Reviews » Archives » October 2009

“At its core, public housing, as conceived by reformers in 1937, was a blueprint for disaster and could not have survived the postwar housing boom without fundamental changes. The need for these changes was actually recognized early on, but they were never seriously pursued. The crime was therefore not the effort to better house the poor but the failure by those in power to alter course and to fix evident mistakes. Leadership at all governmental levels abandoned its poverty-stricken residents in public housing — nowhere more than in Chicago.” {13}

“Rather than bemoan the loss of Main Street and condemn strip commercial areas, then, one would do well to see them as part of the rich visual variety of the American landscape today — a variety that reflects how much America has changed in the twentieth century. … if current preservation trends continue, Americans may find themselves anxiously preserving threatened shopping strips in, say, the year 2050, when these places too become ‘historic.’ After all, in the early 1950s, on the eve of Disney’s rediscovery of late-Victorian architecture, the buildings of the 1900 era were considered so much obsolete garish rubble by many Americans.” {8, 15}