When Public Housing Was Paradise: Building Community in Chicago Book

This book is a series of interviews organized around thematic chapters that tells the tale of the early CHA and how the housing projects functioned before the agency lost its way and ability to effectively screen the applicants.

This would be useful to cull for an author, but as a reader I found it on the repetitive side. I don't think the author cherry-picked the interviewees, or was trying to only highlight the good side of public housing, but I don't think this string of interviews was more than a starting point for a good, organized thesis and larger look at the public housing experiment as a whole. The fact that all of the CHA projects throughout the city were lumped together makes it harder to draw formal conclusions as well, as each project had its own unique geography and tenant mix to take into account.

In other words, this text functions as a vignette and is a good "man on the street" corrective to the idea that public housing = rampant gang violence; but I don't feel that it was successful in making a broader argument based on the evidence that was presented either. Recommended for specialists only.