There Are No Children Here Read Online Free PDF

housing program was reduced when a public housing opponent was elected mayor. In Chicago, the opposition was fierce. The city’s aldermen first bullied the state legislature into giving them the power of selecting public housing sites, a prerogative that had previously belonged to the local housing authority.
    Then a group of leading aldermen, who were not above petty vindictiveness, chartered a bus to tour the city in search of potential sites. On the bus ride, they told reporters that they were out to seek vengeance against the Chicago Housing Authority and the seven aldermen who supported public housing, and they chose sites in neighborhoods represented by these aldermen. Like prankish teenagers, they selected the most outrageous of possibilities, including the tennis courts at the University of Chicago and a parcel of land that sat smack in the middle of a major local highway. The message was clear: the CHA and its liberal backers could build public housing but not in their back yards.
    The complexes were not, in the end, built at these sites. Instead, they were constructed on the edges of the city’s blackghettoes. Rather than providing alternatives to what had become decrepit living conditions, public housing became anchors for existing slums. And because there were few sites available, the housing authority had no alternative but to build up rather than out. So the ghettoes grew toward the heavens, and public housing became a bulwark of urban segregation.
    On the city’s near west side, on the periphery of one of the city’s black ghettoes, was built the Henry Horner Homes. The complex of sixteen high-rises bore the name of an Illinois governor best known for his obsession with Abraham Lincoln and his penchant for bucking the Chicago Democratic machine.
    The buildings were constructed on the cheap. There were no lobbies to speak of, only the open breezeways. There was no communication system from the breezeways to the tenants. During the city’s harsh winters, elevator cables froze; in one year alone the housing authority in Chicago needed to make over fifteen-hundred elevator repairs. And that was in just one development.
    The trash chutes within each building were too narrow to handle the garbage of all its tenants. The boiler systems continually broke down. There were insufficient overhead lighting installations and wall outlets in each unit. And the medicine cabinet in each apartment’s bathroom was not only easily removed, but was connected to the medicine chest in the adjoining apartment. Over the years, residents had been robbed, assaulted, and even murdered by people crawling through their medicine cabinet.
    When a group of Soviet housing officials visited Henry Horner in October of 1955, while it was still under construction, they were appalled that the walls in the apartments were of cinder block. Why not build plastered walls, they suggested. “We would be thrown off our jobs in Moscow if we left unfinished walls like this,” I. K. Kozvilia, minister of city and urban construction in the Soviet Union, told local reporters.
    “In the American way of doing things,” huffed
The Chicago Daily News
in an editorial the next day, “there is little use for luxury in building subsidized low-cost housing.” It was no surprise, then, that thirteen years later a federal report on public housing would describe Henry Horner and the city’s other developmentsas “remindful of gigantic filing cabinets with separate cubicles for each human household.”
    But on this day, LaJoe and her siblings were bubbling over with joy at the sight of their new home. It was, after all, considerably prettier and sturdier and warmer than the flat they’d left behind. Before their father could unload the rented trailer and hand his children the picnic table, which he planned to use in the kitchen, and the cots, which he hoped to replace soon with bunk beds, they ran into the newly finished building. He and his wife could only