They've been bringing them down for a while, from what I can tell. But I just started hearing about it a couple of days ago, probably because there are only two families left in building that used to hold 15,000 people. There's a lot of jubilation about these buildings coming down. Maybe jubilation is too strong a word.
But people are happy it's going. Why they're happy is something else.
It was built over deacdes starting in the 1940s, so by the time it became notorious in the national mind (the 70s and 80s) it was aging housing stock. It was also neglected, with trash (according to the wikipedia article) piling up to the 15th floor at one point.
It was dangerous. It was dirty. And it's probably a good idea that it's going away.
But some of the people who are happy about the end of Cabrini-Green seem to think that it had to fail, that providing low income housing means that you can't give "those people" anything. They say that public housing itself is a failed policy, rather than Cabrini-Green being a poorly thought out solution to a real problem. I'm not exaggerating, take a look at the comments section on NPR.
Public housing that is simply warehousing people is bound to fail. If it ignores, as Cabrini-Green did, all the work people like Jane Jacobs have done on what makes cities work and what doesn't, it's going to fail. Public housing that doesn't provide good basic services to its residents, that maintains the properties, that doesn't think of homes and communities, rather than housing has to fail.
When I was in graduate school, my office was right across from a dining hall on Tower Road. On a sunny day, by three o'clock in the afternoon, trash cans would be overflowing with to-go containers. Garbage was piled around the cans (which weren't tiny, believe me) and drifted over the grass for yards around the dining hall. By four o'clock it was all picked up and the area was clean. The university had a very busy (union and I hope well-paid) maintenance staff. The campus was cleaner than Cabrini-Green, not because these students were neater people, but because someone cleaned up after them. Someone picked up the trash.
But cities don't often clean up the trash for public housing or poor neighborhoods. Given that poor neighborhoods often have higher population densities, you'd think that there would be more frequent trash pickup than in well to do 'hoods. But in San Francisco, it's once a week, whether it's the Mission or Pacific Heights. Same with street sweeping. This even-handed approach leaves poor neighborhoods getting a lower level of service per capita than wealthier ones.
I guess what's bothering me here is that the failure of Cabrini-Green is being framed as a failure of its residents, rather than a failure of planning, a failure of our society to think about or deal with poverty in any useful way.
Crime and why gangs were able to establish such a presence there is a whole other issue and a whole other post, one that I'm not that likely to write.
Many of the families who have left Cabrini-Green have been moved into mixed income neighborhoods. That's probably what the solution should have been back in 1942.
One irony I hadn't expected when I was reading about these projects was that the initial mandate was that the building be 75% white and 25% black. It was an integration policy, innovative at the time.
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