Second chances in the second city: Public housing and prisoner reentry in Chicago

In November 2014, the Chicago Housing Authority approved a pilot program to allow a limited number of individuals with criminal records to live in their housing programs. In this article, I contend that the pilot provides an important opportunity to institutionally recognize and extend material benefits to formerly incarcerated individuals for whom housing is both especially difficult to secure and especially important to find. Drawing on Wacquant, I argue that the pilot also offers an opening for key institutions of urban governance, such as housing authorities, to acknowledge their own role in perpetuating a pervasive “carceral continuum” that disciplines the urban poor and feeds mass incarceration. However, drawing on interviews with pilot organizers and participants, I show how the pilot responds to and replicates pervasive fears of crime that link poverty and criminality in particular. As a result, its cautious experimental design relegates participants to the status of test cases and exceptions, rather than normalizing their presence in public housing. The pilot further relies on a problematic and paradoxical understanding of “return” that obscures public housing’s historical role in the carceral continuum. In all of these ways, the logics of this pilot and others like it remain limited, thus undermining their potential to disrupt such carceral continuities.

From Pathways to Portals: Getting to the Root of a Public Housing Community

The Chicago Housing Authority is currently in the late stages of a controversial ten-year urban renewal initiative that will see the city’s public housing projects replaced with mixed-income accommodations. Ordered to pack up and leave not only their homes but also lifelong friends and support networks, many project residents have, quite literally, had their roots yanked from beneath their feet. In this essay I employ the iconographic uses of natural imagery present in Kerry James Marshall’s Garden Project paintings (1993-1994) and Daniel Roth’s installation Cabrini Green Forest (2004) to, first, explore the “rooted” attachment of public housing dwellers to their living environment and, second, to consider the desire of many residents to safeguard community landmarks against the threat of demolition.

They've Got Pluck: CHA Youth Orchestra a Survival Kit for Kids in Public Housing

EDITORIAL: Sweet Notes in the Projects The notion of letting children in Chicago Housing Authority developments take violins, cellos and string basses home to practice music composed a few centuries before the birth of Michael Jackson or Kool Moe Dee may seem bizarre to some, particularly those who have the benighted belief that nothing good can come out of “the projects.” It is a novel idea but, as Chicago has seen with CHA night basketball, the novel often sounds like nonsense but works quite nicely. The good that can be found in the quarter-million children who call CHA developments home is well represented in the 26 chosen so far for the Music Cultivation Program for CHA Youth. They range from kinder-garteners to 9th graders and were selected in July from four developments by teachers from the not-for-profit Merit Music Program. Officials of CHA and the 11-year-old Merit Music Program hope the Music Cultivation Program eventually will become a full symphony orchestra with bass, winds, percussion and strings. But for now, the children's parents must endure, like other good parents everywhere, the bittersweet joy and agony of hearing young hands become familiar with bows and strings. It may comfort them to know that the CHA's classical music pioneers are engaging in an experience that will help give structure and meaning to their lives no less than it does for children who live anywhere else. Whether or not they achieve their dreams of performing in Orchestra Hall someday—and who is to say some won't?—the lessons of form, grace, teamwork and discipline will serve them well, no matter what fields they pursue later in their lives. With determination on their part and support from others, the young musicians will find their horizons broadened and their self-esteem improved. And everyone else should have their hopes and dreams for the next generation boosted a little with the knowledge that, behind the torn window screens and graffiti-covered walls of public housing, some budding young talents are making beautiful music together.