Chicago Urged to Raze Public Housing Units

The city should demolish most, if not all, of its 168 public housing high-rise buildings for families and find new homes for the 70,000 tenants, a report by a mayor’s advisory group recommends.

Contents of the report, completed in May and submitted to Mayor Eugene Sawyer more than a month ago have not been made public officially, but they were outlined in Friday’s editions of the Chicago Tribune.

“The report doesn’t recommend tearing down any housing until adequate housing is available,” Philip Klutznick, co-chairman of the 25-member panel, said Friday. He declined to discuss the report further.

A spokeswoman for the mayor said Friday that Sawyer planned to release details of the report by the Mayor’s Advisory Council on the Chicago Housing Authority later this month.

Strong Endorsement

The council’s recommendation to raze family high-rises represents the strongest and most official endorsement of a politically sensitive concept that has been discussed for many years, the newspaper said.

The panel’s call for gradual elimination of the family high-rises is based, the newspaper said, on problems common in public housing in Chicago and other cities--a rapidly deteriorating housing stock, a lack of funding to make necessary repairs and the worsening of social problems that occur by crowding large numbers of poor families together.

Edward Marciniak, a Loyola University urban studies professor who published a 1986 book advocating replacement of high-rises, said public housing residents should be relocated throughout the metropolitan area.

“People have blinders when they think we can solve the challenge of providing safe, sanitary, decent housing in the city itself,” said Marciniak, who was not a member of the advisory panel, which was established more than a year ago by the late Mayor Harold Washington.

Intense Concentration

According to the council’s report: “High-rise buildings per se are not a problem. Rather, the problem . . . is the intense concentration of large, poor, primarily single-parent families in buildings poorly designed to support their needs.

“This is further compounded by the concentration of such buildings in close proximity to each other while being racially and economically segregated and isolated from viable neighborhoods,” the report said.

Worsening conditions at the city’s public housing developments are mainly due to a 76% drop in federal funding for housing programs nationally over the last eight years, the council said.

It said the cost of replacing 800 CHA units a year would be $20 million to $48 million.