The Chicago Housing Authority, or CHA did a very poor job in planning the high-rise projects that they build and many, including Hunt, consider the projects to be a “social disaster.” While several factors could contribute to the failure of the housing projects, Hunt makes a good case about how the youth to adult ratio and the tallness of the buildings to be the main causes of the crime and vandalism of these buildings.
Hunt mentioned some of Jane Jacobs’ ideas such as how residents in communities can band together to keep a watch on the neighborhood. The will band together and use “collective efficacy” to police themselves, maintaining social order and minimizing crime (146). While in many neighborhoods this is the case, this did not occur in the CHA’s housing projects. I found Hunt’s discussion of the youth to adult ratios to be very interesting and an important factor in social order and the ability for a neighborhood to actually function as a community to police itself.
The CHA’s housing projects with family public housing had some of the highest youth to adult ratios. It was interesting that this occurred not because of organic reasons, such as parents just wanting to have many children, but because the CHA built housing specifically to accommodate families with many children. I was surprised by the lack of foresight governing the CHA. The CHA did not look at the consequences of housing such large amounts of children in one housing area. The CHA built “Children’s Cities,” excluding childless families and serving families with substantial amounts of children (149). The CHA did not rely on forethought and was trying to match the growing demand for large apartments. As demand continued to increase, the CHA built even more housing for larger families while “no analyses … wrestled with the ramifications of this choice” (151). I found it surprising that no research was done either to look at similar housing projects that have failed such as the one in St. Louis. St. Louis had to demolish its housing project after building housing for large families and having high youth to adult ratios that caused social disorder.
The CHA went on building housing for large families without considering the consequences, perhaps because during the time there was a “limited understanding of how adults informally police social space” (151). Adults would often police the neighborhoods themselves in communities and parents informed neighboring parents of their child’s wrongdoings. This dynamic could no longer occur as the youth-adult ratio grew. Neighbors could no longer keep track of all the children in a neighborhood and there was no sense of community developed in a tall building (153). Thus the result was “social disorder on a staggering scale” (155). I was very surprised by the extreme damage enacted by children in the housing that Hunt detailed, such as how the laundry machines were broken and residents had to wash clothing in their apartments, wooden doors had to be replaced with steel, and the stairwells were even used for toilet purposes (156).
The large amount of children and the smaller amount of adults to control them contributed to many of the examples of crime, vandalism, and social disaster in the CHA housing, but there were also several other contributing factors. The project housing areas were hated by the tenants and often the people living there were “embittered,” lashing out “in response to their victimization” (158). There are many complex reasons for the social disaster but I agree with Hunt that the vandalism is a “crime of opportunity” which occurred more often because of the high youth-adult ratios and the lack of adult supervision. I wonder why the CHA proceeded with so little thought as to the future of the housing and why they did not for see such a disaster?
