Rappel says that he wanted to “subtly subvert” some of Altgeld’s inward-facing nature with the new building’s exuberance. But perhaps the most important factor determining Altgeld’s defensive posture is less rooted in the social dynamics of the place and more in the material conditions of the economy.
Boxed out of expanding suburbs by racist lending practices and redlining during a historically tight housing market, Altgeld offered Black families subsidized housing in a tidy suburban atmosphere. Generous shared courtyards connected long, two-story apartment blocks with gabled roofs that could look quite a bit like single-family homes if you squinted. In J.S. Fuerst’s book When Public Housing Was Paradise: Building Community in Chicago, Claude Wyatt, a resident of Altgeld for ten years from the mid-40s to mid-50s, tells of the revelatory joy at not having “to go into a big building. I would put my key in the front door, go out through the back, come around to the front door again, and walk in and go through—again. I couldn’t believe it.” The development was far from the city center (residents would refer to the rest of Chicago as “the city”), but it was relatively close to the burgeoning industrial concerns of the southeast side. And because there were simply so few other places for Black people to live, there was little stigma attached to public housing.
Altgeld’s details speak to a very American set of housing aspirations. Connected side by side and offset slightly, the small apartment blocks are interrupted by the quirkily stepped parapets that Miller admires, each one emphasizing a roof gable—the ultimate American symbol of single-family hearth and home—and popping up to remind people that public housing can trade in the same domestic signifiers that the private market does. It’s likely these details were applied to reinforce the dignity of the new residents. But considering what’s beneath the ground and in the air, it becomes a futile, superficial gesture, a nod to a suburban mirage of clean living and good health at odds with the way this place has poisoned the people with least freedom in where they lived.
“This is one of the only places we would be putting a childcare center,” says Ann McKenzie, the CHA’s chief development officer. “If we were on the north side, the childcare centers exist already.” It will also offer more space for wraparound social outreach services for both parents and kids, like counseling and after-school programming.
And then there’s the catch-22 common to public engagement in all low-income communities. To design successful projects that serve residents’ needs, administrators, planners, and architects need a deep and time-intensive public engagement process, but no one’s time is more expensive than the poor. “Everybody that’s working on these developments in our community, they aren’t being compensated to do this work,” says Johnson. “We don’t have the luxury to be able to volunteer because we lack job opportunities. People are struggling.” Without this level of engagement, it’s harder to build successful infrastructure that could be the kind of boon to economic prospects residents need to have more time to volunteer. “I think we were kind of used, just to justify that they had resident engagement,” she says.
