National Public Housing Museum. Photo by Jack Crawford
National Public Housing Museum. Photo by Jack Crawford
Rendering of National Public Housing Museum entrance by Amanda Williams and Olalekan Jeyifous
HED Architects and Landon Bone Baker Architects are behind the museum’s design. It will occupy the last building of the Jane Addams Homes, with others having been demolished from 2002 to 2007. This project is part of the Roosevelt Square masterplan, which involves a mix of renovated and newly constructed apartments.
National Public Housing Museum. Photo by Jack Crawford
The project will come with 15 mixed-income apartments. The museum portion will showcase public housing stories through art, narratives, and photos. There will also be a collection from public housing residents and a music room.
Rendering of National Public Housing Museum entrance by Amanda Williams and Olalekan Jeyifous
Features of the museum include a sculpture garden with Edgar Miller’s art and three apartment displays showing different public housing eras. There will also be an Entrepreneurship Hub for local businesses and startups.
National Public Housing Museum. Photo by Jack Crawford
National Public Housing Museum. Photo by Jack Crawford
As far as public transit, the museum is near the Blue Line at the Racine station and bus routes 12, 60, and 157.
BOWA Construction, Blackwood Group, and MIKK handle the museum’s construction, while GMA Construction works on the residential sections. With funding from city, state, and private sources, the $14.5 million project is set to open this fall.
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Is this supposed to be a monument to failure? The democrat voter plantation? Perpetual institutional poverty? Because for a lot less money they could just walk people thorough the abla homes a a couple blocks south and have a real live action adventure in public housing.
Opened this post with expectation that there would be a predicably ignorant Faux-news inspired rant in the comments section and was not disappointed!
I’m not the biggest proponent of public housing, but projects like the infamous Cabrini-Green were are one point highly livable, thriving communities until all funding for social services (like helping families transition to non-subsidized housing), maintenance, and security staffing were eviscerated in the 60s and 70s.
Many projects thus degraded into vertical slums, but most Americans don’t have any idea what an actual slum looks/feels like (Kibera, Mumbai, Rio’s favelas). Most of these places are objectively more miserable, filthy, and lawless than any Chicago neighborhood/project, and people live there out of desperation and suppressed opportunity vs. laziness. Imagine multiple square miles of Chicago fully filled with tin-roofed shanties heated by cooking fires and littered with trash and human waste. This is what almost all modern societies would need to tolerate without public housing.