Robert Taylor Homes
Robert Taylor Homes was a housing project in the Bronzeville neighborhood of the South Side of Chicago, on State Street between 39th and 54th streets alongside the Dan Ryan Expressway.
History
The Robert Taylor Homes housing project was completed in 1962 and named for Robert Robinson Taylor, the son of the first African-American architect accredited in the United States.[citation needed] At one time, it was the largest housing project in the country,[1] and it was intended to offer decent affordable housing. It was composed of 28 high-rise buildings with 16 stories each, with a total of 4,321 apartments, mostly arranged in U-shaped clusters of three, stretching for two miles (three kilometers).[2] The Robert Taylor Homes were also home at one time to such celebrities as Mr. T, Kirby Puckett, and current Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick.
Robert Taylor Homes faced many of the same problems that doomed other high-rise housing projects in Chicago such as Cabrini-Green. These problems include narcotics, violence, and the perpetuation of poverty.
Planned for 11,000 inhabitants, the Robert Taylor Homes housed up to a peak of 27,000 people. [3] Six of the poorest US census areas with populations above three people were found there. Including children who are not of working age, at one point 95 percent of the housing development's 27,000 residents were unemployed and listed public assistance as their only income source, and 40 percent of the households were single-parent, female-headed households earning less than $5,000 per year. About 99.9 percent were African-American. The 28 drab, 16-story concrete high-rises, many blackened with the scars of arson fire, sat in a narrow two-block by 2.5-mile[4] (300 m by 3 km) stretch of slum. The city's neglect was evident in littered streets, poorly enforced building codes, and scant commercial or civic amenities.
Police intelligence sources say that elevated number of homicides was the result of gang "turf wars," as gang members and drug dealers fought over control of given Chicago neighborhoods. Its landlord, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), has estimated that $45,000 in drug deals took place daily. Former residents of the Robert Taylor Homes have said that the drug dealers fought for control of the buildings. In one weekend, more than 300 separate shooting incidents were reported in the vicinity of the Robert Taylor Homes. Twenty-eight people were killed during the same weekend, with 26 of the 28 incidents believed to be gang-related.
On June 25 1983, an infant, Vinyette Teague, went missing from Robert Taylor Homes in the hall, while her grandmother went to answer the phone.[5]
Revitalization
It was decided to replace all Robert Taylor Homes with a mixed-income community in low-rise builidings as part of a federal block grant received for the purpose from the HOPE VI federal program.[4] In 1996, HOPE VI federal funds were granted specifically for off-site Taylor replacement housing. The Chicago Housing Authority moved out all residents by the end of 2006. On 8 March 2007, the last remaining building was demolished. As of 2007, a total of 2,300 low rise residential homes and apartments, seven new and renovated community facilities, and a number of retail and commercial spaces are to be built in place of the old high-rise buildings. The development costs are expected to total an estimated $583 million. Part of the redevelopment is the renaming of the area to "Legends South".
Concurrent with the demolition of the Robert Taylor Homes, Chicago's murder rate has sunk to the lowest the city has seen since the 1960s.[citation needed] In 2004, a record low 448 homicides took place in Chicago. Even with the population growing, the homicide rate has continued to shrink.[citation needed]
Research
Because of the standardized housing and near homogeneous demographics, the RTH cluster was an ideal location for studying the effects of urban living and lack of "green space" on the human condition. This type of research in environmental psychology was most clearly demonstrated by a group of studies done by Francis Kuo and William Sullivan of the Landscape and Human Health Laboratory (formerly the Human-Environment Research Laboratory) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The history and economy of this housing development was studied by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh in his book American Project (ISBN 0-674-00830-8).
References
- ^ “Robert Taylor Homes Cease To Exist”, cbs2chicago.com
- ^ Photo
- ^ Robert Taylor Homes, Chicago Housing Authority
- ^ a b "Hope VI funds new urban neighborhoods". New Urban News. Jan.-Feb. 2002. Retrieved 2007-07-26.
{{cite web}}: Check date values in:|date=(help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in:|publisher=(help) - ^ http://www.charleyproject.org/cases/t/teague_vinyette.html
External links
- CHA's official Robert Taylor Homes site
- "Midst the Handguns' Red Glare - Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes, a public housing development", Whole Earth, Summer, 1999.
- Robert Taylor Homes website at Emporis
- Encyclopedia of Chicago entry on Robert Taylor Homes
- "Falling from the Robert Taylor Homes" by David W. Boles, May, 2006
- "Granddaddy of all ghettos faces wrecking ball" Associated Press, October 8, 2006
- "Dislocation", a film by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, Professor of Sociology and African-American Studies at Columbia University, which "chronicles the lives of tenants in one building as they move through the six-month relocation process" according to the website's description.
- A history of the building's namesake Robert Taylor
- Robert Taylor Homes Cease To Exist, cbs2chicago.com