Public housing: remembering Chicago's success.

Though it's a place they'd never dare go, millions of Americans must now feel intimately acquainted with Chicago's Ida B. Wells Homes, the public housing complex featured in Frederick Wiseman's recent three-and-a-half-hour documentary on PBS. Wiseman's new film, like his previous documentaries, bears a humble moniker - in this case, "Public Housing" - and imposes no plot or narration, giving audiences the eerie impression that they're experiencing unmediated reality. And the reality here is often unpleasant.

Wells residents stand grimly in line before a fortified brick blockhouse that turns out to be - a supermarket. A crack addict applies, without apparent success, to a court-ordered treatment program. And the only hope for salvation amidst this squalor comes from an official of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) who, with all the sincerity of a circus barker, boasts about a vague $300 million jobs program.

Reviewers lavished praise on "Public Housing," calling it a groundbreaking look at poverty in America. Though it may be good television, "Public Housing" is hardly original. By now, bleak portraits of life in the CHA have become almost a genre unto themselves.

Perhaps the best known of these works is Alex Kotlowitz's 1992 book, There Are No Children Here, a harrowing chronicle of the trials two brothers face while growing up in a West Side CHA project. And soon after Kotlowitz's book came out, National Public Radio turned over a tape recorder to two boys from the Wells neighborhood. They produced two radio documentaries, the last of which focused on the 1994 murder of five-year-old Eric Morse, who was thrown from a fourteen-story CHA high-rise by two pre-teens. While these works may serve as a salutary prick to the nation's conscience, they tend to promote some unfortunate ideas about public housing. Usually, the audience comes away with the impression that life in public housing is - and always has been - uniquely depraved.

Though conditions in today's CHA are shameful, Chicago's public housing wasn't always this way. It once worked remarkably well. By looking at its neglected history, one can learn what went wrong with public housing, and how to fix it.

Over the last several years, colleagues and I have interviewed more than a hundred former CHA residents, most of whom grew up in public housing between 1940 and 1960. They do not talk about public housing as a place where bullets capered across barren courtyards or drug deals offered the only signs of commerce. Rather, they speak of safe communities in which working families helped one another achieve their dreams.

In fact, Ida B. Wells was a widely admired haven for two generations of Chicagoans. Under the leadership of the CHA's visionary founding director, Elizabeth Wood, the CHA built and managed some of the best public housing in the nation. Wood faced many of the same challenges that confront today's public-housing managers. The nation's first comprehensive public-housing law, enacted in 1937, contained all sorts of provisions meant to placate private realtors who feared that the government would steal their middle-class clientele. The 1937 law included a strict income limit that effectively excluded all but the poor from public housing.

Nevertheless, Wood carefully screened incoming residents. She made sure to include a healthy mix of working, albeit poor, families. And though decidedly liberal, Wood made sure that her managers moved swiftly to evict any troublesome tenants. Delinquency was rare, vandalism unheard of. Virtually all of the residents we interviewed - and most are now solidly middle class - consider the CHA to have been a profoundly nurturing environment. Many described the developments as "extended families."

Today, children who grew up in CHA projects hold annual reunions that bear more than a passing resemblance to college reunions. That should come as no surprise since many are now doctors, lawyers, executives, or engineers. Today, we scorn public housing as a breeding ground for gangs. But these former residents form the backbone of Chicago's black middle class.

And public housing did not serve only black Chicagoans. In fact, under Wood, the CHA aggressively promoted racial integration. Cabrini-Green, now a much-maligned project, was thoroughly, and successfully, integrated throughout the 1940s and '50s, as were many other CHA developments. Though there were ugly incidents at a few projects, they almost always involved people from outside the development and were clearly exceptional cases. Nevertheless, the controversy generated by those incidents would eventually imperil the CHA. Its decline did not come about through bureaucratic sclerosis, but through a concerted attack on the CHA by aldermen who feared that it would breach the city's racial boundaries. Beginning in the late 1940s, the City Council began blocking CHA efforts to build new projects in white neighborhoods, and in 1954 Wood's aldermanic antagonists finally forced her from the CHA. Only after Wood was gone did the CHA devolve into a corrupt and uncaring agency, one expert at providing patronage jobs but unable to maintain the remarkable communities that Wood had built.

In today's age of ascendant markets, many argue that the only remedy for the ills of public housing is privatization. But the nation's private housing industry has never met the needs of low-income Americans. Even now, as the United States enjoys record rates of homeownership, Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies reports that there is a critical shortage of low-income housing, and that the crisis is only growing worse.

In Chicago alone, more than 100,000 working families - not welfare recipients, but working families - live in substandard dwellings. These are exactly the people that the early CHA served. They are exactly the people that a revitalized public housing program should be serving once again.

J.S. Fuerst, an emeritus professor in urban studies at Loyola University, was CHA research director until 1952. He is preparing an oral history of Chicago public housing.