Conquering the "last frontier": Gentrification, public housing and the limits of New Urbanism in the central city (Illinois).

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This dissertation scrutinizes the physical redevelopment of America's most distressed public housing complexes under the federal HOPE VI program. Using Chicago's Cabrini-Green complex as a case study, this dissertation situates the redevelopment of public housing within its larger economic, political, cultural and architectural context, and unearths the broader significance of such changes in federal housing policy on Chicago's changing urban terrain. The primary argument put forth is that, despite rhetoric to the contrary, the redevelopment of Cabrini-Green orchestrated under HOPE VI was mostly about recovering a remarkably deep “rent gap” in Chicago's Central Area. During the 1980s and 1990s, changes in Chicago's economy, along with an associated intensification of the gentrification process, swiftly converted Cabrini-Green into an almost incomparable anomaly where public housing occupied a prime parcel of real estate in one of the most dynamic urban land markets in the United States.
This particular context informed and structured the shape of the redevelopment efforts. At Cabrini-Green, as in other HOPE VI redevelopment efforts, a New Urbanist model of low-rise and mixed-income townhouses was used to address the problems associated with the “concentrated poverty” exhibited by modernist high-rise public housing towers. This New Urbanist model, however, necessitated the displacement of many public housing households and destroyed nearly 600 units of subsidized housing from Chicago's diminishing affordable residential stock. The ultimate result was the creation of new “ghettos” on the far periphery of the central city—what I call “third ghettos”—that rather paradoxically recreate many of the social and economic problems associated with the concentrated-poverty of the much-maligned high-rises.