Anyone familiar with the dismal, decaying high-rises that have made Chicago’s housing projects a symbol of failed public policy will raise an eyebrow at the title of Jim Fuerst’s oral history When Public Housing Was Paradise: Building Community in Chicago (published last year by Praeger Publishers and now out in paperback from University of Illinois Press), which he’ll read from at the Harold Washington Library on Wednesday. But Fuerst, who worked at the Chicago Housing Authority in the 40s and 50s, remembers when those projects were beacons of hope, and he says the conventional wisdom about them–that they are a failed social experiment–is bogus. “It’s like a young man who, having murdered his mother and father, goes into court and begs for mercy on the grounds that he’s an orphan,” he says. “You ruin the program and then after you’ve finished ruining it you say, ‘That program doesn’t work; we have to get rid of the program.’ But it was the administration of the program that was no good, and the lack of caring that was no good, and the lack of quality people.”
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Fuerst became interested in public housing in 1946 when, shortly after receiving a master’s in social work from the U. of C., he was brought to the CHA by his friend Mick Shufro, then the associate director, to be the director of research and statistics. “And that was the thing that changed my life,” Fuerst says. After working for the CHA for 10 years, he ran an automobile leasing company for 17 (“That’s how I can live in a penthouse!”). In 1970 he became a professor of social policy at Loyola’s Graduate School of Social Work, where he taught for more than 30 years.
A classic New Deal Democrat, Fuerst believes deeply in the responsibility of government to sponsor and encourage social change. The people he worked with during the CHA’s heady first decade, he says, shared this belief. “We had a classy group of people. Jesus Christ. I’ve never worked in an organization like it.” He rattles off the list of “all-stars,” among them a Rhodes scholar, a university president, professors, and lawyers. “These were people who were of enormous stature, and all these people were dedicated to the principle of public housing.”
Wood implemented a quota system that set aside 75 percent of the projects’ units for white residents and 25 percent for blacks, in accordance with the racial makeup of the city at the time. In 1949 the City Council voted against mandated integration in public housing, but Wood worked hard to keep the projects mixed. In 1953 she gave a unit of the Trumbull Park Homes, a white project on the far south side, to a black family. White neighbors rioted, and Wood was fired a year later. “They said it was because of inadequate administration,” says Fuerst. “That’s a lot of crap! The general people of Chicago were not very keen on having black people put in white areas, so there was a big hullabaloo.”
Fuerst admits that he doesn’t much care where such people end up. “They go back to where they came from, to the slums or somewhere else,” he says. “Because if they go to the housing projects, the upward-striving people who want a job, who are perfectly fine people, who are maybe temporarily unemployed but are good, honest people, won’t want to come live there. The left wing hates to hear that, but they know it’s the truth.
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