America knew it needed public housing but designed the system to fail

CHICAGO — It is the small, everyday things that are most evocative: a rotary telephone, a Pyrex baking dish, an old hand mixer and furniture that looks well lived in. The National Public Housing Museum , which opened this month in Chicago, is fighting a heroic battle against misinformation, amnesia and bad history, and for some reason it is the quotidian objects that do much of the basic work.

Eighteen years in the making, the $18 million museum includes 8,500 square feet of exhibition space in the last surviving building of the 1938 Jane Addams Homes, a superblock development on the Near West Side of Chicago. Built as part of the Roosevelt administration's efforts to ensure decent housing for poor and working-class families, the Jane Addams Homes consisted of 32 buildings, around 1,000 apartments and more than 50 rowhouses. (Addams was a social activist who died in 1935.) The architecture, designed by one of Chicago's leading art deco architects, was simple, solid and accommodating — low-rise buildings of three stories, with balconies and shared outdoor spaces.

Almost all of that was torn down along with other major Chicago housing projects in the late 1990s, when President Bill Clinton's efforts to "reinvent" the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) led to the loss of tens of thousands of subsidized homes across the country. According to Lisa Yun Lee, director of the new museum, Chicago still has a deficit of about 20,000 public-housing units, the largest net loss in the country.

"This building is our biggest artifact," she says, standing in the museum's entrance foyer. On a large screen in the lobby, images flash by, the highs and lows of public housing as it was documented over decades of neglect and decline. There are scenes of demolition, but also of families and children at play.

"There was mostly one standard narrative of public housing," says Lee, by which she means a grim narrative of neglect and crime, of high-rise buildings that loomed malevolently over wasted lots of treeless land and urban anomie.

Leaders of the museum studied an important precedent, the Tenement Museum in New York City , for inspiration. As in that museum, original apartments have been re-created to suggest key periods in the building's history, and they are the core of the experience.

One such unit is dedicated to the Turovitz family, Jews who fled the mounting oppression and violence in Europe and were among the first families in the new complex. The kitchen, with its 1930s appliances, was a beloved space because it allowed the family to keep kosher. In a bedroom, there is a copy of a 1939 Superman comic book in which the hero fights to defend children against the depredations of bad housing and poverty — positing a decent home as a basic right of all Americans.

That is the museum's view, too, announced in their mission statement: "to preserve, promote, and propel the right of all people to a place where they can live and prosper — a place to call home."

The museum is also a member of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience , an organization of museums, historic houses and memorial sites devoted to the memory of our species' most painful and traumatic events. Sites of conscience are often in an explicit war against the forces of amnesia and authoritarian narratives of unity, nationalism and partisan tribalism .

"We couldn't have anticipated how relevant we would actually be," says Lee, at a moment when Elon Musk's DOGE cuts to HUD could lead to the loss of more than half its staff and cause enormous disruptions in social housing and the larger housing market.

In a second re-created apartment, a short film using silhouettes and voice-overs sketches some of the essential events in the history of public housing. Redlining, which made it difficult or impossible for people of color to obtain mortgages and insurance in many neighborhoods, concentrated poverty and excluded many families from the wealth-building benefits of homeownership. Other federal policies built into housing programs since the 1930s, including the noxious "neighborhood composition rule," dictated that new public housing not alter the racial balance of a neighborhood, which was effectively a way to maintain segregation for decades. There were also top limits on income levels for public housing, making it in some cases the housing of last resort for the poorest families.

Racism, disinvestment in urban centers and policies that subsidized homeowners through mortgage interest and local property-tax deductions created a downward spiral for many public-housing projects. But while the Chicago museum's leadership was pursuing oral histories of public housing, they found other narratives as well — of community, empowerment and self-sufficiency.

"The stories of misappropriated funds and deferred maintenance opened up other stories of people helping each other, stories of care," Lee says.

In the museum's basement, a television plays episodes of the 1970s sitcom "Good Times" on a loop. As a boy, I was fascinated by this show, with its broad and sometimes ridiculous humor, and its occasionally wrenching dramatic twists. "Good Times" was set in a public-housing project probably based on Chicago's troubled Cabrini-Green Homes, and although the show often lapsed into caricature, it also opened a window on a world that was entirely unknown to me.

Unknown, but frightening. My family would occasionally visit New York or Boston during the 1970s, when government support for public housing peaked before a precipitous decline. My parents knew nothing firsthand about inner-city housing projects, but they had plenty of ideas about them, gleaned from the newspaper, from lurid Hollywood misrepresentation, the rhetoric of opportunist politicians and perhaps channel-surfing past programs like "Good Times." If we passed by one, traversing the outer boroughs of New York, we were told to lock the car doors, and thus I learned to regard them not with curiosity but with fear.

More than two decades after those trips, I would find myself talking to a family in a housing project slated for demolition in St. Louis, where I was working as an editorial writer. "Because it's our home," one woman replied when asked why she didn't want to leave what seemed like a big, bleak, brick box of despair. She had been offered no guarantees of returning to anything equivalent and was being asked to give up more than just real estate. Home meant place, people, community, memory.

The objects on display at the National Public Housing Museum, talismans of domesticity that are markers of people long since scattered or gone, struck me with the same force as that woman's words about home. My childhood world of suburban houses, each with a half-acre of lawn and shrubbery, contained many of these same objects. They connect these two worlds, yet the one I grew up in was subsidized by myriad government policies and benefits. Both offered homes to people, but on one side of the divide, everything conspired to defend and preserve the value of these structures, while on the other, everything militated against those same needs.

If there's a housing crisis in America, and if that housing crisis is a factor in our current political malaise and dysfunction, it's because of disinvestment, bad policy, neglect and fear. Anyone who visits this new museum will immediately see it wasn't about bad design or architecture. It was about the rules of the game, which we made increasingly unwinnable for the people most dependent on public housing.

The National Public Housing Museum , 919 S. Ada St., Chicago, is open Wednesday through Sunday. www.nphm.org .