Historic Preservation: Saving High-Rise Public Housing

Most public housing in the United States is decrepit and getting worse. Today, tenants of crumbling garden apartments or dreary high-rise towers occupy units dating back, in some cases, to before the Second World War. The architects and planners responsible for these developments were fueled with purpose: to replace squalid tenements with innovative and humane housing. To this end, they integrated ideas from the progressive Garden City Movement and International Style architecture into their work. Elements of these design trends survive in decaying public housing complexes from coast to coast, representing important aspects of America’s architectural heritage.

But “the projects” are rarely considered design heirlooms. Years of neglect have taken a toll on garden apartments and “towers in the park” high-rise clusters, stigmatizing both residents and their homes. The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), however, has realized that preserving and rehabilitating some of its historic buildings is a viable - and valuable - option. In partnership with the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency (IHPA), the CHA is demonstrating a new strategy to restore some low-income public housing projects to their former glory. According to Anne Haaker, Deputy State Historic Preservation Officer for the IHPA, the city’s public housing is “important not only to the history of Chicago, but to the whole country.” In light of the Bush administration’s many recent cuts to federal housing program budgets, Chicago’s use of historic preservation tax credits to help fund housing efforts may signal an alternative for other cities.

Preservation: A New Strategy

One of the largest housing authorities in the country, CHA manages 78 properties and 25,000 tenants, including residences for families and seniors. Traditionally, dilapidated public housing in Chicago has fallen victim to the wrecking ball, or perhaps worse, to unappealing exterior alterations. Much has been written about CHA’s razing of large-scale high-rises, such as Cabrini Green and Robert Taylor Homes, and their subsequent “rebirth” as lower density townhouse developments. But CHA’s new strategy, as detailed in their “Plan for Transformation,” approved by the federal government in 2000, is to preserve and revitalize a mid-century housing stock once thought incorrigible.

Proponents of continued spending on site-based public housing have largely supported the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s HOPE VI program, which funds demolition of the worst projects and their replacement with a combination of affordable public units and market-rate dwellings - a “mixed-income” approach - often in the New Urbanist design style. HOPE VI requires public-private partnerships to leverage funds from a variety of sources. But critics say there’s actually been an overall reduction in the total number of public housing units since the program’s inception in 1993.

Fiscal conservatives instead prefer the Section 8 voucher initiative started in the 1980s. Apartment-seekers enrolled in Section 8 receive federal subsidies to pay rent. Some economists believe the market demand expressed through voucher use triggers an increase in private sector affordable housing production - which should reduce public spending. But Section 8 also has critics, who claim the program destabilizes neighborhoods and lets some landlords charge unreasonably high rents in low-value areas. While CHA hasn’t abandoned Hope VI and Section 8 - the Plan for Transformation includes strategies involving both - its new preservation-based option presents an intriguing opportunity for both Chicago and the nation.

In redesigning America’s decaying public housing stock, planners and policy makers have, in recent years, focused on a New Urbanist approach with traditional neighborhood development (TND) concepts to provide a mix of residential and small-scale commercial land uses, walkable neighborhoods, and centrally located public space. This approach is more popular than modernist developments because it can minimize sometimes stark visual differences between public housing and surrounding areas - while addressing the physical deterioration and stigmatization that may have struck both. Yet at the same time, constructing neighborhoods from scratch has required the demolition of historic buildings - eliciting protests not only from preservationists but also public housing advocates concerned with tenant displacement. Housing advocates are more generally critical of TND as well, decrying any initiative that fails to expand the nation’s affordable housing stock.

In 1999, the National Park Service (NPS) inserted itself into the debate, producing a guide for listing public housing on the National Register of Historic Places, which NPS administers. The guide recommends that states and cities evaluate a property’s impact on social or design history, and the existence or absence of other local examples. As an initial step in implementing the Plan for Transformation, IHPA undertook an assessment of every CHA-owned property and identified six developments with significant social or architectural history.

The preservation approach to public housing consists of retaining, rehabilitating, and physically integrating a portion of the original residential building into newly built mixed-use components, including residential, commercial, and service units, as well as recreational amenities. IHPA has focused preservation requirements on exterior features, allowing the developers to reconfigure the interior apartments - typically too small for today’s standards - even at the loss of certain historic elements. This approach is a compromise. According to Anne Haaker, IHPA recognizes “the need to balance preservation with the authority’s primary goal of providing affordable housing.”

While the majority of properties identified by CHA and IHPA for preservation are garden apartments, like the 454-unit Trumbull Park Homes, or mid-rise buildings dating from the late 1930s and early 1940s, Chicago’s focus on historic preservation has opened more recently built affordable housing structures to rehabilitation efforts. In the early 2000s, developers approached IHPA regarding the Hilliard Homes, constructed in 1966. Designed by noted architect Bertrand Goldberg - who was also responsible for Marina City, a landmark mid-century office, apartment, and parking complex located in Chicago’s Loop district - the Hilliard Homes consist of two 22-story arc-shaped apartment buildings that encircle a public space, and two cylindrical 16-story buildings for seniors.

Developers successfully lobbied to list the Hilliard Homes, located on South State Street near Chinatown, on the National Register of Historic Places. This qualified the project for a Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credit of twenty percent, which can be applied to substantial rehabilitations and adaptive reuse of private properties provided that “character-defining” features are preserved. By comparison, the federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit alone only offers developers a maximum nine percent credit per year (with a limit of ten years) for acquisition, rehabilitation, or new construction of rental housing targeting lower-income households. The Hilliard Homes project effectively combined the low-income and historic preservation credits.

The first phase of renovations to the Hilliard Homes started in 2002 and has been completed, with two more phases remaining. Improvements to landscaping, parking, connections to the street grid, lighting, and recreation areas, are planned as part of a mixed-income community. Jonathan Fine, President of Preservation Chicago, a non-profit advocacy group for the preservation of the city’s history, supports the Hilliard rehabilitation because of the architectural quality and social significance of Goldberg’s design. “There is not enough appreciation for the designs of more recent architects, and they are not viewed as historic,” he says. One of Preservation Chicago’s major initiatives includes preservation of structures designed by notable architects of the recent past, including Goldberg. 

CHA and IHPA have also met joint success in rehabilitating Trumbull Park Homes, a two-story complex on the city’s Far South Side. Like Hilliard Homes, this project combines low-income and historic preservation tax credits to upgrade the property. According to CHA’s Press Secretary, Karen Pride, a mixed public/private finance deal is pending for the project, which will retain key exterior features, such as its terraced entrances. Interiors, however, will be upgraded to satisfy modern building code requirements. D. Bradford Hunt, a public housing historian and Assistant Professor of Social Science at Roosevelt University in Chicago, advocates preserving and rehabilitating low-rise row house public housing projects. He believes that the Trumbull Park Homes rehabilitation works primarily because it is small, not that dense, and has a strong tenant organization. In 1953, Trumbull Park was the site of a notorious standoff between mostly white residents, who opposed an African-American family moving in. By the 1980s, Trumbull Park had become predominantly African-American.

“As a community, it works,” says Hunt. “Many high-rise buildings in the city do not work. They have elevators, combined with high densities of children, which makes enforcing informal social controls a problem. Trumbull Park has two-bedroom apartments, and there are rarely more than two to three kids in a family.”

The Troubled Legacy of Urban Renewal

By the late 1930s, federal legislators began to create public housing for the very poor, not just for people temporarily displaced by the Depression. Despite this, a strict tenant selection process remained in place, favoring complete families with an employed head of household. Federal agencies created the system of local housing authorities that exists today, and increased standardization of materials, designs, and policies, leaving less room for design creativity.

By the 1950s, new federal housing acts were significantly changing the urban landscape. First they permitted construction of private housing on land that had previously been called slums, and later, they funded housing that was strictly built in conjunction with urban renewal programs. These policies resulted in large-scale displacement of poor, often minority, populations while relaxing tenant standards, marking a shift away from the creation of model communities and toward providing housing for larger numbers of poor families.

During this period, new public housing construction mirrored the evolving International Style, centering on unadorned concrete or steel and glass high-rises. The new designs radically changed the relationship between residences and their surroundings. Even though garden apartments and row houses had proved to be successful public housing types, architects and reformers wanted to explore other designs that would maximize usage of land. The resulting high-rise projects saved money - a crucial factor in the face of a dwindling federal housing budget - but yielded less livable environments. Parents living in upper-floor apartments could not easily monitor children’s play areas at ground level, and cost cutting led to reductions in security and maintenance services, creating darkened hallways and stairwells, dangerous places ripe for gang activity.

By the 1960s, with little new public housing built and funds still low, the oft-neglected existing housing began to fall apart. It became increasingly hazardous, spurring sociological studies on crime, poverty, and their relationship to the physical environment. Large-scale public housing creation officially ended in 1974 when President Nixon banned new construction. Since that time, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has focused on private management of publicly subsidized housing, and on serving elderly and disabled populations, in addition to HOPE VI and voucher programs. While the popular press has focused on the relatively infrequent demolition and New Urbanist reconstruction of the HOPE VI program, the Chicago Housing Authority has been quietly at work implementing some of HUD’s lesser known, yet critically important, recommended changes, with potential ramifications for the vast majority of its public housing stock.

While the possibilities for revitalizing older public housing have their limits, the coordinated redevelopment of an overall community would allow some historic features - buildings, landscapes, and site plans - to be saved. Renovating and retaining existing units is an economical alternative to building new affordable housing that may also be less disruptive for residents. Rather than continuing the cycle of demolition and displacement that began as part of the urban renewal era, it may be more appropriate and feasible to conserve public housing and keep communities intact while retaining affordable units. As CHA’s rehabilitation of Trumbull Park and the Hilliard Homes shows, careful evaluation of the potential to reuse existing properties, partnerships with local, state, and federal historic preservation agencies, and combined use of available tax credits could prove an effective strategy toward improving the lives of public housing residents across the country - all while preserving an important part of our nation’s heritage.

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