The Hidden War: Crime and the Tragedy of Public Housing in Chicago.

• Author: Taylor, Ralph
• Position: Review

SUSAN J. POPKIN, VICTORIA E. GWIASDA, LYNN M. OLSON, DENNIS P. ROSENBAUM, & LARRY BURON, THE HIDDEN WAR: CRIME AND THE TRAGEDY OF PUBLIC HOUSING IN CHICAGO. Rutgers University Press 2000. 256 pp.

The Hidden War(1) provides a post mortem on one of the most expensive if not one of the grandest urban social experiments to have ever failed in this country: high-rise public housing communities. Begun on a large scale in the 1950s, subjected to numerous policy shifts that redefined eligible tenants from about 1960 onwards, criticized architecturally from the 1960s on by Rainwater, Newman and others, managed by local housing authorities subjected to urban political cross-currents, and overseen and sometimes funded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, these communities are coming down all across the country as rent vouchers, scattered site housing, section 8 (assisted) housing and low-rise, partially-public housing communities take their place. The dynamiting of Pruitt-Igoe in St Louis at the end of the 1960s, widely photographed because it was one of the first uses of the timed implosion demolition technique, not because of the surrounding social controversy, has been bookended by a 1990s Homicide: Life on the Street episode where a police officer witnesses the demolition of the high-rise Baltimore public housing community where he grew up. In the same way that social reformers in the 1950s hoped that clearing "slum" housing and moving residents to well-managed, new high-rise living accommodations would result in drastically improved quality of life, reformers two generations later hope that low-rise developments, rent vouchers, and scattered-site housing will be the safe haven or at least a new and better beginning for residents of high-rise public housing communities. The implications of this book will give them pause in their speculations. If people in later generations want to know how bad conditions were for residents in those high-rises at the end of the millennium, and to get some insight into the policy, social, cultural, and economic factors that led to these deplorable conditions, The Hidden War will provide the case study descriptions and some explanation. This book is for anyone who doubts the unforgivably high costs of segregation and hyper-segregation.

The volume describes the results of a multi-method, longitudinal study carried out in three Chicago public housing communities, namely, Rockwell Gardens, Harold Ickes, and Henry Horner, from the early 1990s through the late 1990s.(2) A multi-institutional research team led by Susan Popkin (Abt-Chicago, now with the Urban Institute) surveyed residents repeatedly, carried out in-depth, key-person interviews, compiled information from local newspapers and other sources, and for a few months had a trained ethnographer visiting the locations.(3) Repeated surveys spanned 1994 to 1997, with various follow-up information on some topics included up to mid-1999.(4) The data on which the volume rests is extremely strong because it is multi-wave, it is multi-method, and it was carried out by researchers who were able to negotiate successfully some of the most dangerous settings imaginable in the United States at the time. Hopefully the newspaper archive and the ethnographic results will be archived, along with the repeated surveys, so that future researchers can benefit more fully from these powerful data.

Chapter One introduces the overall scope of the study, its purposes, and some of the themes the authors develop later. The authors' stated purpose is as follows:

We tell the story of the CHA's [Chicago Housing Authority's] struggle against crime in its developments presented through the eyes of the residents who suffered through life in these communities. The stories in the book poignantly document the tremendous toll that violence has taken on these individuals and the ways in which gang-dominated social order has undermined any efforts to improve conditions.(5) In Chapter One, the authors also start to introduce some of the "lessons learned" from their...