What Went Wrong with Public Housing in Chicago? A History of the Robert Taylor Homes

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The largest concentration of public housing in America stands in a four-mile procession along Chicago's State Street, south of the city's central business district. Each project (five in all) grows successively more intimidating and imposing in scale, climaxing with the massive Robert Taylor Homes - 28 identical, 16-story high-rises, containing over 4,400 apartments. Named after the Chicago Housing Authority's first African American chairman, the Robert Taylor Homes opened in 1962 as the largest single public housing project in the country, housing 27,000 people when fully occupied, more than 20,000 of them children, and nearly all of them African American.1

In 1965, three years …