of and made more serious threats. By the end of 2006, the ambitions that had fed Prisons-to-Community lay in ruins. Meetings had stopped, and open acrimony and threats divided its members.

It’s like playing a complex chess game, always knowing how to move people or money around, where to put them. People on the outside don’t know that. If you’re working here, among your friends and family, they’re going to expect something. We have to deliver. People from the neighborhood doing community work are supposed to be better equipped to deal with things than people from the outside. But . . . you can’t have us doing everything ourselves here,

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Chokes In the end, the serial numbers on the refrigerators did not match up. My dilemma resolved itself when the missing appliance suddenly reappeared in a storage closet down the hall from where it was normally kept. It would spend another summer filled with “chokes”—an affectionate name for donated meals coined during the days when they consisted of sandwiches so dry that kids needed to drain several pints of milk just to wash them down. Even though I was off the hook, my glancing encounter with Westhaven’s accusation mills drove home the pressures and demands of reciprocity and collective commitments in a context of shifting resources streams. As Miles put it to me while reflecting on Prisons-to-Community’s demise in 2007,

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because we have no infrastructure, and sometimes all the expectations that we have for each other get in the way.

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Those expectations meant that the exchange of collective resources like turkeys and toys could still stick in the throat. The cause industry treated transitioning Horner residents’ local participation as an indisputable good, a key ingredient of grassroots or community empowerment and self-determination that would counter the paternalism, neglect, and patronage associated with previous eras of public housing. This presumed good advanced the devolvement of critical resources to local networks of residents ill-equipped for the task, as well as to nonprofits whose commitments might be as short-lived as a granting cycle. In the absence of effective local mobilization, the disenfranchisement of low-income people continued apace. “Participation is no longer a threat to elites,” sociologist Michael McQuarrie has written of community-based organizations and their philanthropic partners; “it is a resource.”23 Efforts to summon transitioning Horner residents to participate in community work did become entangled in the priorities of elite development experts and practitioners. Increasingly starved of what were already modest resource streams, would-be local leaders did not command the means necessary to mobilize a base. In such a context, being summoned to produce and perform the cherished good of participation in a community that was only thereby recognized as a legitimate, authoritative, and, most important of all, grant-worthy endeavor ignited little more than acrimony, suspicion, and frustration. The citizenship pedagogies tangled up in the everyday reeducation of local associations and grassroots mobilizations in Westhaven held some difficult lessons for transitioning Horner residents. They learned that the previous rights and obligations of belonging to this corner of the Near West Side no longer held. They experienced the looming insolvency of “the fund of kin and friends obligated to them”—a fund raised through years of moving alongside each other in hallways and sidewalks. They reckoned with intimate social and domestic relations turned on their heads, relations that had made friends and even family members into people they could no longer trust and in some cases people to fear. In this destructive climate, the scandals and rumors that circulated did not renew anything; rather, they attacked, from the inside out, bonds among people who had long considered themselves family. The scandals and rumors exhausted physical bodies, and in the process choked a precarious social one, sending its collective obligations sputtering and gasping for air.

PART III

Publics

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Resurrections

During the 1990s, the city of Chicago collaborated with community development corporations and politicians to design street signs and sculptures that would mark urban enclaves and celebrate their peoples and histories. Look up or look down, you will see the fruits of this effort. On the city’s South Side, in Bronzeville, lampposts are adorned by bronze silhouettes gripping microphones and trumpets. During the Great Migration, the black migrants who settled in this area brought with them the musical traditions that eventually made Bronzeville famous for its blues clubs. No such clubs remain in Chicago’s Blues District. On the city’s Northwest Side, two steel Puerto Rican flags rise sixty feet above Paseo Boricua. The half mile that the flags bookend runs through the heart of an area where Puerto Rican migrants from New York and Puerto Rico settled in the middle decades of the twentieth century to work in Chicago’s steel industry. Today, a musicians’ walk of fame, Caribbean eateries, metal stencils featuring Taíno designs (Taíno peoples were the original inhabitants of the island now known as Puerto Rico), and Puerto Rican cultural establishments line this gentrifying stretch of Division Street. It was these branded enclaves that Doug, a middle-aged black man active in local redevelopment politics, had in mind when he took a telephone call one afternoon in late summer of 2004. Doug had let me accompany him to a planning meeting at the Near West Side Community Development Corporation. We were an hour early. He was passing the time catching up on calls and I worked on my notes. My ears perked up when I heard him say, “Can you tell the mayor we want something on the street like the Puerto Ricans have up on Division. You know . . . the flags?” When he got off the phone and saw a question on my face, Doug disappeared to a back closet and returned with a three-dimensional foam model and set it on the table before me. It depicted a white 203

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stone pyramid that would, if realized, stand twelve feet tall. Its face bore Near West’s official insignia: a phoenix rising out of the ashes. “The pyramids are for Ancient Africa and her glories,” Doug told me. The phoenix, for Westhaven, “rising.” Doug explained that Near West had worked with a designer to develop plans for the street pyramids several years earlier. They were still searching for funds to erect several along Madison Street, the corridor burned during the riot that followed Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. “Let’s go to Victor Herbert,” Doug said, herding me out the door and around the corner to a local park, the site of a Near West–commissioned mural. I had walked by the mural dozens of times but had never really looked at its six scenes. The mural is dedicated to the senior citizens who organized against efforts to bring a football stadium to the area, a development that would have resulted in their displacement (see Plate 4). On the left are scenes of horror: real estate speculation and destruction; a senior woman gazing out a window and crying at public housing’s physical and human wreckage; men and women engaged in the “self-destruction,” “abuse,” and “vice” of drugs, fighting, and prostitution. On the right are scenes of peace and unity: neat and orderly houses lining clean streets; children learning computer skills at Herbert school; a senior and a young person resting together on a park bench. Long-time residents of the Near West Side have seen disinvestment, poverty, and greed as well as epidemics of crime, violence, and drugs. If respect for family, education, order, culture, children, and seniors takes root, the mural insists, the Near West Side will rise from riots, arson, and displacement to flourish once again. Themed and branded enclaves are common enough in contemporary redevelopment and place-making projects in U.S. cities. But what is so striking about Near West’s public art effort is that it depicted state-mediated abandonment and disinvestment alongside more standard multicultural fare. To be sure, Paseo Boricua and the Blues District both demarcate enclaves that were formed thanks to policies that advanced the marginalization and racialization of migrants. Civil disturbances had, for example, erupted along Division in the summer of 1966 after Chicago police shot a young Puerto Rican man.1 Yet to imagine these enclaves’ difficult pasts, one would have to read between the lines of the signage and sculptures chosen to capture the districts. In Near West’s aspirations, images of resurrection and pan-African heritage symbols such as pyramids and kente cloth stood alongside the ravages of poverty, drug abuse, criminalization, and civil unrest.

The pyramids have yet to be funded, built, and erected. At about the same time Doug pointed me to the pyramids, plans for a project that would stretch standard multicultural fare to incorporate histories of racism and neglect had begun to gain traction on a different corner of the Near West Side. Early proponents of this museum project, though, were not so much concerned with resurrection as they were with resilience. If, in a city struggling with the legacies of racism and neglect, an aesthetics of multiculturalism could expand to accommodate cultures of resilience, on what grounds would public housing residents emerge as citizens with something to contribute?

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6

The Museum of Resilience

In a sense, you reconcile us with ourselves. —Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

“A Place for Conversation” By late 2006, the Chicago Housing Authority had undertaken clearance, demolition, and redevelopment at most of its family complexes, even as many of their residents organized against demolition and displacement. Begun in 1995, Horner’s ongoing demolition and redevelopment was the most advanced, and Westhaven had entered its second phase. Yet like residents of the CHA’s other emerging mixed-income new communities, many of Westhaven’s residents felt uncertainty about what their futures would hold and where those futures would unfold. Despite their uncertainty, Chicago’s housing projects were already being commemorated as a thing of the past. In October of that year, the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, a Chicago-based foundation with granting priorities in the arts and architecture, convened two dozen architects, curators, historians, journalists, artists, and anthropologists from Chicago and major cities around the country to discuss an unusual proposal: to open a national public housing museum on Chicago’s Near West Side. Early one morning, they set out on a whirlwind bus tour that highlighted places on the city’s South Side connected with the history of African Americans in twentieth-century Chicago: a former YMCA painted with murals depicting civic life during the Great Migration; the Union Stockyards, which had beckoned many migrants north with promises of slaughterhouse jobs; the church that had held funeral services for Emmett Till, a black Chicago teenager who, while visiting Mississippi in 1955, was tortured to death for allegedly flirting with a white woman; and several housing projects in various stages 207

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of clearance, vacancy, and demolition. The bus finally made its way to the Near West Side and discharged its passengers at the National Italian American Sports Hall of Fame on West Taylor Street. During the first half of the twentieth century, a large community of Italian immigrants had settled in this area. Most of their descendants had since left for the suburbs, but Little Italy remained a locus of heritage celebrations, important churches, and Italian eateries. The group walked through the small museum’s display of photographs and trophies on its way to a top-floor conference room for that morning’s main event: a wider view of the Jane Addams Homes, a housing project from the New Deal period that stood just down the street. Named in honor of the doyenne of the Progressive Era American Settlement House movement ( Jane Addams had worked with Chicago’s immigrants), this set of row houses and walk-ups anchored a much larger public housing complex known as ABLA. The acronym was shorthand for the entire complex, most of which is now demolished: the Jane Addams Homes, the Robert Brooks Homes, Loomis Courts, and the Grace Abbott Homes. Built between 1938 and 1961, ABLA’s row houses and mid-rise and high-rise buildings once sprawled across several square miles of the Near West Side; by 2006, huge sections had fallen under wrecking balls. After taking in the site from afar, the group crossed the street to 1322 West Taylor Street, the last remaining building of the Addams Homes on site today. Once inside, they juggled their flashlights and cameras while stepping gingerly around intermittent personal effects and clumps of terra cotta fallen from the walls. Some bedding, a tube of lipstick, a Wiffle bat, a hollowed-out Bible . . . “vacant” (or in the words of the maintenance worker who let us in, “evacuated”) for some time, 1322 West Taylor still provided a warm place for squatters to bed down at night. I trailed behind the group, recorder in hand. Organizers had invited me earlier that fall to serve as the effort’s volunteer secretary, and I leaped at the chance. This last remaining building had once been home to immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, returning war veterans, and, by the 1960s, black migrants from the Deep South. It is now slated to open in 2017 as the National Public Housing Museum. Yet an experiential history museum that would draw, as its promotional Web materials would later put it, “on the power of place and memory to illuminate the resilience of poor and working class families of every race and ethnicity to realize the promise of America” was still far off on that October morning.1

The last remaining building at the Jane Addams Homes, slated to house the National Public Housing Museum, and a banner announcing the museum, 2007. This banner was designed to feature the diversity of residents who had once or currently lived in public housing.

After the tour, the group squeezed around the banquet table at a local trattoria for a working lunch. As the group passed plates of pasta and braised vegetables, nobody minced words about the ironies of bringing a public housing museum to a city still in the midst of obliterating its housing projects. Some worried about “museuming” this controversial process. They noted that any effort to make this controversial process a museum object would make it seem like a problem already dealt with, a thing of the past. Yet many successful museums, others interjected, had taken up difficult events and their legacies. Remember, another pointed out, the diverse audiences that had embraced the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. But the sharpness of tragic events, someone else argued, can be blunted with the passage of time in ways that make such memorials possible and necessary; in contrast, the displacement of public housing residents was ongoing in Chicago and around the United States. Daniel, a middle-aged white journalist and writer, brought up the example of another idiosyncratic museum that had harnessed what he called “the power of place” toward productive discussions about a politically sensitive topic, past and contemporary immigration:

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The Tenement Museum [in New York] tells the tale of the immigrant experience, but it’s not a glorified view. When you go into the rooms and hear the stories of people who lived there, there are sad endings. So we tell the entire story of public housing: the idealism, failures, struggles, successes, tragic ends. Unless there’s a place that looks back and forwards, how will we come up with solutions?

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A visiting curator from that museum nodded his head in agreement. Then Carol, a middle-aged white philanthropist and director of the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, cleared her throat. “This place humanizes public housing. It’s not like reading a book. You feel something when you go in.” Her gaze turned to Wilma, a black anthropologist visiting from an African American museum. These two women had something in common. They had both grown up in midcentury public housing projects: Wilma in Chicago, within a community of black migrants from the South; Carol in the Bronx, where her family belonged to a community of lower-income Jews. Wilma nodded, and Carol continued, “That’s important for public housing residents, their children and their grandchildren, and everybody else. It really becomes a place for conversation.” To hear these early museum supporters tell it, the museum would

be “for” people like Carol and Wilma, their parents, their children, and their grandchildren. It would also be “for” citizens who had no apparent connection to public housing, who might find in it a place to encounter current and former residents, their homes, and their stories. Visitors’ experiences might just ignite politically transformative conversations, actions, and solutions concerning the many promises of America—promises made, promises kept, and promises broken.

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Chicago’s public housing reforms, I have suggested throughout this book, targeted more than public housing residents. Through sympathetic contact, publicly and nonpublicly housed Chicagoans came to consider the potentials and drawbacks of becoming more like one another, and at the same time they were forced to reevaluate past ways of understanding likeness, difference, and obligation. Even so, the residents of Chicago’s mixed-income redevelopments were a limited group. What of those within and beyond Chicago who did not live or work near redeveloping public housing? How would they be moved to feel something for public housing, for its residents, and for the ambitious local and national reforms that sought to overhaul both? Could a museum built to commemorate a specific group’s history and heritage perform this function for the broader citizenry? This chapter takes up those questions. It offers a form-sensitive account of efforts to harness the experience of being emplaced in a ruined built environment with the aim of seeding and expanding new conversations about subsidized housing and the ethical stances they might enliven. I explore this problem by developing an understanding of a sympathetic public. Like any public, the sympathetic one anticipated by the museum’s early supporters would emerge through shared attention to circulating forms—in this case, representations of ruined and redeveloping public housing. Rather than track the circulation of these forms, I want to understand how citizens come to recognize them as noteworthy in and of themselves. After all, every day for decades legions of people had passed by the ruined housing projects that littered cities like Chicago and Atlanta without giving much thought to the lives unfolding within them. People who might never have looked closely at the buildings that lined their commutes—people who were already targets of the CHANGE campaign—would be among the NPHM’s public. So, too, would people like Donald Kimball’s suburban neighbors, or even Kimball himself before he was pulled into the lawsuit: people who might take one look at wrecked buildings and promptly declare that they ought to be obliterated and their residents ought to be incarcerated.2 In

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other words, citizens who might be indifferent or even hostile to the poverty of public housing residents might, through the efforts of the museum, learn to experience public housing as relevant to their own lives, as something that might even bind them to strangers. Ideas for the museum have evolved significantly since I began following early iterations of the project in 2004. What I track below is how the museum’s early supporters sought to transform sympathetic contact with a ruined building into a medium for socializing citizens into the attention necessary to develop new stances on poverty. I show how they attempted to cultivate these stances by teaching actual but also imagined visitors to notice and appreciate the emotional and physical textures of a decaying place. I see those oriented toward this decay as the earliest outlines of a public, a broad and expansive “we” that anticipates but also summons citizens to a collective social and political whole moved to think, feel, and maybe even act differently around the entrenched poverty in their midst. Early museum supporters understood that any effort to seed new conversations around public housing, both locally and nationally, would have to reckon with disputes that raged throughout late twentieth-century U.S. politics and scholarship concerning multigenerational poverty. On the one hand, “culture of poverty” type paradigms attributed multigenerational destitution, particularly the destitution of racialized groups such as African Americans and Puerto Ricans, to behaviors, mind-sets, and values endemic to their communities.3 On the other hand, “civil rights” or “structural inequality” type paradigms focused on redressing the long-standing social, legal, and economic inequalities thought to afflict such communities and thus to produce persistent poverty.4 Any public raised from ruined public housing could avoid neither these disputes nor their legacies. The museum’s early supporters in fact anticipated the visitor who might encounter such ruin and see it as yet another reason to blame poor people for their lot. They also anticipated a type of visitor who would pity just how much impoverished people struggled with formidable forces like structural racism. Early supporters wanted to move beyond these familiar plot lines. They aimed to foster experiences and conversations that would compel visitors to locate their own actions and feelings within the broader policies and institutions that have advanced residential segregation and urban poverty. What this chapter explores, then, are not discourses of blame, pity, and their limits per se but, rather, the early museum supporters’ efforts to curate experiences of vulnerability to place and people. Toward that end, it considers how supporters imagined they would elicit and coordinate visceral

Presence, Attention, Publics One theme running throughout recent studies of compassion centers on how even the best-intentioned projects and interventions elicit feelings that reproduce the very inequalities that these projects

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and emotional experiences of place in ways that would compel public housing’s outsiders to reckon with subsidized housing policies and their legacies as a pressing national issue. The earliest articulation of the museum actually emerged from a group of ABLA residents. Former and current public housing residents in and beyond Chicago also count among the museum’s supporters. Former Horner residents, for example, have donated their time, stories, and photographs to the effort. This chapter, however, focuses primarily on early supporters who did not hail from Chicago’s public housing but who nevertheless threw their weight behind the museum because they found the idea compelling. These supporters formed a group whose membership cut across the lines of race, ethnicity, and gender. Still, during the early stages of the effort that followed the ABLA residents’ impetus, supporters were mostly middle-aged, white, well-educated, and financially secure professionals. They were economically, culturally, and in many cases racially privileged people. And they were hyperaware of that privilege. More than a few made a point of applying it toward social justice and other progressive causes. Outsiders are certainly not the most obvious point of entry for examining a museum dedicated to public housing. But I focus almost exclusively on them for several reasons. First, the museum’s long-term viability will depend on appealing to people with no biographical connections to public housing. Outsider supporters drew on their own experiences and tastes to shape initial discussions of what the museum could be. These experiences and tastes resonate in what the museum has since become. Second, these outsiders repeatedly invoked the other major “who?” at stake in the museum project: the public they aspired to conjure through emplacement. That public would be an ideal “we” of citizens disposed to feel with public housing residents and, through such feelings, to reckon and act somewhat differently about poverty. The ideal “we” would resonate with larger aspirations surrounding public housing reform as a project of affective remediation that might spread beyond the boundaries of a redeveloped area to draw a wide range of citizens into post-welfare practices of compassion and care.

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seek to ameliorate.5 Recall that compassion differs from sympathy, in that compassion presumes a fundamental distance between the person who feels and the other for whom he or she feels. Studies of compassion often note that what starts out as an effort to feel with a pained or suffering body ends in feelings of pity that deepen the distances and inequalities that produced such suffering in the first place. In his book Distant Suffering, sociologist Luc Boltanski fleshes out this criticism in ways especially relevant to early plans for a national public housing museum.6 The project’s earliest supporters struggled to find ways to tell stories about public housing that would counter the negative publicity that they thought might prevent Chicagoans—and Americans more broadly—from engaging with its ruin in a thoughtful, careful, and respectful manner. According to Boltanski, the sight of suffering can ignite feelings of pity and compassion in everyone who encounters it. Yet for him, pity and compassion are not the same thing. Compassion centers on the singular presence of one suffering person. Consider a lone beggar who appeals directly to passersby for pocket change. Whether or not change is given, the encounter demands an immediate and pragmatic response. One does or does not decide to give change; one does or does not make an effort to meet a gaze. Pity, on the other hand, is a feeling that emerges when a generalized group of sufferers is encountered at some remove. Boltanski offers the images of famine victims in some far-off land that flicker across so many screens. For Boltanski, the spectacle of spatially or temporally distant suffering offers no obvious course of pragmatic action. And in the absence of such a course, only more or less efficacious actions ensue. Spectators can become indignant and talk about the spectacle. They can become so indignant that they descend into a blame game, dishing out censure to victims and perpetrators. They can even become fascinated with the spectacle of suffering, and that fascination can get in the way of formulating an effective response. These are the pitfalls of a politics of pity, for Boltanski, a politics that deepens rather than lessens feelings of difference and distance. Boltanski does suggest that spectators caught up in consuming the spectacle of far-off suffering can manage these pitfalls by drawing on the “presence” that characterizes any compassionate exchange, even those staged within the media. Spectators who appreciate that presence focus on a current moment and, as much as possible and even at a remove, give themselves over to the immediacy of suffering in that moment and to the feelings that this immediacy stirs up. These feelings might in turn lead to direct action. In this way, bystanders might

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avoid both accusations (that is, this pitiful person must have done something to get herself here) or justifications (that is, the poor are always with us, so what, really, can we do?) that would pull spectators into the past or the future. Spectators could then sidestep a paralysis that allows the present moment to slip by, unseized. For Boltanski, a politics of presence can narrow the asymmetries and hierarchies that are implicit within a politics of pity. “Over the past, ever gone by, and over the future, still nonexistent, the present has an overwhelming privilege: that of being real.”7 Boltanski’s insights align with a central intuition of the museum’s early supporters: that this particular built environment commanded a visceral charge capable of arousing intense feelings and ideas. Yet there is good reason to hesitate at his assertion that “the real” or “the presence” of “the present” could ever, in the context at hand, pull spectators away from fixations on a past that yielded these projects or a future that their legacies seem poised to shape. U.S. welfare projects meted out protections unevenly, in ways that gave salience especially to categories of racial and economic difference. Throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, this process had a heavy spatial component. Housing policies carved up cities and their surrounding regions into places that restricted citizens’ spatial movements. Violence enforced those restrictions.8 Racialized groups who lived within or near urban ghettos—in Chicago, most often blacks and Latinos—certainly recognized that, as did the white people who glanced at their edges, either in person or through the negative publicity that surrounded them. In Chicago, as in other cities shaped by segregation, the solidarities and sensibilities accumulated through lifetimes of constrained movements in urban space will linger in the subjects shaped through them, even as the built environments that once anchored those subjects in place fluctuate so dramatically. As a result, there is no encounter with the presence of ruined public housing, nor any action resulting from that encounter, that is unconstrained by the weight of history or expectations about the future. Built into the concept of sympathy, remember, are the projects, meanings, and values that orchestrate intimate encounters between different entities. Those projects, meanings, and values are necessarily colored by the weight of history and expectations about the future. Consider Susan, a middle-aged journalist who had spent some years reporting on Chicago’s housing reforms. Susan had never lived in public housing. Indeed, she credited what she called her serious case of “southern white guilt” for stoking an abiding interest

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in Chicago’s public housing. I had been reading her work for several years and asked her to speak with me about it. When I met with her in 2004, she explained that she saw her reporting on the subject as a modest corrective to public housing’s impending disappearance. Had she heard some rumblings about a public housing museum?, I asked. “Even if you are white, well-off and never went into a place like Cabrini–Green,” she replied, singling out by name one of Chicago’s largest, most centrally located, and thus best-known housing projects, “it’s not like you could ever miss it. It was there. Just passing by, you felt it. And that never let you forget that there are people who are deeply without in our society. Now these places are disappearing, allowing wealthy whites to disengage with poverty and racism.” Susan’s response surprised me. She did not balk at the museum supporters’ naïveté. Nor did she extol the virtues of public housing residents finally securing a place that would allow them to celebrate “their culture.” I had come to expect both reactions whenever the museum came up in casual conversations among friends whose involvement in public housing did not extend beyond a passing curiosity with the housing projects that they saw coming down around town. Rather, she positioned the project squarely within the larger realm of publicity that surrounded public housing, a realm that touched more than public housing residents. For her, the impending disappearance of places that were once a spectacularly abject fact of the cityscape was a serious impediment to white, well-off citizens’ capacity to engage the legacies of poverty and racism. The museum might fill that void, she suggested, maybe just as well as any careful reportage. Susan did not become involved in the museum. Yet like many of its early supporters, she argued that encounters with moldering public housing might strengthen the ethical footing of individual citizens and the broader society they lived in. For these outsiders to public housing, its visceral weight struck immediately and ineluctably, in ways that could not always be put into words. “It was there. Just passing by, you felt it.” At the same time, Susan and the museum’s early supporters shared the intuition that these feelings would require some active coordination if they were to take hold and spread—be that through narrative journalism, everyday movements throughout the city, or a skilled curator’s imagination. Intuitions that something could be “just there” and “just felt” are, as anthropologist William Mazzarella points out, both the outcome of mediation and the means of its occlusion.9 When something gets us in the gut, it is because we have learned to navigate various media, including our senses, in ways that have taught us to register a given experience as profoundly

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visceral, organic, and immediate. One way to begin understanding the work of this “immediation,” work that is rarely apparent to us, is to turn toward a central insight offered by a materialist theory of sympathy: sympathy’s potential as a medium of physical transfer and social cohesion turns on a governing project’s capacity to make an experience vivid and to extend that experience across spatial distances. Sympathy’s potential to bind people together across space comes to the fore in accounts that move between its status as a material medium of transfer and its capacity to condition durable moral obligations. Recall that for nineteenth-century French psychologist Théodule Ribot, sympathy was “the existence of identical conditions in two or more individuals of the same, or different, species.”10 In Ribot’s account, sympathy is a communicative process. It gains force, stability, and breadth as it passes beyond a reflex or the simple agreement of motor tendencies and emotions into a medium that forges expansive bonds and moral obligations. At its most rudimentary stages, it can only transfer properties among entities that already share the same basic temperament.11 In other words, sympathy has it limits. Sympathy enters its most “evolved” stages when representations aligned with visceral feelings and bodily movements open windows across vastly different temperaments. Members of this “community of representations or ideas, connected with feelings and movements” can then come to resemble everyone and everything they encounter.12 Ribot goes on to suggest that the evolution of sympathy into an expansive medium that draws people together across social and geographic divides relies on the handiwork of especially “sensitive” types like poets and prophets. As these figures do the work of coordinating representational and moral planes, sympathy awakens and enlarges people’s altruistic tendencies. At stake for Ribot, then, is not just the problem of proximity but the representational work it takes to align proximate entities that are not alike. Through such work, qualities flow between entities, allowing persons, animals, things, resemblances, sensations, and feelings to congeal into a much larger and more durable moral whole. Sympathy and its resonances become the preconditions and the expanding forces of a social and ethical cohesion. This is exactly the kind of cohesion that the early museum supporters pursued, and they were far from alone. And they drew on more than one “community of representations” already available for mediating visceral experiences of mass harm and neglect that were unfolding beyond Chicago’s public housing: an international commemoration movement centered on human tragedy and the long-standing history of publicity centered on Chicago’s spectacularly wrecked homes.

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On Chicago’s West Side, public housing residents and their advocates had kicked around the idea of preserving decaying projects since the 1980s, when rumors about impending demolitions had begun to circulate. This included residents at Horner, who originally pushed for a number of their buildings to be rehabilitated and leased to their full capacity. Many felt attached to these buildings; they wanted to continue living among friends and family, and they knew that full occupancy made for both denser and safer living environments. At various points, architects involved with Westhaven’s development proposed preserving original buildings, pointing out the financial and environmental merits of renovation. “Built like bunkers,” one marveled when I ran into him. He conceded that anything built new would not come close to the solidity of Horner’s construction. While efforts to preserve housing projects on the Near West Side for housing ultimately tanked, the idea of a museum of housing grew legs. It owed those legs to the fact that the impending demolition of the Jane Addams Homes collided with commitments to national heritage. Built during the Great Depression, the Addams Homes paired New Deal social ideals with sleek Bauhaus aesthetics. Several notable architects, designers, and artists worked on the project, and they incorporated features and amenities unusual in housing for poor people at the time. These included apartments configured to maximize light and ventilation, landscaped grounds dotted with fountains and play sculptures, and communal laundry and recreational facilities. The architect and luminary John Holabird led the project’s distinguished design team. Notable Works Progress Administration muralist and sculptor Edgar Miller received a commission to build play sculptures for children; his herd of concrete animals once presided over an outdoor play court. The entire site was laid out with trees, walkways, and fountains. Although the suspicion was unconfirmed, museum supporters suspected that the landscaping was the handiwork of the celebrated Prairie School landscape architect Jens Jensen. Noting this pedigree, the National Register of Historic Places cited the Jane Addams Homes as eligible for landmark status in 1994. It observed that the Addams Homes, along with several other early CHA projects, were “historically significant for their association with this country’s earliest efforts to provide large-scale public housing for the urban poor. [They] represent the built response of governmental agencies—at both the National and local levels—to the development of new policies for city planning and urban housing on a scale never before attempted.”13 The Addams Homes stood as a concrete exemplar of nationally significant New Deal–era archi-

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tecture and social policies designed to improve the lot of America’s urban poor. Their eligibility for landmark status threw a wrench into redevelopment plans. By 1998, the city had agreed with preservation officials that an “interpretive exhibit” would accompany any demolition. Though a bronze plaque with a few informative sentences could have done the job, tenant leaders clamored for a museum, which they initially conceived of as a chance to expose their posterity to the experience of living at ABLA. Consultants hired by the CHA worked with tenants to draft an initial proposal. Consultants helped broaden tenants’ focus on an ABLA-centric museum by situating “the story” of public housing within “the American Experience.” However, without a concrete organization to back it, the initial proposal languished on the shelf for a year. When the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation picked up the floundering proposal in late 2005, the National Public Housing Museum project finally took off. The Driehaus Foundation’s staff breathed new life into the proposal by hitching it to the interests of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience. Founded in 1999, that organization represents an international movement that has emphasized deeply experiential encounters with human harm and neglect such as genocide, enslavement, intolerance, and state terror. The coalition’s members are institutions and projects that aim to stimulate tough dialogues on pressing social issues by activating “the power of places of memory to engage the public in connecting past and present in order to envision and shape a more just and human future.”14 Visitors to sites affiliated with this movement might move through a Soviet gulag or a Nazi concentration camp poised to be overcome by the lapses in human conscience thought to still resonate there. Early museum supporters did not tend to equate Chicago public housing’s neglect with genocide, state terror, or internment. Yet they did lean heavily on one museum associated with this movement for inspiration as they crafted a site that might speak to the failures of state-mediated care: New York City’s Lower East Side Tenement Museum—the very model that the journalist Daniel had praised at lunch after the 2006 bus tour. Founded in 1992, the Tenement Museum follows immigrants in nineteenth- and twentieth-century New York, their struggles with ethnic intolerance and substandard residential and working conditions, and the emergence of regulations and institutions to address both. Summing up its success to me in 2005, Driehaus’s director, Carol, observed, “Some people come out of the Tenement Museum having to be carried . . . because they are so overwrought, because the emotion is so present.” She marveled that Chicago did not have

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a comparable institution, given how seminal the city had been to the history of American housing and labor politics. It is tempting to attribute the NPHM’s growing traction to consumer tastes shaped by the success of museums commemorating traumatic events—especially the Holocaust—or to the commodification of place that has kept some postindustrial urban economies humming along. The museum’s early supporters did tap into the global memory culture that has rendered the Holocaust, as literary scholar Andreas Huyssen has put it, a “universal trope for historical trauma.”15 And early museum supporters certainly argued that if a public housing museum could create unnerving engagements within an “authentic feeling” site, Chicago’s public housing might likewise enter a burgeoning tourism circuit commemorating difficult and tragic historical events and sites. Yet there is a much longer history of publicity in the United States and in Chicago in particular centered on the living conditions of poor and disenfranchised people. Over the past century, narrative journalists, playwrights, novelists, and photographers have repeatedly pulled citizens into the city’s deteriorating homes. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), and Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here (1991)—these are just a few among many well-known works that have rendered the homes of Chicago’s poor and marginalized a tangible, public spectacle.16 Along the way, such publicity has supported spatial interventions that have overhauled the landscape of Chicago and other cities. Consider a spate of popular “housing exhibits” in Chicago dating from the late 1940s. Pro-development groups were staging them at civic sites such as libraries and local historical societies just as local politicians and developers were refining the legal instruments (that is, eminent domain) that would, over the next decade, make federally backed slum clearances and redevelopment possible in cities across the country. One photographer, a white woman named Mildred Mead who lived on the South Side, worked throughout the late 1940s and the 1950s to document declining housing conditions in Chicago and large-scale efforts to address them. Her images were included in a number of these exhibits. She captured the powerful effect that the exhibits had on visitors in her notes on her work, observing that they “aimed to teach facts about housing in the city to the public.”17 Those “facts” appeared as tidy charts and statistics, but the exhibits also prodded visitors toward less abstracted, more emplaced modes of knowing. Take one exhibit that funneled visitors through wall charts and statistics into a slum tenement. Curators

Housing in Chicago exhibition, Chicago Public Library, late 1940s. Tenement room, rat and all, on display. Photograph by Mildred Mead; courtesy of Special Collections at the University of Chicago Library.

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of the exhibit had dismantled an apartment from a slum tenement on the city’s South Side and reerected it in what was then Chicago’s main library (now the Chicago Cultural Center) in the city’s downtown. Visitors, Mead scrawled across the back of one photograph she took of the exhibit, were especially “shocked and interested” in this tenement room and its faithfully re-created squalor, which included a taxidermied rat. The exhibits were just one among many forms of publicity centered on wrecked homes that circulated throughout Chicago in the twentieth century. Through firsthand encounters with such publicity, citizens’ intimate experiences of urban blight were drawn into the urban renewal agenda of the postwar welfare state as it enacted major spatial reconfigurations across the American landscape. The National Public Housing Museum emerges from historical investments in the public recognition of mass harm and statemediated neglect, this recognition’s sympathetic resonances, and its capacity to pull together expansive moral wholes made up of people, things, feelings, and places. Yet is it appropriate to talk of these moral wholes and the sympathetic resonances that anchor them in place

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as a public? Scholars have tended to approach publics as collective political subjects that emerge through the circulation, layering, and citation of textual address among strangers who will probably never meet.18 This process involves an abstraction away from one’s own body and location into a larger social imaginary that spans physical and social distances. “Merely paying attention can be enough to make you a member,” notes literary scholar Michael Warner of modern publics and their capacity to unify across the divides of class, geography, ethnicity, and even race.19 But what is the status of mere attention and its solicitation, especially when we are dealing with a situation that cannot be understood within a purely discursive register? Because work that approaches publics through textual analysis tends to treat nonlinguistic media like visual images as texts— segmented and “read” much like one reads a book—it can be tricky to place feelings that are sparked by moving through something like a wrecked building, feelings that stand to bind people precisely because they are, in Carol’s words, so “not like reading a book.”20 But such feelings are not impossible to place. We can situate a range of materials in the communicative processes by which people attend to circulating forms and come to assume that they already belong to certain groups by asking how these intuitions involve both embodied and more abstract modes of knowing. Anthropologists have already begun to forge these accounts by implicating not only texts, speech, and images but also sounds or fleeting visceral intensities in processes that solicit and hold attention.21 Through shared attention, one assumes a bond with others, with strangers whose attention has also been piqued, and as anthropologist Kathleen Stewart notes, “a weirdly floating ‘we’ snaps into a blurry focus.”22 The question remaining is precisely how an interpretive community that coheres around circulating forms “snaps into focus.” In other words, how are would-be members of a public socialized into practices of shared attention? How does engagement with the circulating forms that move through a place mediate, cultivate, and renew the practices of attention and reflexivity necessary to summon publics and their world-making dimensions? My point in asking these questions is not just to suggest that all publics involve affect, or even that they project what Warner describes as a “demanding social phenomenology.”23 Rather, keeping in mind the insights offered by a materialist concept of sympathy, I am concerned with how a demanding social and material phenomenology must be carefully wrought, coordinated, and managed before strangers can even be summoned to the shared attention that knits

citizens together in publics and binds them across geographic and social distances.

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Curating Ethno-Racial Affinities The NPHM’s early supporters stared down substantial challenges. The CHA had donated a building to the effort under the express understanding that it would not make any further contributions to the museum’s funding or operations. The National Public Housing Museum would need to develop a brand appealing enough to attract donations, grants, and, of course, scores of tourists willing to drop money on admissions fees. That brand would also have to pull off the tricky task of navigating the widespread public disparagement heaped on welfare recipients. Outrage at “welfare queens” had made headlines throughout the 1980s and 1990s, but even in 2005, when the most bitter public debates about welfare reform had cooled some, few places seemed less worthy of public commemoration to most Chicagoans than public housing. “Why in the world would we ever want to remember anything like that?” went the oft-repeated question posed to Carol as she pitched the proposed museum to potential funders and worked to rally politicians and civic groups behind it. Even a decade after welfare reform, public housing residents still provoked unease and censure for having apparently destroyed their homes, housed criminals, and plunged their buildings into general chaos. The museum’s supporters moved to resolve public housing’s branding problem and the empathy deficit its residents faced by foregrounding the most unusual feature of the Addams Homes: their “multiethnic” beginnings. Urban public housing is often associated with racialized groups, particularly blacks and Latinos. And in Chicago, despite the fact that plenty of whites, Asians, and Latinos have lived—and still live—in public housing there, it is still widely associated with blacks. But for a good third of the life of the Addams Homes life, few blacks could be found there. This is because up through the 1950s, the CHA actively steered black applicants for CHA apartments to black-only projects. The Addams Homes sheltered first- and second-generation immigrants during its first several decades, with eastern European Jews and Italian Catholics especially well represented. Consultants hired early on by the CHA to draft a first proposal picked up on just how much the origins of the Addams Homes as a housing project for immigrants and their children might surprise anyone used to equating urban public housing

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with blackness. They recommended that a museum capitalize on this surprise to broaden the appeal of stories about public housing. In particular, they wanted to make the most of the museum’s location within a building, and an area, with a long history of ethnic and racial succession. Consider, for instance, the narrative developed in the initial 2004 proposal:

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ABLA’s Jane Addams Homes, a pioneering public housing project built during the Great Depression under the Roosevelt administration, provided affordable residences of good quality to many of the first and second generation European immigrants who had sought refuge in Hull House from the dilapidated slums and tenements in which they lived. Maxwell Street became their new world version of the old world’s street markets where they bought their daily bread, their clothing, and traded household goods. Later, many of the African American migrants who came from the South landed in this poor, but fertile cultural cauldron that nurtured and preserved so many traditions from far away. . . . Many of these residents rose up from the bottom to go on to do great things in America, while others struggled from day to day to eke out a living; some survived, while others were overcome. But whatever the case, there is a profound human story to be told in these struggles, and while there are universal elements in that story, it is fundamentally an American experience. It is a complex story that deserves to be preserved and shared with the public.24

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This first proposal ultimately languished. Yet those who revived the idea in 2005 and 2006 would retain this focus on immigration. For public housing residents to become figures that inspired public attention, they would have to be located within the biography of immigrant struggle that has long been construed as the heritage of all U.S. citizens. Ethnic heritage consumables ran throughout the museum’s first proposal. Early consultants envisioned that its main attraction would be a series of apartments restored according to the living memories of the actual Italian, Jewish, and black families who had lived in them. Moving through these apartments would prod visitors to recognize that many different kinds of citizens had struggled to make new homes in Chicago and to gain a toehold in U.S. society. And folkloric themes abounded, seen, for example, in such suggested events as a

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“Chicago folklife festival” that would showcase blues music alongside the musical traditions of Greek and Italian immigrants.25 This emphasis on cultural compatibility came to the fore in the suggestion of another early proponent of the project, a white anthropologist who attended a meeting to voice her enthusiastic support. She suggested that a soul-food restaurant be opened as a part of the museum. She thought it might draw in the tourists who already frequented the Italian eateries that lined Taylor Street. “Tourists and foodies always look for new theme restaurants,” Sarah mused to me in 2005 while reflecting on the project. Such a restaurant might attract otherwiseuninterested outsiders, and at the same time it could provide remaining ABLA residents with employment and revenue streams. “[White] people have such a hard time crossing boundaries. Maybe around food is a good place? There are many people still who don’t have any black friends, who never sat down for a meal with a black person or invited someone black to dinner. The restaurant could do that.” Sarah was merely brainstorming. Though cultural consumables remain prominent within the developing NPHM, there are no plans to build a soul-food restaurant. At first glance, it may seem that cultural consumables downplay what made the black residents of Addams Homes so unlike their immigrant counterparts: a bitter history of race-based residential segregation. Anthropologists in particular have worried that because cultural heritage projects in the United States tend to organize all differences under a ruling sign of ethnicity, they avoid a critical interrogation of how institutionalized racism reproduces social and economic inequalities.26 A “benign multiculturalism” supported by “ethnicizing discourses” ensues, one that celebrates cultural compatibility and a shared national community at the same time as it cordons off some differences as inassimilable, even threatening.27 Here, immigrant trajectories and cultural pluralism come to stand in, disingenuously, for “the American experience.” These are apt criticisms, but they tell only part of the story. While early supporters hoped that the site would conjure a sense of shared origins and shared fates, they wanted that feeling to be anything but benign. An early open house, held in the spring of 2009, captured the way they aimed to generate unease among visitors by teaching them to notice the unsettling familiarity of domestic objects. On that spring evening, about fifty curious visitors showed up and moved through a series of rooms. Most were spare, having only a few domestic furnishings, like a rocking chair or washer donated by former CHA residents. The earnest strains of singer–songwriter

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ballads about “home” and oral histories detailing everyday life in the projects played on a loop through a makeshift speaker system. With little else to look at, most visitors’ attention drifted to the walls. Projected photographic images of buildings, intimate scenes of everyday domestic and community activities, and resident portraits from the past seventy years flickered across their mottled surfaces. These intimate glimpses into the homes and domestic routines of absent others transfixed many visitors. Several ran their fingers across the terra-cotta walls, trading speculations about their fissures, flakes, gaps, and a few large holes: neglect? self-destruction? bullet holes? Organizers then herded everyone to a bar across the street, and they encouraged us to swap our first impressions with strangers. I attached myself to a thirty-something white couple, and we got to chatting with one of the exhibit’s organizers, a white middle-aged man who lived in Chicago’s suburbs. The couple praised the audiovisual installations, raving about the way the images cast over textured walls pulled them into the “layers of history” and made them feel close to people too often “silenced” by society. But the domestic objects, they noted, paled in comparison. Singling out a Formica-topped chrome kitchen table as absurdly unremarkable, the young man joked, “I’ve seen that table everywhere! We had a table like it growing up!” His companion nodded, and I too owned up to sitting at a version of that mass-produced table every day in my own kitchen. The organizer waved his hands excitedly at us and exclaimed, “But that’s the point! That table belonged to a public housing family. But all of you have eaten at that table. This isn’t just about that family.” If that table was not just about “that family,” then exactly who and what was it about? The organizer suggested that we were bound to bygone residents by something other than compatible cultural origins or pity for their struggles. By asking us to attend to that humble table’s resonance within our own lives, several possibilities emerged. First and foremost, its unremarkable qualities might push back on arguments about poor people’s dysfunctional behaviors. Nothing, after all, could seem more normal-making than a family’s shared meals. Our contact with the table might also extend this humble thing into all the times we gathered around its edges and spread meals across its surfaces. Feelings set off by the table’s unremarkable familiarity demanded that we grasp our domestic movements not as comparable but as identical to those of bygone residents. Coupled with the right kind of proximity to the right kind of objects, the right kind of attention could dissolve our positions as curious yet removed spectators

Projection at open house, 2009. Images of housing from an earlier era flashed across mottled walls. Original projected photograph by Bob Natkin for the Chicago Housing Authority; courtesy of Paul Natkin.

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and bind us to every stranger who had sat or ever would sit across that table. The table joined a host of banal domestic items (children’s toys, lace curtains, appliances) collected, discussed, and later displayed by museum supporters in preliminary exhibits. Critically, though, moving alongside those things would never efface what supporters called public housing’s “hard stories.” In fact, supporters called for exhibits that openly tackled “systemic” issues like racism’s influence on housing policy, welfare benefits’ production of single-parent households, or the relationship between urban crime and disinvestment. As supporters supplemented the early focus on ethnic heritage by orienting actual and imagined visitors to mundane domestic things and routines, complex issues like racial inequality became thinkable through the lens of individual practice and belief. Visitors who came in as outsiders would be asked to grapple with their own part in the practices, feelings, and processes that made public housing residents— with whom they shared the most basic practices and desires, such as making homes and gathering friends and family members over meals—so unlike themselves.

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Curating Civic Dialogues Ribot argued that “unaided” sympathetic contact can provoke tender feelings just as easily as it can spark disgust. It is the latter that causes people to retreat into themselves or to those of their own kind.28 The museum’s supporters worked with the ever-present possibility that it would disgust its visitors. They sought to manage the possibility by channeling visitors’ movements into unnervingly difficult, inclusive, and personal conversations about their own contributions to public housing’s past and future. They took to calling these conversations “civic dialogues,” a phrase that emphasized just how much they considered individuals’ efforts to confront their antipathies toward poor people to be a duty to the city that they all shared. As movement through the site foregrounded deep-seated antipathies that would in turn provoke civic dialogues, visitors’ own responsibility for public housing’s ruin became thinkable through narratives of family and neighborhood life. The early supporters of the museum knew that it would have no problem appealing to visitors with a personal connection to public housing, such as former public housing residents and their families, as well as to visitors with interests in architecture, urban history, and social justice. Yet the early supporters did not want the museum to preach to the choir. They wanted to attract visitors who had not already got it, visitors who might be downright hostile toward public housing and poor people. They were convinced that an encounter with this site would prove to be a personally transformative one, prodding hostile visitors to revisit their views with the help of curators and other visitors. In promoting the unopened museum, they seized on transformative encounters they had already witnessed with the site. Consider one encounter that early supporters trumpeted as a model civic dialogue. Between 2007 and 2008, informal breakfast tours of the site were held to drum up support for the museum. Sometimes tour takers had approached supporters with a request to see the site; more often than not, though, supporters had invited them with the express purpose of bringing new and perhaps unexpected people on board. At some point during each tour of the empty building, the facilitator would pause to highlight the transformative conversations that the site, even in its raw and unrealized state, had already inspired. Most often the facilitator offered the same story, one about two septuagenarians who had taken a similar tour. I had been on that tour with them in 2006, and heard it recounted many times over the following years.

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Here is how the story and its retellings went: Two old friends, Sam and Anthony, grew up in Chicago’s Italian neighborhoods in the 1930s and 1940s. One still lives in such a neighborhood; the other visits one often to volunteer with local cultural institutions. And both of them have hesitations about an effort to bring a public housing museum to West Taylor Street, the heart of Little Italy. Nevertheless, they accept an invitation to tour the last remaining building at the Addams Homes. Anthony emerges bristling. He tells the group that he had often visited the Addams Homes as a child. His widowed uncle, unemployed at the tail end of the Great Depression, had lived there with his children. Each year, his uncle went before managers and social workers to renew his lease. And each year, they would grill him. Why had he not found a job yet? How long did he think he would stay? This annual public shaming drove his uncle to secure employment. He finally moved his family out. (At this point, the facilitator would typically pause, and some listeners would nod along.) Anthony complains that the resolve of residents like his uncle would be lost in this “monument to unwed mothers.” (Now, some listeners would nod while others would shake their heads in disbelief.) But Sam emerges otherwise. Moved by the site’s ruin, he gently rebukes Anthony. What about the ugly racial slurs they had received growing up in the neighborhood as the children of Italian immigrants? Or the even uglier ones they lobbed at its black newcomers? The barriers erected to keep those new neighbors from local street festivals? (Here, many would lean in.) Sam reminds Anthony that their own immigrant families and neighbors had to band together to withstand prejudice and poverty, as had the unwed mothers. He urges everyone present to listen to how the site urged “us” back toward “the basics” of “family and community.” (Finally, most of the group would erupt into smiles and sighs.) The facilitator would close by reminding everyone about the site’s unique capacity to draw out bitter feelings and antipathies surrounding public housing and urban decline. As unspeakable and contentious as the feelings might be, the facilitator would add, reckoning with them was the only way to advance discussions about racism, welfare, and housing in our own day. Sam’s and Anthony’s repeatedly narrated encounter served several pedagogical ends. On the one hand, it emplaced all visitors within a shared past characterized by local family and neighborhood networks. Sam’s rebuke asked everyone to assume responsibility for the loss of those networks by implicating family and neighborly dramas in the perpetuation of racial exclusion and inequality, as well as

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neighborhood ruin. The rebuke also suggested that listeners moved by the site could mimic the banding together of unwed mothers to recapture their past and at the same time, to ameliorate the inequalities of the present. In this sense, the moral of this civic dialogue coheres with neoliberal governance strategies that empower citizens to meet their own needs by cultivating their capacity to act within local groups and networks.29 On the other hand, civic dialogues like this one suggest citizenly duties that exceed a local network’s responsibility for supporting its members. In order to make Sam’s rebuke circulate beyond his own tour, the facilitators needed to align its narration with both future tour takers and the site’s ruin. Only then could all participants catch the rebuke’s emotions and visceral impressions. But the rebuke would do more than establish the fellow feeling that closed the gap between early and later visitors. Narrated in place, civic dialogues would also teach participants how to grapple with the deep-seated antipathies provoked by this place. Such antipathies would become legitimate but also indispensable components of public reckoning. Yet if visitors were to be susceptible to civic dialogues and their provocations, they would need to practice attending to the textures of place in ways that would compel them to divulge and resolve difficult feelings before an audience of fellow citizens.

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Curating Resilience None of the museum’s early supporters disputed the value of restoring the heyday of the Addams Homes—the look and feel of carefully landscaped gardens, airy apartments, and functioning laundry rooms. They were divided, however, on the value of restoring the characteristics of ABLA’s decline, and they disagreed on the degree of physical decay that visitors would “need” to encounter to enter into civic dialogues. Some worried that in an institution focused on individual families’ stories and domestic practices, it would be all too easy for visitors to attribute the decay to the group during whose tenure it peaked—namely, impoverished African Americans. Despite these disputes, many supporters insisted that re-creating some decay would throw into sharper relief the care that black residents had lavished on their homes, their neighborhoods, and one another. Some even suggested that intimate encounters with decay would help visitors recognize black residents’ vulnerability as an exemplary quality that was worthy of imitation, in that it birthed resilience. This suggestion came up in several of my conversations with early supporters

of the museum, especially in my conversations with Paul, a middleaged white housing advocate. Paul had spent his career advocating for housing that would meet the needs of indigent and homeless men. It was this work that led him into ABLA in the summer of 1996. He had gone there to facilitate interviews between public housing residents and media crews in town to cover the Democratic National Convention. This was the very convention that made public housing’s demolition and redevelopment a compelling backdrop against which to showcase President Clinton’s progress toward comprehensive welfare reform. Throughout the convention, international and national media turned to public housing residents for their comments on Clinton’s domestic policy agenda. A decade later, when I asked Paul about what a public housing museum might do, he did not speak of his extensive work on homeless issues; instead, he recalled a visit he had recently made to Berlin’s Jewish Museum: They had in the wall exhibits [in glass cases], photographs of families who had been annihilated in the Holocaust, or passports. And then you slowly come down this hallway to this large door, and you open up the door and you go inside. It’s a completely bare room with a light up in the corner. Very tall, probably 12 feet to the ceiling or more, and it’s all concrete, totally clear. And the only light is that little window. You can hear the sirens out on the street and you can hear the street noise, and you feel so incredibly alone. Like you’re in a prison, like you’re waiting for guards to come. I was in there for three or four minutes, with other people, probably feeling the same thing. If I hadn’t gone in, I would have remembered, “They did a nice job with the photos.” But it would not have been as telling.

Paul then switched gears away from his “telling” experience of fear and solitude in Berlin to walk me through an exhibit in a public housing museum that might prove equally telling: THE MUSEUM OF RESILIENCE

Something like going into this lady’s apartment in the [ABLA] high-rises [in 1996]. Total mess, graffiti all over. That smell everywhere. Then you open her door and walk into an apartment that is bare, but not un-nice. She had pictures of Martin Luther King and John Kennedy on the wall, and we didn’t even ask her to put them there!

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Paul paused to show me around this conjured apartment, pointing out its tidiness and its photographs of civil rights era icons. “Look!” he said to an imaginary visitor. “They are trying their best, within their limits, to make it nice. They couldn’t be responsible for what was outside the door. But they certainly were for what was inside.” Like Sam, Paul imagined sympathetic contact with the museum as a means to liken the behaviors of bygone residents to behaviors that visitors might consider laudable. Moving through this overwhelming contrast of stench, disrepair, and hominess, Paul proposed, would make bygone residents’ vulnerability, laudable acts, and hope contagious. This became clear when he argued that his ideal exhibit would not “just tell stories”:

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That smell is really important. You could have a line like “and the halls were filled with the smell of urine.” But not everyone has smelled that. Hearing or reading that wouldn’t generate emotions like “God, that’s offensive,” “God, that smells bad,” “God, that people have to live that way.” Or, have them lug groceries up six flights, because the elevator’s broken, again. How does that feel, being on edge, constantly?

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A self-described “New Dealer,” Paul suggested that putting visitors “on edge” might make them amenable to conversations that could garner support for increased federal involvement in affordable housing. However, he never claimed this to be a necessary outcome for the museum. For Paul, the capacity of impoverished black citizens to weather repeated rounds of state-mediated neglect could not be separated from their exposure to its abject material fallout. Further, “being on the edge, constantly” had made them resilient, and that resilience buoyed them through the very decades during which the gains of the civil rights movement and the promises of the U.S. welfare state stalled. Helping visitors sympathetically inhabit and mimic bygone residents’ vulnerability to decay and neglect, however briefly, could cultivate important dispositions within these visitors. It could shake them from the spectator’s comfortable remove by giving them the chance to practice feeling disgusted, indignant, frustrated, or even just moved. For visitors, encountering decay could unlock the pleasures not just of apprehending otherwise but, more strongly, of becoming otherwise. Paul was by no means the only supporter to suggest that the museum’s most unusual feature might be its ability to deflate the empathic

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stances of visitors. For visitors, becoming attentive to a resilience born of vulnerability while also becoming more vulnerable themselves would be the museum’s key pedagogical outcome. When I pressed those supporters who had taken to calling the site “the Museum of Resilience” about obligations that might emerge from this pedagogy, I was struck by the similarity of their responses. It would be great, several told me, if visitors felt moved to initiate further conversations with neighbors about contemporary poverty and housing problems. It would be even better, they added, if these conversations compelled visitors to undertake concrete actions in their own cities, like donating time or money to tutoring poor children or building affordable housing. And it would be wonderful if, through the modest conversations and actions provoked by moving through the museum, visitors might learn to meet the failure of government to protect citizens and their homes with the same dogged resilience executed by “poor and working-class families of every ethnicity” who had struggled to “realize the promise of America.”30 Yet many supporters whom I spoke with insisted that the museum’s only necessary outcome was cultivating a physical and emotional connection to bygone public housing residents. Daniel, the journalist and writer I quoted at the outset of this chapter, drove this point home when he mused in 2006, “Maybe it’s just that the next time you read about public housing, you know more about it. Whether or not you donate money or become involved, you become more human. You laugh, cry, or think a little more. That’s enough.” For Daniel, sympathetic contact was an opportunity first and foremost to get in touch with one’s own humanness and vulnerability, and only secondarily to become more aware about an issue as weighty as the abandonment of one’s fellow citizens. Yet these feelings do not oblige one to take concerted action on behalf of one’s fellow citizens. No one who laughs, cries, or thinks a little more upon next hearing or reading about public housing is any more beholden to the bygone residents who have touched and renewed his or her feelings of human vulnerability, just as a post-welfare state is no longer beholden to protect any citizen. Writing in the context of federal welfare reform in the 1990s, literary scholar Lauren Berlant argued that the national public sphere had been replaced by a conservative conception of citizenship focused on personal feelings and intimacies.31 By implying that the poverty that beset many Americans was exceptional, this conservative conception of citizenship suppressed the inequality and vulnerability borne by many citizens. Although related to this earlier moment,

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the early aspirations surrounding the museum were also novel. As it was conceived at the time of my fieldwork, the museum would render inequality and vulnerability vivid, consumable, and communicable, even as the very citizens who embodied such inequality and vulnerability were being displaced from central urban areas. Rather than being erased, vulnerability and inequality would ground a citizenship ethics that defines collective belonging as the capacity to feel something, anything. Museumgoers would transform harm and neglect into a citizenly virtue by encountering and inhabiting the vulnerability that had plagued disadvantaged citizens. The pursuit of a communicable vulnerability raises difficult questions about the ethical obligations and political mobilizations possible within a sympathetic public. In many ways, the “culture of resilience” valorized by some of the museum’s supporters would seem to be the inverse of the “culture of poverty.” It seeks to ameliorate poverty by understanding and reshaping a particular set of behaviors and attitudes. But here, the behaviors and attitudes in question are not those that belong to poor people. They are those of a museumgoer who suffers not just from an inability to empathize with the disenfranchised but from an inability to feel any vulnerability whatsoever. The civic dialogues that the museum supporters hoped to incite would not call for a reinstatement of the Fordist welfare state’s commitments to its citizens’ basic well-being. They would not push back on neoliberal welfare regimes that, in the face of shrinking social protections, celebrate citizens’ capacity to become self-sufficient by practicing reciprocity and self-help. They would not demand swift or permanent structural interventions on behalf of poor people or redress for the harms that poor people have borne and continue to bear. In short, the sympathetic public would not upend a national belonging long predicated on differentiated citizenship, racism, and neglect. Many of the museum’s early supporters would have certainly welcomed such outcomes, and many worked toward them in their personal and professional lives. Yet staging unsettling conversations and opening the opportunity to feel vulnerable and to emote more would be enough, at least for the time being.

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Post-Welfare Consensus Tourism and museum scholars have noted an upswing during the past two decades in the demand for sites and museums that examine the failure of the twentieth century to live up to its promises of social and technological advancement. Indebted especially to the

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global movement to commemorate the Holocaust, a movement that gathered steam in the 1980s, “dark tourism” has come to encompass everything from memorials that bring veterans into touch with their fallen comrades to museums that commemorate various atrocities.32 Located around the globe, these memorials and museums decry the deplorable treatment of ethnic, racial, religious, or political minorities, all the while they promote visions of a liberal polity that champions pluralism and tolerance as the most ideal future. When it finally opens its doors, the National Public Housing Museum will provide a place for former public housing residents and their families to commemorate lifetimes spent in public housing. Yet it will also provide a form of dark tourism, one that extends liberal multiculturalism’s impulse to transcend past failures of inclusion by folding the prejudice endured by many public housing residents into their cultural heritage. Here, African American public housing residents’ musical or culinary traditions take their place alongside the musical or culinary traditions of the first- and second-generation European immigrants who also passed through public housing. And the racism, sexism, and neglect endured by black public housing residents align with the struggles faced by “poor and working class families of every race and ethnicity to realize the promise of America.” All vectors of social inequality afflicting people living in public housing can become, in political theorist Wendy Brown’s phrase, “culturized.”33 That is to say, they can all be taken to be matters of practice, belief, and identity instead of the result of a social welfare system that has, when it comes to impoverished women and people of color, long shaded into punishment and abandonment. Correcting these injuries means reshaping individual beliefs, practices, or identities instead of overhauling safety nets and policies that continue to hold up one model of work and domestic life as the most viable way of organizing citizenship, its rights, its duties, and its protections. Beyond reconciling ethnic heritage discourses with structural inequalities, the museum will render the display and celebration of resilience a civic virtue in its own right. Publicly and nonpublicly housed citizens will be equally welcome to partake. Here, just as learning to practice and display dogged resilience in the face of past and ongoing neglect becomes virtuous, so too does learning to get up front and personal with the difficult conditions that demand such resilience. Outsiders summoned to a public forming around public housing’s wreckage will, it is imagined, reject a spectator’s empathic remove from neglected bodies and places in favor of the discomfiting pleasures of learning to feel vulnerable themselves.

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It is as tempting to speculate about the outcomes of partially realized projects like the museum as it is to let their stated intentions guide assessments of their impending successes or failures. In this case, I might speculate that the efforts of early supporters to mobilize citizens by making them vulnerable to their fellow citizens’ pain and resilience will have few politically transformative effects, because they take no direct aim at the structures of inequality that allow social abandonment and material neglect to continue apace. I might point out that a celebratory stance on poor people’s cultures of resilience offers a comforting narrative for audiences in the position to consume resilience and wreckage, even as it evades a more critical engagement with the conditions that reproduce poverty. The poor will remain strong, this narrative might go, because they will continue to support and love each other even as they bear inequality, neglect, racism, and sexism. They might even teach everyone else a thing or two about how to love better and about how to survive. But there is something else to be said, especially if we want to better appreciate the discursive and material grounds that guide the creative, world-making dimensions of all publics and especially the utopian ones aspired to by projects like the museum. One way to begin doing this is to spend more time with the admittedly difficult pleasures of consuming wreckage and to acknowledge that dark tourism’s uneasy pleasures attract tourists and scholars alike. They have particularly attracted anthropologists, who have made the documentation of authentic forms of difference as well as the documentation and critique of marginalization an intellectual priority. In this sense, it is worth considering what kinds of publics dark tourism and their guides anticipate. “Pleasure” may not seem like the right word to use when speaking of places like troubled public housing projects and the publics they might summon. These are, after all, places associated with violence, inequality, neglect, and abandonment. “ ‘Pleasure’ does not describe my expectations for Hiroshima,” tourism scholar Dean MacCannell insists of his visit to that city and its memorials to victims of nuclear aggression, “nor my feelings when I was there.”34 He balks at the use of the term when speaking about places of “painful memory.” His hesitation is understandable, but only if we follow his relatively circumscribed understanding of pleasure as “enjoyment” or “fun.” What I have in mind when I use the term is different. What I have in mind is a central ethical pleasure of liberalism itself—the pleasure that comes when even the most reasoned heart stumbles onto vivid scenes it cannot withstand and experiences itself opening onto them.

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This would be the pleasure of arriving at sympathetically enlivened convictions, the convictions that our past mistakes and our past exclusions are not only correctable but are being corrected as we learn to confront them. And this would be the pleasure of realizing that our polities and the promises of inclusive well-being that they continue to hold out can be constantly improved and enlarged. Several decades ago, philosopher Richard Rorty singled out anthropologists as playing a critical role in the realization of precisely such pleasures.35 These “agents of love” and “connoisseurs of diversity” helped “bourgeois liberals” pay attention to “non-persons” whom they might have otherwise overlooked, and in many cases, even denigrated, excluded, and harmed. Rorty insists that because anthropologists have both an ear for and the ears of such marginalized peoples, they can communicate what it is like to bear the weight of exclusion and denigration. And through such communicative work, anthropologists can amplify liberal society’s moral imagination and its political commitment to reasoned procedural justice.36 As sympathetic interpreters, anthropologists teach citizens how to recognize nonpersons as bearing dignity and how to welcome them as valuable “conversational partners” whose presence stands to enrich liberal political society. Together, he suggests, liberals, nonpersons clamoring for inclusion and justice, and the agents of love who help facilitate both might take pride in achieving a political culture that is a “wellwindowed monad.” This would be a political culture whose members would be primed to correct the injuries of past and ongoing exclusion and indifference by being primed to listen to and consider yet another group of nonpersons. For Rorty, “agents of love” give bourgeois liberals a reason to keep clinging to their dreams of eventual universal equality, well-being, and inclusion. The museum’s earliest supporters included many who would endorse this project, including anthropologists, folklorists, journalists, curators, and writers. Many shared the conviction that telling “the entire story of public housing” might eventually yield “solutions” to the tough problems surrounding poverty and neglect. Yet in the interim they were satisfied with more modest and much less reasoned developments than those imagined by Rorty. Regardless of whether or not the museum delivered transformative solutions or procedural justice, these supporters argued, it would afford visitors the pleasure of broadening their own horizons. For them, the promise of transformative politics and policies turned not merely on learning how to be more attentive to poor people or learning how to listen to them. It turned on learning to feel with them. A post-welfare consensus

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would be one that grounded an agreement of minds within an agreement of the senses. In Chicago, citizens summoned to both a sympathetic public taking shape around public housing’s wreckage and whatever consensus it might nourish about the provision of care in a post-welfare city do not want to keep anyone’s vulnerability, especially their own, in check. They do not want to project the immediacy of harm, across other bodies, locations, or times. They do not want mere empathy. What they want, need, and will probably demand as they sort through the aftermath of public housing reform and begin to imagine other practices of collective protection are narratives and experiences that are effective precisely because they are so affective, because they strike at every taut physical and moral fiber of their beings. For those who would be socialized into such a public—into noting, catching, experiencing, and sharing the difficult yet productive pleasures of human vulnerability—there is perhaps just one necessary outcome. And that is reliable contact with a steady supply of wrecked places and their resilient residents who might “reconcile us with ourselves” and reliable contact with agents of love skilled at leading citizens into compulsions to care for or to simply be moved by the poor.

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Epilogue: Raising Sympathetic Publics My fieldwork coincided with another looming housing crisis. In hindsight, its symptoms were visible throughout the Near West Side between 2003 and 2008. Construction crews hammered, pounded, sawed, and drilled from early until late to complete new houses and condominiums and to gut renovations. Would-be developers, speculators, and scammers stuck brightly colored notices to the front doors of both dilapidated and well-maintained private residences offering to buy the property outright, to help owners access loans for repairs, or to refinance their mortgages. “Sell your house tomorrow!,” they exclaimed; “we buy houses!” Long-term home owners in the area felt pressure to look into these offers to manage their property taxes, which had risen in step with the values of their homes. My friends in Westhaven joked that there was only one other thing that an unfamiliar car casing local streets could be, if it was not a plainclothes detective ready to pounce on anything suspicious or a would-be john looking for the prostitutes who sometimes still stood out on Madison Street: a would-be home buyer. Across the country, urban neighborhoods once torn apart by redlining and disinvestment had become attractive again to home buyers, real estate developers, and speculators. The housing bubble finally burst in the fall of 2008, as I was finishing up a draft of my dissertation. Millions of Americans watched as the values of the homes they lived in plummeted. Savings tied up in these homes disappeared, as did hopes for financing educations, retirements—the list goes on. Many home owners who took on new mortgages or refinanced existing ones during the overheated housing market that had buoyed the economy since the 1990s now owed more on their houses than what they were worth. Some stopped paying down their housing debt, leaving cities and regions 239

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that had ridden the housing bubble to struggle with a glut of foreclosures, vacant homes, destabilized neighborhoods, and homeless shelters that could not keep up with demand. Entire sectors of the economy that relied on housing starts or real estate—such as the construction industry and investment banks that had become deeply entangled in the secondary mortgage market—teetered on collapse. The fallout reached further still. In the 1970s, the federal government had restructured lending regulations so that it could expand the supply of mortgage credit by insuring both government and privately issued mortgages. With the computerization of mortgage servicing, banks could bundle loans together into large debt pools and then sell securities backed by slices of the aggregate debt. Precisely because the federal government insured so much of the nation’s outstanding mortgage debt, mortgage-backed securities seemed to be low-risk, high-yield investment opportunities for institutions in and beyond the United States.1 Central banks, pension programs, universities— they all invested in funds entangled within mortgage-backed securities. So when the subprime crisis sent the U.S. economy into a tailspin, its effects were felt across numerous sectors and around the world. My friends on the Near West Side were, however, not that surprised. They were, after all, no strangers to housing crises. As they took in this latest one over the next several years, more than a few sounded what was by then a familiar refrain: It was not just public housing and its redevelopment that had been “built to fail.” All housing was caught up in a cycle of failure. Fleshing out this theory one evening in the summer of 2010, Michael, who had once been active in local politics but had by then stepped back to spend more time with his daughters and new grandchild, argued that like the redevelopment of public housing, the subprime mortgage mess would “displace millions” while “making millions” for developers and investors. Michael had picked me up at a friend’s. He pulled over as we drove past several half-built but abandoned construction sites and a recently completed but empty condominium building. It remains empty to this day. A few of these sites had begun to show signs of vandalism, decay, and squatting. For Michael, they stood as an uncanny repetition of the vacancy and abandonment that had engulfed Horner and the Near West Side several decades earlier. Michael was right to draw public housing’s redevelopment together with developments that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. During Clinton’s presidency, HUD embarked on ambitious public housing reforms. At the same time, it also charged ahead with plans

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to expand “home ownership opportunities” for low-income citizens. This policy move from “affordable housing” to “affordable home ownership” in the 1990s wrapped itself in the exact same discourse that had propelled federal welfare reform. Journalist Alyssa Katz captured this move especially well while writing about the way HUD officials sought to transform low-income renters into owners of affordable homes, and by extension to move them into the ranks of the great middle class who made regular mortgage payments and exercised more responsibility over their living environments. “Both welfare reform and the homeownership push were poised to herd poor people from the raunchy outskirts of the economy into the eye of the marketplace, as workers and then as consumers of financial services,” Katz observes. “Through sheer numbers, this march of millions had the power to heave the American economy to new heights.”2 During Clinton’s presidency, the national home ownership rate had soared from 64 percent to its highest rate in history, 66.8 percent. HUD counted seventy million families as home owners and proudly noted that “40% of the net new homeowners since 1994 are minorities—even though minorities account for just 24% of the population.”3 In other words, the very groups excluded from mortgages in the decades following World War II now buoyed an exploding housing sector. “Homeownership has always been the American Dream,” then HUD secretary Andrew Cuomo remarked of these gains in 2000, “and now the dream is becoming a reality for more and more of our people.”4 Yet if 8.7 million more citizens had joined the ranks of the responsible by the end of Clinton’s presidency, some of them got there through lending practices now considered patently irresponsible. During the 1990s, federal agencies and quasi-governmental entities worked directly with private mortgage lenders and nongovernmental entities to facilitate lending to lower-income home buyers. Credit counseling and flexible down payment programs pulled more renters into mortgaged home ownership. As the housing sector heated up, so did products that catered to those who might not qualify for a more stable loan. Common features of these “subprime” mortgages included minimal down payments, little income verification, and loans with adjustable rates. They too were batched up in aggregate debt pools. As housing prices began falling in 2005 and 2006, subprime borrowers began defaulting on their loans. By late 2008, mortgagebacked securities and their insecure reaches were shaking the foundations of the national and global economy.5 At the outset of this book, I suggested that throughout the latter

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part of the twentieth century, housing subsidies were a cornerstone of a federal housing project designed to boost the economic and physical security of the vast majority of citizens. Over the last two decades, however, citizens have had to reckon with the fact that a system of housing subsidies established on the cusp of the Fordist– Keynesian welfare state had failed to deliver such security. This system had in fact brought the opposite of security, leaving citizens and municipalities to reckon with a glut of abandoned, vacant, and decaying buildings. In Chicago, attempts to deal with the aftermath of the subprime mortgage mess have changed the course of its ambitious public housing reforms. In 2012, the CHA and Chicago’s new mayor, Rahm Emanuel, called for a “recalibration” of the Plan for Transformation. Both insisted that the constraints of a new housing market made plans to continue with ongoing mixed-income housing construction unviable.6 Indeed, developers in Westhaven and other mixed-income communities faced a tricky situation: they could not move their market-rate units. By the CHA’s account (and it is an account that housing activists have disagreed with), the agency had delivered 85 percent of the twentyfive thousand new or renovated units it promised to deliver under the Plan.7 The CHA and the city eventually decided to move away from new construction in favor of working with private entities to acquire and rehab apartments and houses throughout the city, which would then be rented to CHA families. Vacant tracts of land cleared through demolition would also become available for private investment. From its beginnings, the Plan had prioritized public–private partnerships. So while this recent strategy has disappointed my friends in Westhaven, it has not exactly surprised them. What was perhaps more surprising was the process that yielded it. In a move that reflected the ascendency of participatory planning and crowd-sourced ideas and the integration of information technologies into municipal governance, the CHA worked with the city of Chicago and the MacArthur Foundation on an effort initially dubbed “Plan for Transformation 2.0.” This “upgrade” began with an intensive process to solicit the input of what the CHA termed the Plan’s “stakeholders.” The cast of stakeholders was familiar: developers, service providers, CHA leaseholders, and new residents of the mixed-income communities. But in a new turn, the CHA also solicited input from any interested Chicagoan. Meetings were organized around the city and an online portal was mounted for “all those concerned with the future of the CHA to make their voices heard.”8 The CHA made a point of elaborating, in the most quantitatively specific

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terms, how it went about “hearing the voices of Chicagoans.” Thirtytwo “Stakeholder Input Sessions” hosting over 160 organizations, 4  “Regional Resident Input Sessions” hosting over 800 residents, 320 conversations with staff members, 312 “Registered Online Users,” and 240 online comments pecked out into cyberspace later, Chicago had been summoned and Chicago had been heard.9 In the spring of 2013, the CHA debuted the results of this process, a five-year plan that it now calls “Plan Forward.” Even before Plan Forward debuted, criticisms flew that a process billed as open and collaborative was in fact neither. Why, for instance, were there separate meetings for different kinds of stakeholders; what was so threatening about putting developers and residents in a room together? Or why had the participation process felt so rushed? And why was the Internet a central forum for input if the very population that stood to be most affected by Plan Forward—CHA leaseholders and other low-income Chicagoans—tended to lack consistent Internet access? Reminiscent of scholarly concerns about public spheres and public spaces that did not incorporate a diversity of bodies and voices, these criticisms suggest that mobilizing a public is a matter of hitting on the right platform, space, or procedure.10 The more inclusive the platform, space, or procedure that assembles a diversity of bodies and voices, the more expansive the discussions and consensus it facilitates. The more expansive the discussions and consensuses, the more democratic its outcomes. The more democratic its outcomes, the more legacies of past exclusions recede. This book has taken a different approach. Rather than see the formation of publics as effects of the right platforms, the right spaces, the right discussions, or the right interactions, I have sought to implicate material forms and experiences in the processes through which citizens come to see themselves as already a part of a particular collectivity, as already sharing aspirations, sentiments, and duties with other members. I have done this by fleshing out the way contact with a built environment in dramatic social and material flux compelled citizens to reckon with the emerging conditions of care in a polity that seemed unable to guarantee such basic protections as shelter. Throughout this book, I have tracked how a range of citizens, including but not only public housing residents, came to recognize the social and material disorientations of a changing place as demands to consider what was owed to them and also what they might owe each other at the moment of welfare state retrenchment. In Chicago, varied experiences of abandonment—by institutions tasked with keeping their charges safe and warm, by friends and

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relatives tasked with sharing available resources, or by citizens seemingly indifferent to their fellow citizens—have become entangled in the project of public housing reform. Through this project, some have been summoned to imagine their location within a changing place and their obligations toward the people “in” it as the key feature of belonging to a city wracked by the failure of one of the most maligned infrastructures of the U.S. welfare state—public housing. Many of my interlocutors understood visceral contact with changing public housing, its people, and its things to be a medium that transferred qualities and sentiments between unlike entities. Whether it unfolded in shared residential spaces or through poignant stories about housing struggles, such contact compelled them to imagine, articulate, and debate different approaches to poverty and social care. For that reason, I have approached aspirations bound up in such contact as the faintest outlines of a sympathetic public, an anticipated collectivity whose anonymous members might be summoned to feel, think, talk, and act somewhat differently around poverty. Throughout this book, I have unpacked various dimensions of this anticipated public and its spatialization as a more inclusive city populated by more caring citizens. I have done this by examining everything from the movement of decay beyond buildings to the retraining of sociability, intimacy, and attention. What lessons might aspirations surrounding a sympathetic public and the imagination of a more inclusive, caring city that it feeds hold for the study of citizenship and its pedagogies? Citizenship, the formal status of belonging to a polity and the attendant rights and obligations of that belonging, retains within it the idea of a city. This point was not lost on early scholars of the city. Sociologist Max Weber, for instance, positioned that act of committing to collective urban life, and with it, to social ties that exceeded those of faith or kinship, as precursors of commitments to an even broader, more expansive, and democratic polity—the nation-state.11 Over the past two decades, scholars of contemporary urbanism have argued that major cities and their metropolitan regions have once again emerged as a scale relevant to experiments and innovations in democratic governance. Scholars have looked toward cities in the global North and the global South to argue that flows of people, goods, and capital have changed the meanings and practices of citizenship. As second-class citizens, or urbanites excluded from formal citizenship, mobilize around the necessities of urban life, such as shelter or sanitation, they have managed to leverage their presence into a “right” to the city.12 This narrative of expanded belonging or experimentation at

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scales relevant to many urbanites—everyday life and everyday necessities—is certainly heartening. I have suggested, though, that it is important to dissect the precise terms upon which “presences” within urban spaces can become visible and recognized as a salient feature of social and political belonging. By examining how urbanites forge sympathetic links between people and places and how these links came to be learned, felt, and recognized within public life, I have sought to flesh out the potentials and constraints of a politics of social care that is predicated upon a politics of urban presence. For instance, in the early 1990s, Horner residents argued that the physical decay that engulfed their buildings threatened their emotional and physical well-being. They argued that this threat violated prior commitments that the federal government had made to them and that these violations warranted legal remedy—in this case, a substantial recommitment to housing them in a safe, decent, and sanitary manner. This recommitment came at the very moment the federal government was embarking on legislation to overhaul high-profile welfare programs and scaling back on its public housing program. In this respect, the sympathetic links forged between decaying buildings and the bodies that moved within them expanded protections for Horner residents. Yet these expansions also constrained the shape that resident politics could take in Westhaven. Over the following twenty years, political organizing came to orbit the ongoing presence of decay, its effects upon residents, and, more broadly, its efficacy within arguments about protection. Preoccupations with decay have continued to shape ongoing redevelopment interventions in Westhaven. All 1,014 households guaranteed replacement housing when Horner began falling under the wrecking ball have been rehoused. They found what the Consent Decree referred to as their “permanent housing” in Westhaven proper or in private rentals that they have secured through Section 8 vouchers. Yet more recently such housing seems less permanent. In 2011, the CHA moved to transfer an entire section of Westhaven’s first development phase—the Superblock—to the private developers who have built and managed Phase II. The downturn in the housing market had stalled Westhaven’s final phase, and it is still not clear when it will resume. Yet developers keen to protect their investment in Phase II turned their attention to the Superblock and its two hundred units of public housing. They stand right in the center of Westhaven’s mixed-income phases. Newer residents of the mixedincome phases, as well as those living in private homes and condos that abut it to the south, have continued to put pressure on police,

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the CHA, developers, and managers to curtail unsavory activities that seem, from their vantage point, to be concentrated in the Superblock, including noise, rowdiness, and suspected drug activity. Toward that end, the CHA moved to allow the developers to renovate the Superblock and then convert it to mixed-income housing, which the Phase II developers would also manage. The CHA argued that the Superblock had become an island of concentrated poverty that threatened the thriving mixed-income community on its edges. It also argued that the substantial wear and tear on its units—units that were not yet twenty years old—warranted immediate intervention lest physical conditions worsen. In other words, arguments for this conversion, which will result in some former Horner residents being displaced from what they understood to be their permanent replacement housing, were advanced on some of the same grounds Horner residents and their lawyers had used to argue for expanded protections in the 1990s. By the end of 2013, all parties had agreed to this conversion. Those residents able to stay were to move to vacant units while they awaited the completion of renovations. When they returned to renovated homes, they would live in a mixed-income development. And they will be subject to the stricter regulations and higher rents that their counterparts in Phase II now live with. These days, some of the same residents who assiduously monitored building conditions throughout my fieldwork no longer see them as viable points of political organizing or leverage. In fact, they now read decaying conditions as evidence of their impending displacement. One friend who had spent most of her life at the Annex took me on a tour of the decrepit conditions plaguing the renovated mid-rise in late 2013. Mary dwelled on an especially large crack spreading across its facade and noted that the building had been fully renovated in the late 1990s. In the past, I had heard Mary mobilize such decay countless times to argue for maintenance and repair, but this afternoon she seemed far more resigned. For her, the advanced stage of the crack proved that the building really would come down, and she concluded, “We really will have to leave, after all.” Gesturing to the parking lots that still surround the Annex, she added, “They will probably [tear it down to] make it a parking lot.” And when Tanya, my old neighbor, read an early chapter of this book in 2014 and saw that I began with decay, she advised, “You better end it with decay too. Except [tell the readers that] this time, people won’t be coming back.” For these women, sympathetic links forged between buildings and bodies that once advanced protection now advance displacement, in the name of protection. For them, a politics of

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urban presence continues to play out, one that will shuffle and cycle them, their families, and their friends through expanding commitments and ever-approaching neglect, expanding protections and ongoing displacements. Past organizing efforts, they now understand, have made the displacement of Westhaven’s residents part and parcel of official efforts to protect them. This book has not just been concerned with sympathetic bonds forged between buildings and bodies. I have also considered efforts to rescale affections and commitments among a range of urbanites. I tracked the way designs inspired by New Urbanism pulled neighbors into intimate physical and social proximity. The potential of sympathy to attenuate the divides of race and class emerged in fleeting moments, as long-standing residents of the Near West Side and newcomers took in each others’ presence. Yet both groups also reached an impasse of sympathy as they ran up against each other’s modes of inhabiting domestic and public spaces. In Westhaven, even the most empathetic newcomers came face-to-face with the limits of what they could tolerate, while transitioning Horner residents found themselves compelled to curtail how they went about expressing sociability, care, and obligation in everyday domestic and neighborhood space. As much as sympathetic encounters pushed people together, they could also pull them apart. I also looked to attempts to train those with no apparent connection to public housing or its residents to become attentive to both. Supporters of the National Public Housing Museum have imagined spaces in which strangers to public housing would be moved to think, act, or feel differently about poverty. Yet these sympathetic encounters are likewise complicated. They would nudge visitors to be moved by public housing residents’ resilience, by their capacity to weather ongoing housing failures and the dangers and inequalities bound up in them. While residents would be incorporated into the museum’s public, they would be there on very narrow terms: as figures poised to inspire other visitors with their dogged resilience. Those summoned to a sympathetic public might agree that the eventual cessation of housing failures and inequalities might be a laudable goal. Yet to date, it has been secondary to the valorization of resilience. Attempts to forge sympathetic bonds among unlike people and things run throughout Chicago’s ambitious housing experiment. These attempts underscore the fact that even the most mainstream publics emerge and expand in registers that exceed rational critical debate. In this respect, I have been pushing against scholarly treatments of publics that would relegate issues of embodiment and

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emplacement to “counterpublics” and their limited circulations.13 I hope to have shown that less patently discursive modes of knowing guide the world-making dimensions of all publics, even mainstream ones that would advance welfare state retrenchment through a sentimental or sympathetic mobilization of citizens. In this sense, the case of Chicago’s housing experiment contributes to a growing body of scholarship that situates affect, embodiment, sensation, and emotion at the center of polities and the collective political lives and subjectivities they nurture.14 But visceral modes of appraisal do not just support public life and political reckoning. As political theorist William Connolly suggests, the centrality of their presence in political life troubles any divides that liberalism or secularism has drawn between the public and the private, between feelings and sentiments on the one hand and reasoned thought, debate, and action on the other.15 Yet anthropologists and other scholars concerned with the prominence of projects that coordinate sympathy in public life should not stop at making political subjectivities or collectivities safe for feeling, embodiment, or affect. They cannot stop at adding things, in all their pulsing vitality, to the flows that draw people together, to the circulations out of which publics emerge. They must also ask why contemporary projects of care demand publics or subjects addicted to sympathetic and sentimental encounters. And anthropologists in particular must also ask what role contemporary ethnographic sensibilities play in that addiction. From the vantage point of the urban Midwest, tackling the first question seems straightforward enough. This is a region that came to economic maturity with the rise of Fordism–Keynesianism. Its industrial centers produced the things and the consumers that propelled the United States to economic dominance in the twentieth century. More recently, though, this mode of production and the protections for citizen–consumers that it organized through commodities like mortgaged home ownership seem obsolete and unviable. In 2015, pundits, politicians, and demographers continue to wring their hands over the ongoing population loss of the region’s most stalwart city, Chicago. This ongoing loss has helped tip Illinois, as one recent news editorial put it, into “the dreadful category of states with declining populations.”16 Taken together, the city and the county it is located within are struggling to deal with a glut of fifty-five thousand vacant homes, ten thousand of them considered hazardous. These hazards are particularly pronounced on the South and West Sides, where the city has taken to locking up vacant and abandoned houses. It has also emblazoned them with giant red Xs,

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so that passersby, neighbors, responding police, and firefighters will recognize the imminent danger of collapse, fire, and crime that these houses pose.17 These vacant houses pose immediate physical risks, but just as significantly, they also point to tattered municipal tax bases and services for citizens such taxes support. Everything from sound schools to sound public pension plans are entangled in them. The landscape grows shades bleaker further afield from Chicago and Illinois. The city of Detroit, for instance, has been moving since 2014 to take down at least sixty thousand such structures, while navigating its emergence from the largest municipal bankruptcy in the history of the United States. In this context, the basic protections that municipalities have long funded through property taxes have dwindled. Public pensions that make retirement more secure, even roads and sidewalks that make for safe navigation, firefighters and police who arrive in a timely fashion, nights illuminated by streetlamps, tidy and mown empty lots and neighboring lawns—Detroiters no longer take any such things for granted. In the introduction to this book, I noted philosopher David Hume’s passing attention to growing infrastructures at the height of Great Britain’s imperial expansions. Hume looked to several spectacular “compositions” of government—canals, judiciaries, harbors, ramparts—to think about the pedagogical processes through which citizens might become sympathetically enlivened to the interests and concerns of geographically and socially remote others. Hume invested such infrastructural “compositions” with the capacity to coordinate and expand citizens’ narrow sympathies and, in so doing, to advance political and social cohesion. In a region saddled with decimated tax bases, depopulation, looming bankruptcies, and houses whose vacancy and rot eats away at earlier housing, welfare, and governance projects, obsolescence might be one of the few things left standing through which to orchestrate visceral, concrete experiences that bring the interests of fellow citizens into intimate proximity. It is worth noting, though, just how well a public and a citizenry raised and mobilized through sympathy meshes with the general climate of fiscal austerity and small government. What need, after all, is there for expansive investments in the citizenry’s well-being when citizens might rely on fellow feeling to fashion mutual obligations and protections for themselves? Indeed, while beginning to follow their city’s ambitious demolition program in the summer of 2014, I heard some residents of Detroit grouse about pitch-black nights on their block and then entertain the idea of going in with

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their neighbors to buy, mount, and maintain their own streetlights. Moreover, given that sympathy can just as easily inspire revulsion as it can compassion, sympathetic connections seem a fragile structure to hang basic safeties and collective protections on. This is one of the unacknowledged problems plaguing the various civic-engagement, place-making, and do-it-yourself urbanism projects celebrated now by nongovernmental organizations, philanthropic foundations, but also municipal governments in cities like Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans, Cleveland, and Philadelphia. The other one, as my friend and interlocutor Miles pointed out, involves the fact that a protracted history of uneven resource distribution, uneven wealth, and urban disinvestment has left members of lower-income, urban black communities without the resources, time, or infrastructure necessary to mount and sustain effective grassroots organizations.18 It is quite clear to me why sympathy and its potentials should resonate so profoundly with neoliberal governing projects. But it is far less clear to me why they should also resonate so profoundly within contemporary ethnography in the U.S. academy and, in particular, in the discipline of anthropology. A growing body of scholars seem concerned with the work of moral compulsion or, on a related note, with the work that vivid ethnographic writing can do to support such compulsion.19 In a recent article, for instance, anthropologist Joel Robbins expands Rolph Trouillot’s analysis of the “savage slot” to take up what he calls anthropology’s “suffering slot.”20 Trouillot argued in his earlier discussion that “the West” is a term that is geographical in its designation, but that it is more productively understood as a fivehundred-year-long political, ethical, and economic process hinging on overlapping geographies of imagination and management. The West simultaneously required a symbolic figure against which to track its progress and a vision of humanity that might usher in optimism about human progress and improvement. It recruited the noble savage to play such a role, and that move was eventually consolidated in the founding of anthropology. Anthropologists became experts on that savage and on the other worlds and other ways that that savage might ignite within the progressive imaginations of the West.21 Although he did not use these terms, what troubled Trouillot was anthropologists’ willingness to provide endless empirical fodder for the expansive, sympathetic imagination of the West.22 Robbins suggests that the “savage slot” gave way in anthropology during the 1990s to moral optimism surrounding “the figure of humanity united in its shared vulnerability to suffering.”23 He finds ethnographies that convey the suffering of others to be moving. Yet

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he asks whether this focus comes at the expense of what he sees as anthropology’s long-standing commitment to the “cultural point,” that is, its commitment to elaborating the many different ways humans live in this world. Robbins calls for complementing a suffering anthropology with an “anthropology of the good” that would elaborate “the way people orientate to and act in a world that outstrips the one most concretely present to them”24—so, in other words, the worlds that might be, the worlds that our interlocutors struggle, even through a blur of discomfort, anguish, or suffering, to realize. Writing from what Robbins calls the “mature center” of suffering anthropology, anthropologist João Biehl has recently called for something quite similar: ethnographies that convey, in vivid, affecting, and visceral terms, how our interlocutors struggle, through the limits of their language or their social and bodily degradation, to make connections and to articulate worlds that they find desirable. For Biehl, these struggles of becoming hold value because in accounts of them, the potential of a public emerges. “I say public,” Biehl writes, “for ours is a practice that also begs for the emergence of a third, a reader, a community of sorts, that is neither the character nor the writer, which will manifest and carry anthropology’s potential to become a mobilizing force in the world.”25 Biehl, like Robbins, seeks ethnographies that would ignite the potential of publics whose members can, through sympathetic encounters with struggling and hopeful others, imagine otherwise, but also become otherwise. When I sought permission to follow the early development of the National Public Housing Museum, one of my interlocutors remarked that they would surely welcome “a fellow squalor-ite.” That is, they would surely welcome someone poised to capture, in intimate, personal, and deeply affecting terms, the difficult and squalid conditions that plagued public housing alongside its residents’ collective struggles to weather them. As anthropologists and others enlist ethnography to enliven human vulnerability in all its poignant guises, what other tasks might we take up, in addition to summoning publics preoccupied with love, squalor, suffering, dignity, and endurance? In addition to illuminating the social, political, or ethical potentials that precarious life worlds hold for anthropologists and their readers, how can we also tackle the mechanisms that distribute such precariousness, including those that discipline our imaginations into capturing and rendering it in the most vivid, affecting, and consumable terms? But these are all questions for my fellow squalor-ites to answer, if we will ask them.

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Acknowledgments

Before decades of neglect transformed Chicago’s public housing complexes into “the projects”—a particular and particularly stigmatized kind of place—each was a “project” in the strictest sense of the term. Each was an ambitious undertaking that required time, planning, coordination, and collaboration to complete. Over the past twenty years, another ambitious undertaking has emerged in Chicago: the demolition of decrepit public housing complexes and their replacement with smaller, mixed-income developments. Proponents hoped that everyday life in these “new communities” would raise citizens committed to taking better care of themselves and their neighbors. This is a book about that project, the last project standing as the dust settles on Chicago’s massive demolitions. But this book has also been a project in its own right, one that many helped me see through. My thanks to all of them, most especially to those I cannot name. I owe my largest debt of gratitude to those on the Near West Side of Chicago. The area’s substantial transformations upended their lives and their work, yet they took the time to help me grasp the complexity of those transformations and to make me feel welcome and looked after. I especially thank those whom I have called Martha, PB, Michael, Tracy, Wanda, Mary, Jeanie, Jomo, Mr. Green, Elaine, and John, as well as Nayna and her family. My research and the book it has become would not have been possible without you, your thoughts, your friendship, your frankness, and, of course, your patience and humor while I learned how to listen and how to ask better questions. Staff and members of several organizations active in and around the Near West Side graciously allowed me to observe their work, peruse their files, and ask countless questions about their efforts. These included the Horner/Westhaven Local Advisory Council, the Horner Residents Committee, the Near West Side Community Development Corporation, the Homeowners of Westtown, the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, Brinshore Development 253

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Corporation, the National Public Housing Museum, Landon Bone Baker Architects, and a group I call Prisons-to-Community. I thank Richard Cahan, Sunny Fischer, Vorricia Harvey, and William Wilen for their openness to my presence and for their clarity about the stakes of Chicago’s housing experiment. And thanks to those who left a back door cracked open each morning at the Chicago Housing Authority’s shrinking archive. I learned so much from documents in that archive, and I hope they will find a proper home, one in which they will be both preserved and accessible. Several institutions threw their weight behind this unconventional anthropology project, and I am grateful for their support. This project first took shape in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. My advisers, Jessica Cattelino, Susan Gal, Joseph Masco, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Michael Silverstein, did not flinch when I decided to work up the street, and they always insisted on posing the kinds of questions that I think about years later. Also at Chicago, Robert Fairbanks, Nicholas Kouchoukos, Nancy Munn, and Danilyn Rutherford offered astute observations that allowed me to see surprising things in my material. And Anne Ch’ien steered me, as she did so many students, through everything else. I feel tremendously lucky to be pulled into the orbits of the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University and Barnard College and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. I could not ask for a better place in which to reimagine the possibilities of anthropological work, and I am grateful for colleagues and students who take risks with their thinking and writing. Nadia Abu El-Haj, Zoe Crossland, Val Daniel, Severin Fowles, Brian Larkin, Rosalind Morris, John Pemberton, Elizabeth Povinelli, Audra Simpson, and Paige West all read various parts of this manuscript and offered suggestions and encouragement that helped me realize the ambitions I had for it. I learned much, too, from my conversations with Marilyn Ivy, Brinkley Messick, Mae Ngai, Lesley Sharp, and Michael Taussig. Thanks to Naomi Adiv, Becca Journey, Amy Starecheski, Grace Zhou, Samantha Fox, Dory Kornfeld, Tzu-Chi Ou, Amiel Melnick, and every single student in my “Who Cares?” and my “Modes of Inquiry” seminars for thinking with me. I benefited from the research and editorial assistance of Megan Zutter, Becca Journey, Galo Falchettorre, and Violet Nieves-Cylinder. And John Mangin’s careful legal research helped me better grasp the theories that propelled Horner’s redevelopment. Finally, U.S.-based anthropological research and writing can be tricky to fund. Several institutions gambled on mine. The National

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Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship, the U.S. Department for Housing and Urban Development’s Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant, the Horowitz Foundation’s Graduate Research Grant, and the Josephine De Karman Fellowship Trust funded my initial research and write-up. The Black Metropolis Research Consortium’s Short-Term Fellowship and Columbia University’s Junior Faculty Summer Research Support Program allowed me to gather and analyze critical archival materials. The University of Minnesota’s Quadrant initiative and the Visiting Scholar Program at the Russell Sage Foundation provided the space, time, and conversations through which my revisions came together. Research and writing is always satisfying work, but it is also always intimidating work. I am grateful for the eyes and provocations of those who strengthened the research and writing that went into this book. Nikhil Anand, Hannah Appel, Ulla Berg, Rob Blunt, Nicholas Caverly, Edgar Rivera Colón, Dilip Gaonkar, Trevor Goldsmith, Brian Goldstone, Andrew Graan, Gökçe Günel, Issa KohlerHausmann, Karen Ho, Setha Low, Jeff Maskovsky, Ramah McKay, Andrea Muehlebach, Marina Peterson, Stuart Rockefeller, Stephen Scott, Kate Shaw, Jesse Shipley, Bettina Stoetzer, Karen-Sue Taussig, Hannah Woodroofe, Zoë Wool, Rihan Yeh, and Ana Ramos-Zayas all offered critical feedback and provocations that helped me clarify specific points and chapters. Sapna Cheryan, James Holston, Annette Lareau, and Joe Phelan nudged me to write as broadly as possible. Courtney Berger and Pieter Martin found three reviewers whose exacting and generous insights improved this manuscript beyond measure. Pieter’s unflagging patience and enthusiasm for this project, as well as the flexibility and creativity of Laura Westlund and her colleagues at the University of Minnesota Press, allowed me to see it through. Deirdre O’Dwyer and Kathy Delfosse read every single word of this manuscript and wrangled my prose into something far less ferocious. And Scott Smiley pulled together an impressively elegant index. Finally, the friendship and intellectual company of Andrew Bauer, Erin Debenport, Joseph Hankins, Angie Heo, Laura-Zoë Humphreys, Kelda Jamison, Rocío Magaña, Sean Mitchell, Sarah Muir, Kabir Tambar, and Jeremy Walton at so many steps along the way made it a pleasure to see this through. Sarah, Joe, Angie, and Jeremy, you read so much, and left such smart fingerprints all over this book. This book project wound on longer and farther than I expected. Friends helped me make sense of its most challenging stretches and provided welcome distractions. Michael Cepek always offered blunt

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and always right advice about ethnographic research. Annie Knepler, Micah Maidenberg, and Daniel Tucker always found time to throw around ideas about Chicago’s singular development politics. Patsy Evans, Brad Hunt, and Jamie Kalven lent me ears and observations honed by years of working around Chicago’s public housing. Ben Stokes wisely pushed me to pay attention to narrative and made my initial pass at writing so doable. Tony Bezsylko, Matt Curtis, Erin Debenport, Sonia Dingilian, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Anna Gehriger, Chris Hayes, Kiyomi Kimble, Martin LaFalce, Lisa McNally, and Lauren Silver’s generosity, intelligence, humor, and meals sustained me between several cities. In different ways, Julie Shapiro, Kate Shaw, Megan Twohey, and Benjamin Wurgaft taught me to own my ambitions alongside everything that feeds them. And thanks to Elise Zelechowski and Issa Kohler-Hausmann: your ideas, energies, commitments, and friendship have inspired and grounded me for more than the better part of a decade. I have a sprawling family. Sometimes they were baffled that one might spend, as my cousin Simone Jantz recently counted, a quarter century in school, but they always supported my endeavors. My parents, Roger and Kathleen Fennell, prioritized education and generosity and what it can bring into a life. I am so grateful to you both. My grandfather, Richard Leonard, insisted that I not pass up the chance for more school if it came along, “for free.” My brothers and sisters, Dorothy, Seth, Jacob, Brendan, Julia, Charles, Bridgid, and Anthony, lent many ears, energies, and adventures. Julia and Charles opened their home again and again when I needed a break. My nieces and nephews Georgia, Hugo, Kieran, and Saverio have come along and kept me laughing, and my aunt, Julie Leonard, always modeled what it might look like to pursue and sustain one’s curiosity. Finally, my grandmother, Dorothy O’Donnell, still teaches me how to listen for cities that get under the skin. Dan Alexander Torop has the sharpest, wildest, and kindest eyes I have ever encountered, and not just for color. As long as you have made a home with me, you have also lived with this book. And you have constantly reminded me that making work takes time.

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Introduction 1. The CHANGE campaign was most visible as a commuter campaign, but the rebranding of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) extended beyond buses and trains. Within the CHA, the new logo appeared on everything from staff business cards to formal communications with tenants. 2. This book follows many other scholars who have taken the position that inasmuch as “race” is real, its reality is a social rather than biological one. However, I shy away from using the term “construct” because it suggests that this particular social classification is easily unmade. That is not the case. In the United States, where an individual falls (and does not fall) in terms of racial classificatory schemes has long had far-reaching effects on every aspect of her life. Everything from the ability to gain access to sound education and health care to the ability to amass and transfer wealth to subsequent generations has been entangled in these schemes. In this respect, racism is what makes race a social reality in the United States. See Fields and Fields, Racecraft, and Trouillot, Global Transformations, for especially astute discussions. 3. Most personal names in this book that appear in the context of conversations and interactions with me are pseudonyms, in many cases chosen by the person him- or herself. 4. CHA-Research, personal communication (e-mail) to author, December 16, 2014; Chicago Housing Authority, “An Update on Relocation.” In 1999, the CHA’s housing stock consisted of approximately 38,000 units. The CHA reports that between 1995 and June 2012, 18,807 units were demolished, including 12,914 high-rise units. It also reports that approximately 3,000 units of housing were demolished between 1995 and 1999. The overall goal of the plan was 25,000 newly constructed or rehabilitated units. The total number of people displaced is difficult to reckon, but the CHA generally reports that 25,000 households were eligible to return to redeveloped or rehabilitated housing under the Plan, the majority of which were headed by African American women. The number given me by many tenant activists and policy analysts I worked with was at least 75,000 persons displaced, assuming 25,000 households, each averaging three persons. Although this 257

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estimate is based on the CHA’s own assumption throughout my research concerning average household sizes, I stress that this is an estimate. It would not account for people who resided in public housing in an unofficial capacity. I should also note that most figures provided by the CHA do not include relocations that occurred in the years leading up to the Plan. Horner’s demolition began in 1995. 5. Popkin, Cunningham, and Woodley, Residents at Risk; Sullivan, Independent Monitor’s Report to the Chicago Housing Authority and the Central Advisory Council regarding Phase III-2003 of the Plan for Transformation; Venkatesh, Celimli, and Turner, The Robert Taylor Homes Relocation Study. 6. Hyra, The New Urban Renewal; Chaskin, Khare, and Joseph, “Participation, Deliberation, and Decision Making”; Goetz, New Deal Ruins; Vale, Purging the Poorest. These are just a few of the studies that have emerged in recent years that have assessed the successes, failures, and unexpected effects of public housing reform. 7. For an especially sensitive and rich analysis of how Chicago public housing residents experience spatial displacement alongside ongoing anxieties and experiences of crime and violence, see Rymond-Richmond, “Habitus of Habitat.” 8. Ribot, The Psychology of the Emotions, 230. 9. Rai, Rule of Sympathy, xix, 57–60. 10. In the scholarship, these events are called “midnight raids.” The term “public aid raid” for my interlocutors referred to the practice by which staff members of agencies that distributed welfare benefits would arrive unexpectedly at a recipient’s house to find out whether they had additional, unreported sources of income. Most often, administrators were looking for the presence of men. It was assumed that women would or should not qualify for benefits if they had access to income from a working man. My interlocutors also noted that administrators were looking for large consumer goods, like television sets or cars, which would, administrators reasoned, point to unreported income. Such raids were common at Horner throughout the 1950s and 1960s. 11. Addams, Newer Ideals of Peace; Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House; Graham Taylor, Chicago Commons through Forty Years; Shpak.-Lisak., Pluralism and Progressives; Park, Burgess, and McKenzie, The City. For all the optimism that early twentieth-century social scientists and settlement-house activists in Chicago seemed to have had about the capacity of everyday urban life to promote assimilation and encourage dense, secondary associations (especially civic ones), they often noted that the process of assimilation stalled when it came to differences perceived as racial. Settlement-house workers worried about the acrimony that their immigrant constituents expressed toward newly arriving African American migrants. They also sometimes expressed their own frustrations when these same migrants did not respond to their efforts and interventions. Chicago Commons Association, Annual Report 1945–1946.

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12. Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom; Cruikshank, The Will to Empower; Hyatt, “From Citizen to Volunteer”; Fairbanks, How It Works. 13. Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier; Brenner and Theodore, “Cities and the Geographies of ‘Actually Existing Neoliberalism’ ”; Hackworth, The Neoliberal City. 14. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, “The Federal Housing Administration.” 15. U.S. Congress, Housing Act of 1937 (Wagner–Steagall Act). 16. Michael Katz, The Price of Citizenship. 17. Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor; Mink, Welfare’s End. 18. Kornbluh, The Battle for Welfare Rights. 19. Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled; Mettler, Dividing Citizens. 20. U.S. Congress, Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. 21. National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing, The Final Report of the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing. 22. Weiss, “Within Neighborhoods, a Broad Range of Housing Types and Price Levels Can Bring People of Diverse Ages, Races, and Incomes into Daily Interaction, Strengthening the Personal and Civic Bonds Essential to an Authentic Community.” 23. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and Congress for the New Urbanism, An American Challenge. 24. Naparstek, Freis, and Kingsley. HOPE VI; U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, HOPE VI. 25. U.S. Congress, HUD’s Takeover of the Chicago Housing Authority, 12–32, 110–20. 26. U.S. Congress, HUD’s Takeover of the Chicago Housing Authority. 27. An individual’s or group’s location is rarely experienced on purely geographic terms. Landscapes and built environments become repositories for meanings, identifications, and embodied experiences salient to a particular group. See Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places; Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road; and Casey, The Fate of Place. 28. Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers; Michael Katz, The Undeserving Poor; Quadagno, The Color of Welfare; Nancy Fraser and Gordon, “A Genealogy of Dependency.” 29. Žižek, Santner, and Reinhard, The Neighbor, 5. 30. Marshall and Bottomore, Citizenship and Social Class, 45–46. 31. Rose, Powers of Freedom, 167–98. 32. Muehlebach, The Moral Neoliberal, 43. 33. Sassen, “The Repositioning of Citizenship,” 61–62. See also Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed. 34. Holston, Insurgent Citizenship, 8. 35. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 9. 36. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 218.

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37. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual; Connolly, Neuropolitics; Stewart, Ordinary Affects. 38. Thrift, “Intensities of Feeling.” 39. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 380–84. 40. Rutherford, “Sympathy, State Building, and the Experience of Empire,” 7. See also Rai, Rule of Sympathy; Stoler, Along the Archival Grain. 41. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 49–50. Building on Hume’s discussion, Gilles Deleuze notes that the meaning of government in the context of extension is not the specification of rules or standards but, rather, their vivification. 42. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries. 43. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 2. Habermas begins his classic study of the rise of the bourgeois public sphere in early modern Europe with a lament: “Publicity has changed its meaning. Originally a function of public opinion, it has become an attribute of whatever attracts public opinion.” This is a derisive definition of publicity in an age of mass media, but its remarkable under-specificity implicates a range of textual but also nontextual forms that can be implicated in the communicative practices and performative interactions that summon people to collective meanings, commitments, and identifications. His own account makes passing mention of urban pageants, parades, and the nested divides of bourgeois homes, suggesting that emplacement plays a critical role in this process. 44. Weintraub, “Theory and Politics of the Public/Private Distinction,” 5–8. 45. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere; Anderson, Imagined Communities; Gal and Woolard, “Constructing Languages and Publics”; Cody, “Publics and Politics.” 46. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics. 47. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk. 48. De Genova, Working the Boundaries; Ramos-Zayas, Street Therapists. 49. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto. 50. Spyer, “The Body, Materiality, and the Senses,” 128. 51. Questions about intention in planning are important. Yet focusing exclusively on them leads to at least two related problems. First, such a focus suggests that ideas, intentions, and convictions unfold wholly in a realm secreted away from the lived experience of emplacement. Analyzing the built environment then becomes a matter of critiquing the gap between an intended and actualized order. Second, this focus suggests that if we could just hit upon the right intention and execute it in the right way, we might transcend the inequities, movements, and tastes that particular configurations of space have made material. This focus on the right fix distracts from understanding and analyzing exactly why such inequities or tastes should have such staying power in social and spatial life.

1. Across Damen

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1. Park, Burgess, and McKenzie, The City, 94. 2. Chicago Housing Authority, CHA Statistical Report 1977. 3. Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier; Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States; Beauregard, When America Became Suburban. 4. Bowly, The Poorhouse. 5. Ibid., 98–99. 6. Kenneth Jackson, “Race, Ethnicity, and Real Estate Appraisal.” 7. Yinger, Closed Doors, Opportunities Lost. 8. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 56. 9. Grossman, Land of Hope. 10. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis. See also Spear, Black Chicago; Tuttle, Race Riot. 11. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto. 12. Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster. 13. Bethel New Life, “Old Lake Street Community,” 1–3. 14. Padilla, Puerto Rican Chicago. 15. Each high-rise consisted of two buildings positioned next to each other, each with its own separate entrance and address. For this reason, many former Horner residents insisted that the Horner Homes had four, not two, high-rises, and this larger number is figured into their reckoning that the complex had twenty-one buildings. 16. Le Corbusier, The City of To-Morrow and Its Planning. 17. Chicago Housing Authority, “Press Release: The First Families Will Move into the Governor Henry Horner Homes.” 18. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto. 19. Quinn and Christiansen, “Letter to Chicago Housing Authority re: IL Project 2-35.” 20. Hills, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Petitioner, v. Dorothy Gautreaux et al., 425 U.S. 284 (1976). 21. Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States. Section 8 is a voucher program that allows low-income families to find their own rental housing on the private market. Funded by HUD but managed by local public housing authorities, this voucher program allows holders to travel anywhere they like with their subsidy to rent a modest apartment. Holders are expected to pay about 30 percent of their income toward rent and utilities. With the advent of public housing reform, Section 8 became the primary subsidy program available to low-income citizens. 22. Bethel New Life, “Old Lake Street Community.” 23. A group of Black Panthers settled on the Near West Side in a house a few blocks south of Madison in the late 1960s, and under the leadership of their young charismatic leader Fred Hampton, they made major inroads into organizing local residents. Many of my interlocutors who were children

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in the 1960s remember visiting the Panthers’ breakfast and history programs. Chicago police working with the FBI assassinated Fred Hampton in December 1969. A Horner replacement unit now stands on the site of Hampton’s assassination. 24. Gleason, Daley of Chicago; Farber, Chicago ’68; Cohen and Taylor, American Pharaoh. 25. Near West Side Community Development Corporation, “West Haven.” 26. McCarron and Pierson, “Bears Leaning to West Side Stadium.” 27. Near West Side Community Development Corporation, “Our Story.” 28. Chicago Housing Authority, “HOPE VI Application.” 29. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 147–48. 30. Wilen, “The Horner Model,” 70. Area median income calculations are based on Cook County, the county in which Chicago is located. 31. Calthorpe Associates, “Henry Horner Hope VI: Revitalization Plans,” 1. 32. Brinshore–Michaels Development Corporation, “Henry Horner Homes Phase II—Hope VI Revitalization Plan, December 2001,” copies in the possession of the author. 33. For the 2010 decennial census, the Census Bureau shifted census tract boundaries on the Near West Side and consolidated several smaller tracts into three larger ones. These numbers were generated by comparing estimated 2010 demographic data concerning those three census tracts, across which Horner once stood, with earlier census data generated from seven local tracts across which Horner once stood (from the decennial censuses of 1940–2010 and the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey estimates from 2006 to 2010). This comparison suggests substantial demographic change in the area. Yet because these tracts do not map cleanly onto each other, these numbers and the changes they suggest cannot be read as authoritative. 34. Trouillot, Global Transformations, 106. See also Urciuoli, Exposing Prejudice. 35. Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus. My interlocutors’ editing falls under what anthropologist Audra Simpson has recently discussed as “ethnographic refusal.” This is a dynamic in which groups historically subject to the ethnographic gaze refuse to accept the terms upon which this gaze has typically constituted—and managed—them.

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2. The Many Harms of Staying Here 1. This interview aired as part of Inside Housing, a public affairs series focused on the Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan for Transformation and, more broadly, on the housing challenges faced by a range of Chicagoans. 2. Kotlowitz and Dorn, “Don Kimball: The Visitor.”

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3. W. M. Newman, “Chicago’s $70 Million Ghetto.” The best-known account from this period was an April 1965 Chicago Daily News seven-part series that criticized (and sensationalized) declining social and material conditions at the Robert Taylor Homes. The series was filled with lurid accounts of “the Jungle on State Street,” including vandalism, rapes, knifings, fighting, and other violent acts. Completed three years earlier, Taylor was then the largest public housing project in the United States. The series brought negative attention to the city’s public housing program. 4. Lending, Legacy; Kotlowitz, There Are No Children Here; Bernard Rose, Candyman; Isay, Ghetto Life 101. 5. Behaviorist explanations of poverty became prominent in the late 1960s and the 1970s with the growing traction of sociologist and Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family (1965). Published at the height of the civil rights movement, the Moynihan Report, as it came to be known, fleshed out a “culture of poverty” thesis to argue that the main problem facing low-income African Americans was not inequality or racism per se but, rather, ghetto-specific family structures and behaviors. Anthropologist Oscar Lewis was particularly important in developing this line of thought. See Moynihan, The Negro Family; Lewis, The Children of Sánchez. “Culture of poverty” arguments maintained their purchase in academic and policy circles throughout the 1990s. For an overview of the way debates concerning the behavior or “culture” of the underclass circulated through social sciences and public policy in the latter part of the twentieth century, see Reed, Stirrings in the Jug; O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge; Morgen and Maskovsky, “The Anthropology of Welfare ‘Reform.’ ” 6. Olsen, “Material Culture after Text”; Miller, “Materiality: An Introduction”; Holbraad, “Can the Thing Speak?”; Witmore, “The Realities of the Past.” 7. CHA quoted in Wilen, “The Horner Model.” 8. Graham and Thrift, “Out of Order,” 2. Building maintenance and decay are part and parcel of the “humble but vital processes” that rarely make their way into accounts of contemporary urban life. 9. Latour, Making Things Public, 31. 10. Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster; Vale, From the Puritans to the Projects. 11. Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster. Newer households tended to rely for income on Aid to Families with Dependent Children or some other cashassistance program instead of formal wages. Open-occupancy standards established by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 pushed the agency to relax screening procedures that had favored higher-income households. Combined with lawyers’ and activists’ efforts to promote the racial integration of Chicago projects, relaxed screening measures eroded economic diversity across the CHA. 12. Ibid.; Venkatesh, American Project. 13. Moynihan, The Negro Family, chapter 4. Moynihan famously argued

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that “the Negro Family” had come to be structured around matriarchies in ways that emasculated young men and encouraged juvenile delinquency and alienation. 14. Some scholarly and political circles characterize these events in Chicago and other cities as “rebellions.” Throughout my time on the West Side, I heard this term used only once, from someone who did not hail from the area. This is perhaps because my interlocutors were not at all averse to criticism that moralized destructive activities, regardless of whether that destruction was carried out by an individual household or a large-scale institution like the CHA. 15. Obama, Dreams from My Father, 165. See also Venkatesh, American Project; Fuerst and Hunt, When Public Housing Was Paradise; Petty, High Rise Stories. 16. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 106–8. 17. Bennett, Vibrant Matter; Ingold, Being Alive. 18. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 5. 19. Frazer, The Golden Bough. 20. Ibid., 37–45. 21. Keane, “Subjects and Objects,” 200. This is a point that Keane emphasizes when he observes that material things are vulnerable to “brute causality”: “Without in any way determining their cultural significance, objects may be important vehicles of transformative pressure on, or provide openings and new possibilities for, systems of meaning and pragmatic action.” 22. Chicago Housing Authority, What You Can Expect from the CHA, 33–34. 23. Vale, From the Puritans to the Projects. 24. Meehan, “Looking the Gift Horse in the Mouth”; Maslow‐Armand, “The Newark Tenant Rent Strike.” 25. For a history of this case and the program that emerged from it, see Polikoff, Waiting for Gautreaux. 26. Chicago Housing Tenants Organization Inc. v. Chicago Housing Authority, 512 F.2d 19 74-1037 (7th Cir. 1975). 27. Cole v. Lynn, 389 F. Supp. 99 (D. D.C. 1975). 28. Edwards v. District of Columbia, 821 F.2d 651 (1987). 29. Concerned Citizens of Father Panik Village v. Pierce, 685 F. Supp. 316 (D. Conn. 1988). 30. In 1983—that is, between Cole and Edwards—Congress amended the Housing Act of 1937 to include §1437p, which mandated that local housing authorities get approval from HUD to demolish public housing units and that HUD could not approve the request unless local housing authority consulted with affected tenants, replaced the demolished units, and provided decent, safe, sanitary, and affordable relocation for displaced tenants. When the Edwards court nevertheless found that §1437p was not sufficiently clear to create enforceable rights and protect tenants in a de facto demoli-

3. Project Heat and Sensory Politics 1. Wells opened in 1941. Like many CHA projects, it was named to honor a figure who had worked on behalf of the poor. The African American

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

tion situation, Congress amended §1437p to explicitly overturn the decision of the Edwards court and ensure that §1437p provided enforceable rights in de facto demolition scenarios. 31. Wilen, “The Horner Model.” 32. Affidavit of Carol Henderson, November 11, 1992, Henry Horner Mothers Guild v. HUD and CHA, 824 F.Supp. 808 (N.D. Ill. 1993), Evidence, box 6, U.S. Court, Northern District of Illinois. 33. Affidavit of Donald E. Kimball and Submitted Inspection Report, November 5, 1992, I-5, Mothers Guild v. HUD and CHA, Evidence, box 6, U.S. Court, Northern District of Illinois. 34. Rutherford, “Sympathy, State Building, and the Experience of Empire,” 7. 35. Kotlowitz, There Are No Children Here, 17, 27, 28, 239. 36. Ibid., 171, 53. 37. New York Public Library’s Center for the Humanities, “New York Public Library’s Books of the Century.” 38. Kemp, “Acceptance Speech.” 39. Cisneros in U.S. Congress, HUD’s Takeover of the Chicago Housing Authority, 12–17. 40. Kevin Marchman in U.S. Congress, HUD’s Takeover of the Chicago Housing Authority, 33 (my emphasis). 41. Dauber, The Sympathetic State. Horner residents were by no means the first citizens to look toward the wasted shells of their homes and see both the prospect of imminent federal abandonment and the potential for a renewed federal commitment to their well-being. Sociologist Michele Dauber has shown how social protections passed during the New Deal leaned on a history of congressional appropriations for victims of “natural” disasters (that is, floods, droughts, fires, “Indian attacks”) that stretched as far back as the late eighteenth century. For Dauber, what propped up thencontroversial programs like Social Security was not a moral calculus that orbited work but, rather, one that orbited politicians’ and claimants’ capacity to narrate personal deprivation as a disaster that was, in no uncertain terms, entirely beyond their control; the more compelling the narrative, the better. 42. McRoberts, “An Era Begins to Come to an End with Teardown of a Horner Building.” 43. McRoberts and Kass, “Demolishing Some High-Rises Job 1.” 44. Kotlowitz and Dorn, “Don Kimball: The Visitor.” 45. Brown, States of Injury, 15. 46. Ibid., 60.

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journalist Ida Bell Wells-Barnett was an advocate for civil rights and was active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in antilynching, education, and women’s rights campaigns. 2. Klinenberg, Heat Wave. 3. Kotlowitz, There Are No Children Here; McRoberts, “Doctor Cited for Finding Cause Why Many Children Suffered Burns.” 4. Kamin, “Out of Housing, into Homes.” 5. Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom; Bauman, Work, Consumerism, and the New Poor; Clarke et al., Creating Citizen-Consumers; Soper and Trentmann, Citizenship and Consumption. 6. These discussions draw on Michel Foucault’s concept of “governmentality,” with which he charted a move away from a political rationality that operated through external forces and code toward one that operated through a flexible ensemble of programs, techniques, knowledge sets, and theories. This dispersed ensemble would guide men’s self-conduct, disposing them toward persons and things in ways leading to ends suitable and convenient for each. See Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. “To govern humans is not to crush their capacity to act,” writes Nikolas Rose in his gloss of Foucault, “but to acknowledge it and use it for one’s own objectives. Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom, 4. 7. In the winter of 2005–6, just a handful of original buildings remained that included heat in the rent. All but one, the mid-rise at the Annex, had been disconnected from their original heat sources and outfitted with a temporary system while the buildings were gradually emptied in preparation for demolition. Except that it was still “free,” everyone agreed that the quality of heat output in these buildings came nowhere close to that of project heat. Annex residents continue to enjoy project heat to this day. For that reason, as well as my inability to locate any materials concerning its heating system, this chapter does not focus on the Annex. 8. U.S. Department of Commerce, NOAA, “Chicago, IL Seasonal Winter Temperature Rankings.” With a seasonal mean temperature of 29.1°F, Chicago’s 2005–6 winter stands on the warmer side of the record books. Since record keeping began in 1873, the average temperature in Chicago between December and February has been at 26.4°F. Neither reading, of course, accounts for Chicago’s windchill, that is, the temperature felt on exposed skin when wind speed and direction are factored in. Given Chicago’s winter winds, it can feel much colder than the average temperature readings suggest. 9. Bunk beds and deep-freezers were especially important for larger households. Bunk beds could maximize sleeping space for children, and deep-freezers allowed the household to freeze and store foodstuffs purchased on sale. Yet they were both incredibly cumbersome to move. 10. Perhaps this was a proud exaggeration. Yet at the time of its construction, Chicago’s South Side Robert Taylor Homes featured an extremely sophisticated heating system comparable to only one other in the country, at

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. See Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster, 347. 11. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto. 12. Swibel, “Letter to Editors of Chicago Daily News.” 13. Dominic Boyer, “Infrastructure, Potential Energy, Revolution,” unpublished paper, n.d., 2. 14. Chicago Housing Authority, What You Can Expect from the CHA, 9–10 (my emphasis). 15. Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” 380. 16. Graham, “When Infrastructures Fail.” 17. Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” 336–38. 18. Swibel, “Letter to Editors of Chicago Daily News.” 19. Jarik, “Letter to Director of Development, Chicago Housing Authority, re: Governor Henry Horner Homes Boiler Plant.” 20. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 42–43. It is precisely the transformative potential of self-conscious reflection upon bodily dispositions and desires that preoccupied Michel Foucault in his examination of “self relations” in Greco-Roman sexual ethics. An individual in this world examined his own bodily gestures, bodily sensations, and bodily contacts and learned to situate them within an ensemble of practices thought to produce certain forms of pleasure and desire. Through this process, he then might transform himself into a subject who embodied moral conduct. At issue was not endorsements of or interdictions on specific bodily acts, desires, or pleasures. Instead, Foucault considered how an individual reflected on the dynamic forces by which his bodily desires and pleasures might move him into a different ethical state. Moderation was one such dynamic force. An individual ought not deny himself any pleasure that emerged in relation to the satisfaction of “natural” needs, like eating or engaging in sexual activity. Rather, he might “use” these pleasures moderately to guard against their potential excesses and thus develop mastery over natural appetites. In other words, self-conscious and careful use of bodily needs became the raw material of ethical self-transformation. 21. Turner, “No C.H.A.N.C.E. for CHANGE.” Transitioning Horner residents were not alone in their utility difficulties. At around the same time, resident advocates and journalists began reporting unpaid utility bills among Chicago’s transitioning public housing residents that ran as high as $22,000. 22. When residents moved, their bad credit standings followed them. It would travel beyond public housing and beyond state lines. 23. Seremetakis, The Senses Still. 24. Ibid., 10–11. 25. This claim mirrors patterns of displacement: younger people unable to secure housing or to be on a waiting list ended up in peripheral parts of the city, of the metropolitan region, and of the broader Midwest.

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26. Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” 51. 27. Ibid., 66–68. 28. Kant, “On the Different Races of Man,” 46. 29. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 122. Polyani notes in his readings of eighteenth-century liberal thought that biological need, understood as “nature,” gradually became folded into arguments that markets, and by extension societies, were capable of self-regulation. The workings of biological or natural want became particularly important within proposals for the minimal management of poor people. Polyani focuses especially on Jeremy Bentham’s writings on pauper management in Great Britain. “The calculus of pain and pleasure required that no avoidable pain should be inflicted. If hunger would do the job, no other penalty was needed. To the question, ‘what can the law do relative to subsistence?’ Bentham answered, nothing, directly. Poverty was nature surviving in society; its physical sanction was hunger.” Yet even Bentham understood that the workings of discomfort, need, and habit were quite complex. His faith in the sanctions of physical discomfort did not stop him from taking up the ideal kinds and degrees of “pauper comforts” to be offered in his model workhouse and pauper colony, Pauper-land. For Pauper-land, Bentham imagined well-ventilated rooms and halls and a temperature “regulated with a view to comfort as well as health.” Inmate paupers would be kept just warm enough to remain healthy (the same criterion would be applied to the quality of their fare). Yet Bentham also noted that individual apartments should be heated at different levels, some uniformly cold, some uniformly warm, some alternating, depending on what kind of worker inhabited it. He argued that limited indulgences for older paupers, that is, for those who could not shake tastes and habits developed before they came to Pauper-land, would have to be made. See Bentham, “Tracts on Poor Laws and Pauper Management,” book 4. 30. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 66–67.

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4. Experiments in Vulnerability

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1. Near West Side Community Development Corporation, “West Haven.” 2. Addams, Newer Ideals of Peace, 16. 3. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere; Anderson, Imagined Communities; Warner, Publics and Counterpublics. 4. Iveson, Publics and the City; Amin, “Collective Culture and Urban Public Space”; Cody, “Publics and Politics.” 5. Amin, “Collective Culture and Urban Public Space,” 6. 6. Sorkin, “Variations on a Theme Park’’ and “See You in Disneyland”; Caldeira, City of Walls; Mitchell, The Right to the City; Low and Smith, “Introduction: The Imperative of Public Space.” 7. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference.

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8. Allen, Talking to Strangers. 9. Take Habermas’s classic account of the bourgeois public sphere in early modern Europe (1989), often criticized for glossing over the exclusion of women and landless men (for example, Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere”). For Habermas, it was not just the possession of property or a penis that admitted a bourgeois man to the cafés and salons that supported this sphere. It was also his command of interactional styles that allowed him to abstract away from his body and his location and imagine and participate in a wider reading public made up of anonymous strangers concerned with ideas rather than status. Bourgeois men learned such styles as they moved through homes that taught them to appreciate gradations between private, public, and intimate spaces and as they consumed literature preoccupied with the interior lives of individuals. Places like cafés and salons were important inasmuch as they reinforced styles of association credited with bringing strangers together across geographic and social distances. 10. Poe, Selected Poetry and Tales; Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”; Benjamin, Reflections; Crary, Suspensions of Perception. 11. Simmel, “The Sociology of Sociability,” 254. 12. Ibid., 259. 13. Compare this to Erving Goffman’s treatment of face-to-face interaction in everyday life. Unlike Goffman, Simmel does not ground his theory in a binary between authentic and inauthentic attitudes and intentions. This affords Simmel’s concept of sociability much more transformative power with respect to social subjects and the entities to which they belong. See Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. 14. Note that Habermas also makes this move in his discussion of entering into the public sphere, the bracketing of inequality, which is necessarily a performance. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 43–51. 15. Simmel, “The Sociology of Sociability,” 257. 16. While New Urbanists put this golden age of planning between 1850 and 1930, they drew direct inspiration from models of social and spatial life generated by planners and sociologists involved with the Settlement House movement. Planner Clarence Perry’s “neighborhood unit” design has received special attention. Perry first devised this design in 1924 through his work with the Russell Sage Foundation and its efforts to develop planned residential communities in and around New York City. New Urbanists appreciate that Perry’s ideal neighborhood provides for a diversity of uses at the same time as it situates residential space within a five-minute walk of major services, amenities, and gathering places, including schools, recreational spaces, shops, and various civic institutions. See Perry, Housing for the Machine Age. 17. Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere; Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck, Suburban Nation.

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18. Robertson, “A New Vision of Urbanism,” 48. 19. Leccese and McCormick, Charter of the New Urbanism. 20. Kelbaugh, “Civitas and Democracy.” 21. Ibid. 22. Le Corbusier, The City of To-Morrow and Its Planning. 23. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Hope VI, 12. 24. Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. 25. Oscar Newman, Defensible Space. 26. Naparstek, Freis, and Kingsley, HOPE VI. 27. Gal, “A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction,” 79. 28. Chicago Police Department, “What Is CAPS?” 29. Harvey, “The New Urbanism and the Communitarian Trap,” 3. 30. This does not seem to be the case today. In the past several years, the areas especially to the south and west of Westhaven have become more unstable, and my interlocutors have become much more worried about gun violence, especially gun violence spilling over from internecine gang conflicts, and its capacity to harm uninvolved people. My interlocutors have different ideas about what has caused the upswing in such tensions. However, many suggest that the rise in violence is a result of power vacuums left behind after leaders went to prison for drug and related offenses at the height of the crack epidemic. The vacuum, they claim, was filled by younger, much less experienced leaders. These younger groups, they speculate, are much less disciplined and in the absence of tough leadership behave erratically. These are their speculations. 31. Many of the middle-class African American professionals who landed in or near Westhaven had had firsthand experience of Chicago’s public housing projects in the past. Either they had lived in or near them while young, or they had friends or relatives who had. Scholars of black middleclass urban life, in fact, note that, contrary to what is popularly imagined, African American enclaves are not overwhelmingly or uniformly impoverished. They show that middle-class African Americans are much more likely to have had, in their lifetimes, extensive contact with African Americans of less means. See John Jackson, Harlemworld; Pattillo, Black on the Block. 32. Rutherford, “Commentary: What Affect Produces,” 687. 33. Bijsterveld, Mechanical Sound. 34. Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant; Classen, Aroma; Howes, Sensual Relations. 35. Activities that disturbed other tenants, such as noise, were grounds for eviction. However, when a noise complaint emerged, management staff generally worked with residents to adjudicate and figure out strategies to lower noise. Criminal activity was a different matter. Transitioning Horner residents could lose their lease if anyone engaged in criminal activity, especially any activity involving the consumption, selling, or manufacture of drugs, while visiting their apartment. Residents glossed this regulation as

“one strike,” short for a HUD policy known as “one strike and you’re out.” This policy emerged in 1996 as HUD moved forward with expanding HOPE VI on a national scale. It granted a public housing authority the right to evict at its discretion, residents who violated the policy. Within a few years of its implementation it was challenged in federal court, but the Supreme Court upheld it in 2002. See Department of Housing and Urban Development v. Rucker et al., 535 U.S. 125 (2002). 36. Povinelli, The Empire of Love. See also Berlant, Intimacy. 37. Pattillo, “Gentrification.” See also McCormick, Joseph, and Chaskin, “The New Stigma of Relocated Public Housing Residents”; J. C. Fraser et al., “HOPE VI, Colonization, and the Production of Difference”; Chaskin, “Integration and Exclusion.” Scholars writing on HOPE VI sites in Chicago and elsewhere have suggested that instead of delivering integration, their reforms reinforced the stigma, surveillance, and exclusions experienced by impoverished people of color.

5. The City, the Grassroots, the Poverty Pimps

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

1. At the time of my research, the CHA could reject an application or request for continued occupancy if the applicant or tenant in question had, in the previous three years, been involved in violent crimes against a person or property. Westhaven’s standards were stricter, as residents had negotiated stricter screening measures, and a resident committee conducted the screening. Those with an “adverse police record” could be denied. An adverse police record included any drug-related arrest pending resolution or any drug-related conviction; any arrest for assault and/or battery pending resolution or any conviction for assault or battery; any felony arrest pending resolution or any felony conviction involving physical violence to persons or crimes against property. Applicants could also be rejected if it appeared that they could not control their dependents or if other members of the household appeared to be a threat. 2. Congress for the New Urbanism and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Principles for Inner City Neighborhood Design, 34. 3. Putnam, Making Democracy Work; Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart; Etzioni, The New Golden Rule. Like the neocommunitarian thinkers enjoying influence in domestic and international policy circles at the same time, proponents of New Urbanism and HOPE VI argued that a renewed civic life would build a citizenry anchored in place. Its members would associate in ways that expanded tolerance, mutuality, and local or regional self-sufficiency. 4. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, “Notice of HUD’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2005 Notice of Funding Availability Policy Requirements and General Section to SuperNOFA for HUD’s Discretionary Grant Programs,” 13586–87.

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NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

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5. By 2003, when I began preliminary research, MacArthur had already made sixty-five grants totaling $19 million, many directly to the CHA and its development partners. It devoted millions more over the next decade to various measures, including funds to researchers studying the plan’s effectiveness and to entities that could foster public confidence and participation in the plan. 6. LISC/Chicago, “About NCP—New Communities Program.” 7. Part personal motivation, part career counseling, life coaching usually targets well-off people looking to redirect their professional lives, but the Annie E. Casey Foundation sought to make this service available to community-based social service organizations and their clienteles. 8. Castells, The City and the Grassroots. 9. Cash benefits for indigent families were most often claimed by mothers or female guardians of dependent children. However, to qualify for the benefits, applicants needed to show that they were not receiving other income to support children, namely, money from the children’s father. This had the effect of pushing men out of households and confining them to informal or illicit labor. 10. Transitioning Horner residents’ discussions of how they handled dwindling benefits align with what scholars have written about the challenges of stretching public aid payments. Even prior to Welfare Reform— the 1996 legislation that abolished Aid for Families with Dependent Children and replaced it with a temporary assistance program—impoverished women could not rely on the benefits to which they had typically had access (that is, AFDC, food stamps, subsidized housing) to meet their needs. They had to cobble together additional sources of income, such as, for example, working off the books or borrowing from family and friends. The situation became more strained as AFDC was abolished to push women into the formal workplace. See Edin and Lein, Making Ends Meet. 11. When convergences of blood and space were not openly acknowledged—for instance, when a child resulted from a sexual tryst or a sexual assault—family and neighbors took careful note. It was not uncommon for emotional and material support to flow to such tacit ties, often from female relatives of the child’s biological father. 12. Stack, All Our Kin, 107. 13. Geschiere, Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust. 14. Gluckman, “Papers in Honor of Melville J. Herskovits,” 313. 15. Geschiere, Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust, 17. See also Siegel, Naming the Witch. 16. Lomnitz, “Ritual, Rumor, and Corruption in the Constitution of Polity in Modern Mexico,” 33. 17. Reed, Stirrings in the Jug; Marwell, Bargaining for Brooklyn. 18. Venkatesh, American Project, 101; see also Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster. 19. In a way reminiscent of Marcel Mauss’s “spirit of the gift,” these

women located exchanges that expanded everyone’s well-being between not two parties but three: the one who gives, the one who receives, and those to whom both the giver and the receiver appeal as they advance the ongoing circulation of gifts. Mauss, The Gift, 167–68. See also Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, 167–68. 20. Peck and Theodore, “Carceral Chicago.” 21. Gilmore, Golden Gulag; Sampson and Loeffler, “Punishment’s Place.” 22. Peck and Theodore, “Carceral Chicago.” 23. McQuarrie, “No Contest,” 169.

Resurrections 1. Several scholars have examined the history and cultural politics that have defined and redefined this area. See Padilla, Puerto Rican Chicago; Pérez, The Near Northwest Side Story; Ramos-Zayas, National Performances.

6. The Museum of Resilience

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

1. National Public Housing Museum (NPHM), “Home.” 2. See the introduction and chapter 2 above. 3. Lewis, The Children of Sánchez; Moynihan, The Negro Family. 4. Reed, Stirrings in the Jug. 5. Butt, “The Suffering Stranger”; Berlant, “Compassion (and Withholding)”; Ticktin, Casualties of Care; Fassin, Humanitarian Reason; Muehlebach, The Moral Neoliberal; Thomas and Clarke, “Globalization and Race.” 6. Boltanski, Distant Suffering. 7. Ibid., 192. 8. See chapter 1 above. 9. Mazzarella, “Affect: What Is It Good For?” 10. Ribot, The Psychology of the Emotions, 230. 11. Ibid., 231–34. 12. Ibid., 231. 13. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and Chicago Housing Authority, Papers regarding Determination of Eligibility Notification, Chicago Housing Authority Properties, 9. 14. International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, “About Us / Sites of Conscience.” 15. Huyssen, Present Pasts, 13. 16. Sinclair, The Jungle; Wright, Native Son; Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun; Kotlowitz, There Are No Children Here. For examples of this genre beyond Chicago, see Riis and Museum of the City of New York, How the Other Half Lives; Agee and Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. 17. Mead, Room with a Rat. 18. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere; Gal

273

and Woolard, “Constructing Languages and Publics”; Warner, Publics and Counterpublics. 19. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 53, 62. 20. Gaonkar and Povinelli, “Technologies of Public Forms.” 21. Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape; Stewart, Ordinary Affects. 22. Stewart, Ordinary Affects, 27. 23. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 62. 24. Telesis Corporation and Austin, A Museum of Public Housing, 9–10. 25. Ibid., 16. 26. Di Leonardo, “White Ethnicities, Identity Politics, and Baby Bear’s Chair”; Trouillot, Global Transformations. 27. Handler and Gable, The New History in an Old Museum; Silverstein, “The Whens and Wheres—As Well As Hows—of Ethnolinguistic Recognition”; Urciuoli, Exposing Prejudice. 28. Ribot, The Psychology of the Emotions, 233. 29. Cruikshank, The Will to Empower; Hyatt, “From Citizen to Volunteer”; Muehlebach, The Moral Neoliberal. 30. National Public Housing Museum (NPHM), “Home.” 31. Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City. 32. Lennon, Dark Tourism; White and Frew, “Exploring Dark Tourism and Place Identity”; Williams, Memorial Museums. 33. Brown, Regulating Aversion, 116. 34. MacCannell, The Ethics of Sightseeing, 168. 35. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 203–10. 36. Ibid., 207.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

Epilogue

274

1. Massey, “Risk and Regulation in the Financial Architecture of American Houses.” 2. Alyssa Katz, Our Lot, 42–43. 3. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, “1999 Homeownership Rate Hits Record Annual High of 66.8%.” 4. Ibid. 5. Massey, “Risk and Regulation in the Financial Architecture of American Houses”; Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States. 6. City of Chicago, Mayor’s Press Office, “Chicago Housing Authority Launches Plan for Transformation 2.0 Planning Process.” 7. Chicago Housing Authority, “Plan Forward: Communities That Work.” 8. Chicago Housing Authority, “Plan Forward Stakeholder Input Report.”

NOTES TO EPILOGUE

9. Chicago Housing Authority, “Plan Forward: Communities That Work,” 9. 10. See chapter 4 above. 11. Weber, The City. 12. Holston and Appadurai, “Cities and Citizenship”; Sassen, “The Repositioning of Citizenship”; Roy, City Requiem, Calcutta. See also Lefebvre, Writings on Cities. 13. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics; Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape; Iveson, Publics and the City. Theorists of publics have by no means ignored issues of embodiment. For instance, Michael Warner notes that although publics appear open to indefinite strangers, various criteria always select for their participants. These criteria inevitably have positive content, which inevitability makes the disembodied, abstract subject implied by modern publicity a shaky pretense. Warner observes that the selection criteria may include shared social spaces or a shared habitus. Yet because his discussion of mainstream publics focuses on such criteria as linguistic style, reading practices, and idiolect, issues of embodiment, territorial location, and creativity become associated with the limited circulations of “counterpublics.” Even Jürgen Habermas, who has been taken to task for his hyperrational conception of the bourgeois public sphere, considered the way its disembodiments and abstractions hinged on attention and reflexivity inculcated in bourgeois men as they learned physically to navigate the emerging public and private divides of their domestic spaces, mercantile activities, and social gathering places. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 45. 14. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain; Gould, Moving Politics; Berlant, Cruel Optimism; Muehlebach, The Moral Neoliberal; Mazzarella, Censorium. 15. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist, 36. 16. Chicago Tribune Editorial Board, “Goodbye, Illinois.” 17. Gallun and Maidenberg, “Reckless Abandon.” 18. See chapter 5, above. 19. Biehl, Vita; Garcia, The Pastoral Clinic; Holmes, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies; Bourgois, Righteous Dopefiend. These recent works exemplify this ethnographic sensibility in the most engrossing and compelling fashion. 20. Robbins, “Beyond the Suffering Subject.” 21. Trouillot, Global Transformations, 9–23. 22. Joseph Hankins and Catherine Fennell, “Liberalism’s Witness, Anthropology’s Suffering Slot: On Feeling Bad to Feel Better,” unpublished paper, draft, 2015. 23. Robbins, “Beyond the Suffering Subject,” 450. 24. Ibid., 457. 25. Biehl, “Ethnography in the Way of Theory,” 577.

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Index Abbot Homes, 208 ABLA Homes, 208, 213, 230. See also Addams Homes accusations: of corruption, 171, 180, 193–99; of greed, 180, 186–93; “poverty pimping,” 171, 180, 183–86, 187 Addams, Jane, 139–40, 208 Addams Homes: boiler at, 110; ethnic history of, 223–24; landmark status eligibility, 218–19; as museum site, 208, 209, 218–19. See also National Public Housing Museum adverse police record, 271n1 affect: New Urbanism and affective ties of place, 146; publics and, 222; scholarship on, 23. See also bodies and embodiment; sympathy and affidavits and reports: Henderson, 89–90, 91; Kimball, 71, 90, 96–97 African American identity vs. black, 60–61 Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC, formerly Aid to Dependent Children), 14–16, 263n11 Amin, Ash, 141 Angelou, Maya, 94–95 Annie E. Casey foundation, 174, 272n7 annual contributions, 75

art, public, 203–5 aspiration, 17, 27–28 assimilation, racial difference, and Chicago, 258n11 attention, shared, 222–23 backyard vs. “fronts,” 142–44 baseboard radiators, 108, 112 Bennett, Jane, 81 Bentham, Jeremy, 268n29 Berlant, Lauren, 233 Biehl, João, 251 Bijsterveld, Karin, 159 Black Panthers, 50, 261n21 black vs. African American identity, 60–61 Blagojevich, Rod, 196 Blues District, 203, 204 bodies and embodiment: Brown on politics of discrimination and, 97–98; decay and, 90–91, 94; Enlightenment views of race, nature, culture, and climate and, 129; Foucault on self-conscious use of the body and ethical self-transformation, 267n20; mediated by ethnographer’s body, 62–63; noise and, 158–59; Polyani on Enlightenment views of “nature” and self-regulation, 268n29; practice-based theories of social life and, 128–29; project heat and, 106, 114–16, 127–31; 295

INDEX

publics and, 27, 247–48, 275n13; rotting things and children’s bodies, 94; sensations, social and material history of, 124; sensory memory, 124–25; sympathy and, 22–23 Boltanski, Luc, 214–15 Boyer, Dominic, 109 branded urban enclaves, 203–5 bricks kept as memorabilia, 45 Brinshore–Michaels, 54 Bronzeville, 101–2, 203 Brown, Wendy, 97–98, 235 Bud Billiken Day Parade and Picnic (Bronzeville), 101–2, plate 3 building conditions. See decay and decline Burnett, Walter, Jr., 195 Bush, George H. W., 16 bystanders, 21–22, 25, 92, 214–15

296

Cabrini–Green Homes, 37, 88, 216 Callner Senior Apartments, 1–2 Calthorpe Associates, 53 care: CHANGE Campaign and, 2; HOPE VI and, 17; as maintenance or protection vs. as attention or concern, 2–3; physics of post-welfare care, 13–19; potentials and constraints of politics of social care, 245; public sociability and, 159–60, 161, 166 cause industry, 172–77, 200 Cayton, Horace, 41 Central Advisory Council, 186, 190 CHANGE campaign, 1–3, 27, 257n1 CHANGE pennants, plate 3 CHAOS Campaign, 3, 4, 9, 27 Chicago City Council, 42 Chicago Department of Human Services, 181 Chicago Housing Authority (CHA): Central Advisory

Council and, 186; CHANGE campaign, 1–3, 27, 257n1; CHANGE logo, 1, 3, 68, 257n1; demand for CHA housing, 43; financial issues, 75–76; grievance procedures, 85; headquarters, 67–68; HUD takeover of, 18, 95–96; leasing criteria, 19; mosaic seal of, 67–68, plate 2; National Public Housing Museum and, 207, 223; parade float, 101–2, plate 3; Plan for Transformation, 5–6, 173, 174, 257n4; Plan for Transformation 2.0/Plan Forward, 242–43; projects after 1949 National Housing Act, 39; racial geographies, efforts to stabilize, 42; resident services funding slashed by, 173; Service Connector program and, 181; siting practices of, 45–46, 85; tenant handbook, 84. See also legal actions and court cases Chicago Housing Tenants Organization v. Chicago Housing Authority, 85 Chicago Police Department and CAPS program, 151 “chokes” (donated meals), 199 Cisneros, Henry, 95, 96 citizenship: Berlant on conservative conception of, 233; CHA criteria and, 19; cities and, 244–45; immediacy and, 19–20; urban citizenship movements, 20–21 civics: curation of civic dialogues at the National Public Housing Museum, 228–30, 234; meanings of, 10; the neighbor in civic imagination of Chicago, 139–40; of neighborly care, 166; sympathetic, 157. See also community

renovation option, 46; Horner Residents Committee established by, 186; income mix under, 52–53; LAC role, 57; legal protections granted by, 59, 92; “permanent housing” and, 245–46 conspiracy theories over heat, 127–28 court cases. See legal actions and court cases crime: anxieties around, 153; criminal activity as grounds for eviction, 270n35; gun violence, anxieties about, 270n30 culture of poverty paradigms, 212, 233 Cuomo, Andrew, 241 Daley, Richard M., 4 Damen Avenue, 33–35 dark tourism, 235–36 Dauber, Michele, 265n41 D.C. Housing Authority, 86 decay and decline: bodies and, 90–91, 94; Brown on political efficacy and embodiment of discrimination and, 97–98; concrete blocks, stairwells, handrails, and light bulbs, 83; de facto demolition theory, 86–87, 88–89, 264n30; financial roots of, 74–76; HUD takeover of CHA and, 95–96; Kimball report and affidavit, 71, 72–73, 83–84, 90, 96–97; Kotlowitz articles and book, 92–95; Latour on material entanglements, 74; “leaky” or “vibrant” things and sympathy, 80–83; legal cases and legal experiments, 84–92; mortgage exclusion and, 41; narratives of, 77–80, 246; in national media, 73; National

INDEX

work, local leadership, and resource redistribution; neighbors and public sociability Civil Rights Act (1964), 263n11 civil rights paradigms of poverty, 212 class: social encounters across. See neighbors and public sociability climate and weather in Chicago, 107, 117, 266n8 Clinton, Bill, 16, 95, 96, 145, 231, 241 “cold-water flats,” 108 Cole v. Lynn, 86 Commonwealth Edison (ComEd), 102 Community Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) program, 151, 160, 161, 163 community work, local leadership, and resource redistribution: accusations of corruption, 171, 180, 193–99; accusations of greed, 180, 186–93; the cause industry, 172–77, 200; funding streams, 174; HOPE VI and civic engagement ideals, 171–72; kin and near-kin networks of obligation and scandal, 172, 177–80; LAC and, 186–93; Mauss on “spirit of the gift,” 272n19; off-lease arrangements and kinship obligations, 121; “poverty pimping,” 171, 180, 183–86, 187; the prison industry, 193; Quality of Life Plan for Greater Westhaven and, 169–71; the refrigerator story, 169, 171, 199; rumors and gossip, role of, 180–81; Service Connector program, 181–86 compassion, 213–15 concrete blocks, 83 Connolly, William, 248 consensus and publics, 27 consent decree: demolition vs.

297

INDEX

298

Public Housing Museum and curation of, 230–33; project heat and, 126–27; racialized associations with, 41; riot and, 78–79; at Robert Taylor Homes, 263n3; stigma and assumptions of irresponsibility, 71–72, 73, 76, 93; sympathetic bonds, forging of, 89–92, 94–98; sympathetic magic and, 82; tenant handbook guidelines and, 84; transformative pressure and, 82–83, 84, 88; vacancy and, 87, 89 de facto demolition theory, 86–87, 88–89, 264n30 Deleuze, Gilles, 260n41 Democratic National Convention (1996) at United Center, 96, 231 demographics: Chicago’s racial trends, 28–29, 43; Great Migration, 41; Near West Side, racial and ethnic history of, 41–42, 48; politics of difference and, 28–29; population loss in Chicago, 248–49 demolition, plate 1; Annex vote to renovate rather than demolish, 46–47; by CHA across Chicago, 5–6; commencement of, 3–4; de facto demolition concept, 86–87, 88–89, 264n30; early spot demolitions, 48, 50; HUD guidelines, 86–87; numbers of, 257n4; one-to-one replacement rule, 87, 92 design: Annex, 45–47; Extension, 44–45; New Urbanism and, 53; Project No. Illinois 2-19 (Homes), 42; Westhaven, 53–54 Detroit, 249–50 difference, politics of: assimilation, racial difference, and Chicago, 258n11; demographics and, 28–29; housing scholarship and,

28; racialized bodily difference attached to project heat, 115, 127–31 discrimination: Brown on political efficacy entangled in embodiment of, 97–98; court cases on, 85, 97; deracialization of, 29; focus on building conditions rather than, 69; residential, 28, 40; sensory politics and, 126, 127; structural, 69, 212, 235; by welfare and housing policies, 9 displacement: heat conspiracy theories and, 128; in the name of protection, 246–47; numbers, 257n4; to peripheral areas, 6; in place (sensory displacement), 18, 59; younger people and, 267n25 distributive politics. See community work, local leadership, and resource redistribution dogs and sociability, 162–64 Drake, St. Clair, 41 Driehaus Foundation, 207–11, 219 Du Bois, W. E. B., 28 Edwards v. District of Columbia, 86, 87, 264n30 Emanuel, Rahm, 242 ethnic heritage and the National Public Housing Museum, 223–25 ethnographic refusals, 62, 262n35 eviction: criminal activity as grounds for, 270n35; HUD “one strike” policy, 271n35; rumors of man evicted for sharing music, 135–36 failure, cycle of, 240 family obligations. See kinship networks and obligations Fanon, Frantz, 207

Father Panik Village case, 86, 88 fear: Berlin’s Jewish Museum and experiences of, 231; housing projects and stereotypes of, 37; neighbor encounters and, 156, 161; sensory politics of heat and, 131 Federal Housing Administration (FHA), 14, 40–41 financial decay, 75–76 fires, 123–24 fireworks, 158–59 football stadium project (failed), 51 Fordism–Keynesianism: architecture of, 8, 9; citizenship and, 20; housing subsidies and, 242; industrial cities, welfare reconfiguration, and, 13; project heat and, 109; urban Midwest and, 32, 248 Foucault, Michel, 130, 266n6, 267n20 foundation grants, 174, 272n5 Frazer, James, 82, 91 Fun Day, 179

INDEX

Gal, Susan, 148–49 Garfield Park, 50 Geschiere, Peter, 181 Gluckman, Max, 181 goal setting under Service Connector program, 181–85 Goffman, Erving, 269n13 golden age of city planning, 145–46, 269n16 gossip, 179–81 governmentality: Foucault on, 266n6 grass: prohibition from walking on, 143 grassroots, 173–75. See also community work, local leadership, and resource redistribution grievance procedures, 85 gun violence: anxieties about, 270n30

Habermas, Jürgen, 260n43, 269n9, 269n14, 275n13 Hampton, Fred, 261n21 handrails, 83, 90–91 Harvey, David, 153 heating and project heat: Annex and, 266n7; baseboard radiators, 108, 112; Bentham on pauper comforts and, 268n29; bodily habituation or addiction to, 114–16; boiler at Jane Addams Homes, 110; CHA promises of abundant heat for comfort and happiness, 109–13, 111; Chicago climate and, 107, 117; collective benefits and dangers of, 117–18; ComEd at parade and, 102; conspiracy theories over, 127–28; early journalist accounts of, 104–5; embodiment and, 94; fires from tampering with, 123–24; Fordist–Keynesian economic philosophy and, 109; heat marches, proposed, 127; heat plants, 108, 109, 110; infrastructures, 108, 113–14; kinship obligations and, 121–22; LAC and legal proposals over, 125–27; longing for, 106–7, 116–17; meanings of project heat, 102, 119; open windows, 104, 114; program officer’s bodily experience of, 22; racialized bodily difference attached to, 115, 127–31; self-sufficiency, bodily mastery, and, 118–19, 130; sensory politics and, 124–31; strategies for heat, 122–24; time and seasonality in relation to, 116, 118; utility bills, credit issues, and financial distress, 104, 120–21; utility mandate and shift to private utility market, 103–4 Henry Horner Annex (the Valley): design, 45–47; leasing criteria

299

INDEX

300

on ex-offenders, 170; Mothers Guild and, 87; project heat in, 266n7; recent decay at, 246; separation from the Olds and the New, 46; as subsection, 33–34, 38; vacancy rates, 87; vote to renovate rather than demolish, 46–47 Henry Horner Extension (the New): Cisneros on stage at, 96; design, 44–45; early tenants of, 49; project heat in, 108; as subsection, 33–34, 38; vacancy rate, 87. See also Westhaven Henry Horner Homes (the Olds): project heat in, 108; setback, 147, 148; as subsection, 33–34, 38. See also Westhaven Henry Horner Mothers Guild v. HUD and CHA, 18, 53, 87–92 Hills v. Gautreaux, 45–46, 85 Holabird, John, 218 holiday baskets, 60, 189, 190, 191 Holston, James, 21 home ownership trends, 241 Homeowners of Westtown, 58 Home Visitors Program, 57; project heat and, 105; Service Connector program and, 181–82; utility bills and, 104 HOPE VI (Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere) program (HUD): civic engagement ideals, 171, 271n3; HUD takeover of CHA and, 18; income mix targets, 52–53; Mothers Guild case and, 95–96; New Urbanism and, 16–17, 53, 145 Horner complex (Governor Henry Horner public housing complex), 5; demolitions, 3, plate 1; earliest phase of demolition and redevelopment, 34; early history of, 39–42; HUD, HOPE

VI and, 18; number of buildings in, 261n15; population of, at height, 38; Project No. Illinois 2-19, 39, 42–44; Project No. Illinois 2-35, 44; as racial project, 47–50; subsections of, 33–35, 38; vacancy rates, 87. See also decay and decline Horner Family Reunion Picnic, 33, 197 Horner Residents Committee (HRC), 186 Housing Act (1937), 14, 75, 86–87, 264n30 Housing and Urban Development, Department of (HUD): annual contributions from, 75; block grants, shift toward, 173; CHA takeover, 18, 95–96; demolition guidelines, 86–87; direct services defunding and shift to block grants, 173; HOPE VI program, 16–17; Kotlowitz book, influence of, 95–96; New Urbanism and, 145; “one strike” policy, 271n35; policy shift from affordable housing to affordable home ownership, 241. See also legal actions and court cases housing as racial project, 41, 47–50, 55–56 housing bubble, 239–40 housing covenants, racially restrictive, 41–42 housing exhibits in Chicago, 220–21 Housing in Chicago exhibition (late 1940s), 221 Hume, David, 21–22, 25, 249 Huyssen, Andreas, 220 Hyde Park neighborhood, 135 Ickes Homes, 42 Ida B. Wells Homes, 43, 101, 265n1 identity theft, 120–21

immediacy and citizenship, 19–20 immigrants in Near West Side, 42, 223–24 infrastructural compositions (Hume), 249 integration, residential: opposition to, 41–42 intention, human, 32, 260n51 International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, 219 intimacy and public sociability, 156, 165–66 intuition, 216–17 Jackson, Camille, 1–2 Jacobs, Jane, 148, 153 Jensen, Jens, 218 Jewish Museum (Berlin), 231 Johnson & Lee, 53 Kamin, Blair, 104–5 Kant, Immanuel, 129 Katz, Alyssa, 241 Keane, Webb, 82–83, 264n21 Kelbaugh, Douglas, 146–47 Kemp, Jack, 95 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 50–51, 78–79, 127 kinship networks and obligations: community work, resource redistribution, and, 172, 177–80; gossip, role of, 179–80; modes of reckoning vulnerability and, 167; project heat and, 121–22; visitors and social calls, struggles with, 164–65 Kotlowitz, Alex, 92–95, 98, 220

MacArthur Foundation, 174, 242, 272n5 MacCannell, Dean, 236 Madison Street, 38, 41, 50–51, 78–79, 204, 239 magic, sympathetic, 82, 91 Marshall, T. H., 19–20

INDEX

labor, relational, 20 Lake Street Community, 42 Landon Bone Baker, 54 Larkin, Brian, 113 Latour, Bruno, 74, 80 leadership, local. See community

work, local leadership, and resource redistribution leasing criteria: on ex-offenders and violent crime, 170, 193, 271n1; mandatory work requirements, 19; stricter, under redevelopment, 9; threats to tenure, 59, 62, 166–67, 176, 193; utility accounts, individual, 103. See also off-lease arrangements legal actions and court cases: Chicago Housing Tenants Organization v. Chicago Housing Authority, 85; Cole v. Lynn, 86; considered, over utility bills, 126–27; Edwards v. District of Columbia, 86, 87, 264n30; Father Panik Village case, 86, 88; Henry Horner Mothers Guild v. HUD and CHA, 18, 52–53, 87–92; Hills v. Gautreaux, 45–46, 85; transformative pressure and, 84. See also consent decree Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago (LAFC), 87 Lewis, Oscar, 263n5 life coaching, 174, 272n7 Little Italy, Chicago, 208 Local Advisory Councils (LACs), 57–58, 125–27, 186–93 Local Initiatives Support Council (LISC), 170, 174 local leadership. See community work, local leadership, and resource redistribution Loomis Courts, 208

301

INDEX

mass harm: public recognition of, 217–20 Mauss, Marcel, 128, 272n19 Mazzarella, William, 216 McQuarrie, Michael, 200 Mead, Mildred, 220–21 memory, sensory, 124–25 middle class: black middle-class interactions with lower class, 270n31; model of property protection and security, 159–60; private lifestyle and, 151; “tyranny of,” 166–67 “midnight raids,” 258n10 Miller, Edgar, 218 mortgage exclusions, 39–40 mortgages, subprime, 240–42 Mothers Guild, 87 Mothers Guild case (Henry Horner Mothers Guild v. HUD and CHA), 18, 52–53, 87–92 movement: racial projects and sensibility of, 23–24 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 263n5 Moynihan Report, 263n5 Muehlebach, Andrea, 20 museum. See National Public Housing Museum

302

National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing, Final Report, 15, 16 National Housing Act (1934), 14 National Housing Act (1949), 39 National Italian American Sports Hall of Fame, 208 National Public Housing Museum (NPHM): Addams Homes site and history, 208, 209; banner announcing, 209; breakfast tours of site (2007–2008), 228; civic dialogues, 228–30, 234; compassion, politics of presence, and, 213–15; dark tour-

ism, post-welfare consensus, and, 234–38; decay, resilience, and vulnerability, curation of, 230–34; Driehaus Foundation meeting to discuss proposal for, 207–11; earliest ideas for, 213, 218–19; early “housing exhibits” in Chicago and, 220–21; ethno-racial affinities and ethnic heritage consumables, curation of, 223–27; initial proposal for, 224; movement for recognition of mass harm and, 217–20; multigenerational poverty disputes, reckoning with, 212; New York’s Tenement Museum and, 209, 219–20; open house (2009) and mundane domestic objects, 225–27; publics and, 211–12, 213, 222–23, 238; shared attention and, 222–23; sympathy and weight of history or expectations for future and, 215–17 National Register of Historic Places, 218–19 “natural” disaster narratives, 265n41 Near West Side (Chicago): phoenix rising insignia, 204, plate 4; racial and ethnic history of, 42–43; racial meanings and, 47–48 Near West Side Community Development Corporation, 51, 57; as community-based agency, 174; plans for socioeconomic and ethnic mixing, 138; public art efforts, 203–5; Quality of Life Plan for Greater Westhaven, 169–71; upstart tenant group and, 188. See also Home Visitors Program neighbors and public sociability: antiloitering campaigns, 167; anxieties about security and

52; Muehlebach on community and, 20. See also Welfare Reform; welfare retrenchment New Communities Program (LISC/Chicago), 174 Newman, Oscar, 148 New Urbanism: civic engagement ideals, 271n3; golden age of city planning and, 145–46, 269n16; Harvey’s critique of, 153; HOPE VI and, 16–17; public sociability and, 145–49, 153, 161; Settlement House movement, neighborhood unit design, and, 269n16 noise issues and complaints, 158–59, 270n35 Obama, Barack, 80, 196 obligation networks. See kinship networks and obligations off-lease arrangements, 121, 162, 176, 178–79 Omi, Michael, 41 “one strike” policy, 271n35 one-to-one replacement rule, 87, 92 open-occupancy standards, 263n11 outsiders: demographics and profile of, 55 outsiders encountering transitioning residents. See neighbors and public sociability Parade, Bud Billiken Day, 101–2, plate 3 Park, Robert, 37 Paseo Boricua, 203, 204 patronage, 125–26, 186 Pattillo, Mary, 167 Peoples Gas, 103 Perry, Clarence, 269n16 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (Welfare Reform), 10, 14–15, 73, 95, 103–4

INDEX

crime, 153; backyard vs. “fronts,” 142–44; “being in public” as point of contention, 138–39; care and, 159–60, 161, 166; in civic imagination of Chicago, 139–40; communicative styles and, 141, 269n9; cross-class differentials as burdensome, 144–45; differential expectations of interaction at Westhaven Park Tower, 154–56; dogs and, 162–64; HOPE VI and expectation of interpersonal bonds, 17; intimacy and, 156, 165–66; middle-class model of property protection, 159–60; newcomer encounters and experiments with sociability, 156–61; New Urbanism and, 145–49, 153, 161; noise issues, 158–59, 270n35; presence and, 19; public–private divide, 148–51; publics and public space, 140–42; racial projects and sensibility of social interactions, 23–24; rumors of man evicted for sharing music, 135–36; security technologies and, 151–52; Simmel’s play of sociability, 140, 142, 144–45, 166; stranger sociability and publics, 26–27; surveillance and, 151–53, 160–61, 162, 163–64; tensions and “tyranny of the middle class” at the Tower, 166–67; visitors, social calls, and, 164–65; vulnerability and, 161, 165–66, 167; Westhaven design and social control in urban space, 147–49 neoliberalism: architectural juxtaposition of Fordist–Keynesian Horner and neoliberal communitarian Westhaven, 8, 9; bodily comfort as reward vs. right and, 130; color-blind policy climate,

303

INDEX

304

pets and sociability, 162–64 phoenix rising insignia, 204, plate 4 picnic, 33, 197 pity vs. compassion, 214–15 Plan for Transformation (the Plan) of the CHA, 5–6, 173, 174, 257n4 Plan for Transformation 2.0/Plan Forward of the CHA, 242–43 play of sociability, 140, 142, 144–45, 166 pleasure and dark tourism, 236–37 pocket parks, 149 Polyani, Karl, 130, 268n29 population. See demographics poverty: behaviorist explanations of, 263n5; conservative conception of citizenship and, 233; diseases of, 56; Kotlowitz on, 93; National Public Housing Museum and paradigms of, 212, 234, 236; Polanyi on, 130; promise of eliminating, 5; Superblock and, 246; surveillance and the production of poverty knowledge, 37; welfare benefits and reproduction of gendered forms of, 177 “poverty pimping,” 171, 180, 183–86, 187 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 165 practice-based theories of social life, 128–29 presence: accounting for author’s presence, 36–37; Boltanski on compassion and politics of, 214–15; neighborly relations and, 19; public sociability and, 157–58; Sassen on, 21; visibility and recognition of, in urban spaces, 245 prison industry, 193 privacy, 62, 184–85 project heat. See heating and project heat

Project No. Illinois 2-19, 39, 42–44 Project No. Illinois 2-35, 44 proximity: decay and intimate proximity, 91, 96; sympathetic magic and, 82. See also neighbors and public sociability public aid raids, 9, 258n10 public aid welfare investigators: props of, 61 public art, 203–5 public housing: themes and questions associated with, 61–62. See also specific topics and projects public housing “on trial,” 96 public–private divide: public sociability and, 148–51 public–private partnerships: Daley and, 4 publics and publicity: aspiration and, 17, 27–28; Biehl on, 251; Chicago “housing exhibits” and, 220–21; counterpublics, 248, 275n13; dark tourism and, 236; embodiment and, 27, 247–48, 275n13; Habermas on, 260n43; material forms and experiences in processes of, 243; meanings of, 26; modes of knowing and, 248; National Public Housing Museum and, 211–12, 213, 222–23, 238; Plan Forward “Stakeholder Input Sessions” and, 243; public space and, 140–42; shared attention, 222–23; stranger sociability and, 26–27; sympathetic, 26–30, 211, 234, 238, 244, 247. See also National Public Housing Museum public sociability. See neighbors and public sociability public space: developer elimination of, 150–51; “fronts” vs. backyards, 142–44; grass, prohibition

from walking on, 143; morphing of, during redevelopment, 139; neighbors, sociability, and, 138–39; platforms, space, and procedures for publics and, 243; pocket park, temporary, 149; publics and, 140–42; Westhaven design to minimize or eliminate, 147–48, 150–51. See also neighbors and public sociability Puerto Ricans in history of Horner, 48, 49 Quality of Life Plan for Greater Westhaven (Near West Side Community Development Corporation), 169–71 Quinn and Christiansen Architects, 44

Santner, Eric, 19 Sassen, Saskia, 21 Scattered Site units, 53, 54, 56, 78, 107, 142 Section 8 voucher program, 46, 72, 261n21 security: adequacy of, 78, 167; anxieties about, 153; buzzing in visitors, 164; in Calthorpe Associates plans, 53; Fordist– Keynesian welfare state and, 242; individual responsibility for, 153; mutual investment in, 160; New Urbanism on, 148–49; project heat and, 117–18; public sociability and, 161; sidewalk presence vs. technologies of, 153; surveillance technologies and, 151–52 segregation, residential: Chicago as textbook example of, 28 self-sufficiency and project heat, 105–6, 130 sensations: social and material history of, 124 sensory memory, 124–25 sensory politics of heat, 124–31 Seremetakis, Nadia, 124–25

INDEX

racialization: assimilation in Chicago and, 258n11; of desire for heat, 115, 127–31; housing as racial project, 41; problematic of racial classification, 257n2 racism: Brown on political entanglement and, 97–98; cultural heritage projects and, 225; Horner redevelopment’s silence on, 52; public art and, 205; race made social reality by, 257n2. See also discrimination Rai, Amit, 8 redistributive practices. See community work, local leadership, and resource redistribution redlining, 40 Reinhard, Kenneth, 19 rent strikes, 84 resilience: curation of, 230–34, 235–36 resource redistribution. See community work, local leadership, and resource redistribution

Ribot, Théodule, 7, 217, 228 riot following King assassination, 50–51, 78–79 Robbins, Joel, 250–51 Robert Brooks Homes, 208 Robertson, Jaquelin, 146 Robert Taylor Homes, 2, 37, 88, 263n3 Rorty, Richard, 237 Rose, Nikolas, 266n6 rumors: kinship networks and, 179–80; leadership politics and, 188, 191; political expression and, 180–81 Rutherford, Danilyn, 25, 156

305

INDEX

306

Service Connector program, 181–86 Settlement House movement, 269n16 similarity: Hume on, 25 Simmel, Georg, 140, 142, 144–45, 269n13 Simpson, Audra, 262n35 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), 42 Smith, Adam, 21 sociability, public. See neighbors and public sociability social workers and being “socialworked out,” 181 Solomon Cordwell Buenz & Associates, 53 space, “black,” 47–48 spectacle and spectators, 214–15 Spyer, Patricia, 29 Stack, Carol, 179 stairwells, 83 Star, Susan Leigh, 113 Stewart, Kathleen, 222 stranger sociability and publics, 26–27. See also neighbors and public sociability structural inequality paradigms of poverty, 212 St. Stephen’s African Methodist Episcopal Church, 137–38 subprime mortgage crisis, 240–42 suffering, 214, 250–51 Superblock, 34, 52, 53, 54, 121, 150, 163–64, 245–46 surveillance: production of poverty knowledge and, 37; public sociability and, 151–53, 160–61, 162, 163–64; security technologies, 151–52 Swibel, Charles, 113 sympathy: compassion or revulsion inspired by, 8, 228, 250; decay and sympathetic bonds, 89–92, 94–98; definitions of, 7; em-

pathy vs., 22–23; encounters in public space and, 147; likeness and, 25; limits of sympathetic civics, 157; materialist theory of, 24–25, 82, 217, 222; as mode of power, 8; National Public Housing Museum and, 233; project heat and, 122; Ribot on, 7, 217; Robbins’s suffering anthropology and, 250–51; sympathetic magic, 82, 91; sympathetic publics, 26–30, 211, 234, 238, 244, 247; theory of, 21–25; “vibrant” things and, 81–83; weight of history, expectations for the future, and, 215–17. See also neighbors and public sociability Taylor, Charles, 26 Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, 176 tenant councils. See Local Advisory Councils tenant groups: organizing of, 84 tenant handbook, 84, 109–12 Tenement Museum (New York), 209, 219–20 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 21 There Are No Children Here (Kotlowitz), 92–95 Thrift, Nigel, 23 Till, Emmett, 207 traffic on Damen Avenue, 35 transformative pressure, 82–83, 84, 88 Treatise of Human Nature (Hume), 21–22 Trouillot, Rolph, 60–61, 250 Union Park, 33 United Center, 35, 51, 96 utilities. See heating and project heat

vacancy, 87, 89, 240, 248–49 Valley, the. See Henry Horner Annex Venkatesh, Sudhir, 186 Veterans Administration, 40–41 “vibrant” things, 80–83 “vouchering out,” 72. See also Section 8 voucher program vulnerability: citizenship and, 20–21; modes of reckoning obligation and, 167; National Public Housing Museum and, 232–34; public sociability and, 161, 165–66, 167; Robbins on suffering anthropology and, 250–51 walkway remnants, 35 Warner, Michael, 222, 275n13 Weber, Max, 244 Weiss, Marc, 16–17 welfare: housing as racial project, 41; popular discourse on impoverished black women and, 14–16; third-way policies, 20 Welfare Reform (Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996), 10, 15–16, 73, 95, 103–4 welfare retrenchment: direct services, defunding of, 173; neighbor vulnerability and, 166; and project heat and self-sufficiency, 105–6; responsibilization of citizens and redistribution of so-

cial protection, 11; social control in urban space and, 147–48. See also Welfare Reform welfare state programs: history of, 14–15 Wells-Barnett, Ida Bell, 266n1. See also Ida B. Wells Homes Westhaven: early planning and construction, 51–52; efforts to unmake racial projects of postwar housing, 55–56; irresponsibility narratives transferring to, 72; Phase I, 52–53, 54; Phase II, 53–55, 152, 245–46; preservation ideas, 218; prohibition on those with “adverse police records,” 271n1; public–private divide in design of, 147–48, 152. See also heating and project heat; Henry Horner Extension; Henry Horner Homes; neighbors and public sociability Westhaven Park Tower, 154–56, 166–67 West Haven Rising mural, 204, plate 4 Wilen, William, 88, 91–92 Winant, Howard, 41 windchill in Chicago, 117 Winfrey, Oprah, 94–95 Young, Iris Marion, 141 Žižek, Slavoj, 19

INDEX

307

Catherine Fennell is assistant professor of anthropology at Columbia University.

Plate 1. High-rise building at the Horner Homes under demolition, summer 2005. Phased demolition and redevelopment began at the Horner complex in 1995. Demolitions of original buildings continued through 2008 and are now complete; redevelopment is ongoing.

Plate 2. Seal of the Chicago Housing Authority hanging in the lobby of its former headquarters, 2006. The seal probably dates from the late 1950s or early 1960s, the years the CHA moved toward high-rise housing.

Plate 3. CHANGE pennant, 2005. Felt pennant waved by children on the Chicago Housing Authority’s parade float at the Bud Billiken Day Parade in Bronzeville, August 2005. In the hands of child residents, this pennant fit the theme of the parade. It invokes high school and college pennants and, with them, hopes of mobility through education.

Plate 4. West Haven Rising, 2006. Mural commissioned by the Near West Side Community Development Corporation and funded by LISC/Chicago. “West Haven” is a designation favored by Near West to include not just the Horner redevelopment but also the surrounding area.