Robert Taylor Homes Case Study

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The Robert Taylor Homes Public Housing Development 1. What were the Robert Taylor Homes? The Robert Taylor Homes was a public housing development completed in 1962 and named for after Robert Taylor who was an African American activist and a Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) board member. At one time, it was the largest public housing development in the country, and it was intended to offer decent affordable housing. "This is a great thing for the city. It provides decent housing for fine families." It was composed of 28 high-rise buildings with 16 stories each, with a total of 4,415 units, mostly arranged in U-shaped clusters of three, stretching for three kilometres. It formed a kind of concrete curtain for traffic passing by on the nearby Dan Ryan Expressway. Although it was meant to be an improvement over the slums they replaced, the buildings turned into hot zones for a host of social problems. The housing project was supposed to be a ‘half way house’ on the road to a better life, but it quickly became a dead end for most residents. …show more content…

The housing area was one of the poorest in the USA. With drab exteriors and chain-link fences on the balconies, Robert Taylor Homes came to be seen by many residents and by outsiders as prisons for the poor. At one point 95% of the 27,000 residents were unemployed. 40% of the households were single-parent, female-headed households earning less than $5,000 per year. About 96% were African-American. Residents were twice as likely to be the victims of serious crime as other Chicagoans. Many of the drab, concrete high-rises were blackened with the scars of arson fire. Robert Taylor Homes faced the same problems that doomed other high-rise housing projects in Chicago. These problems include narcotics, violence and poverty. The city's neglect was evident in littered streets, poorly enforced building codes, and very few

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