This book focuses on the 75-year history of public housing and the struggle to house what have been called the "deserving poor." Focusing on two cities, Atlanta and Chicago, Vale looks at how in the 1930s, both demolished their slums (or a designated slum) and established some of the United States' first public housing. Decades later, these same two cities led the way in clearing public housing. These are what Vale terms "twice-cleared" communities and this book examines the history of these two cities' housing projects: Chicago’s Cabrini-Green and Atlanta’s Techwood /Clark Howell Homes. The author also delves into how design politics affects the issues of architecture and urbanism and how those affect policy.
Coming from the Chicago area, I know a fair amount about public housing in that city, including Cabrini-Green, so I was curious about this book. It's fairly academic in nature and admittedly, I was more interested in the section about Chicago. I remember when the Cabrini-Green development was dismantled and how it felt momentous, at least on the outside, because those buildings had been such a solid part of the landscape in that neighborhood that it was difficult to imagine that they hadn't always been there. I appreciated that the author took a direction of examining how design affected the politics of public housing. This wasn't a book I'll be picking up for a re-read, but it had some interesting parts to it.
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