Why We Need The Nation’s First Public Housing Museum

A 1936 advertisement for the New York City Housing Authority depicts the clamor of city life: a jumble of line drawings depict a leaping alley cat, trash can, train, and fire escape. Bold text in a quintessential Art Deco font plastered diagonally across the image reads, "Must we always have this? Why not HOUSING?," addressing both the energy and desperation of urban life in 1930s America. Funded by the Works Progress Administration, the ad was of a time when the federal government created massive public works projects across America to uplift the poor during the Great Depression.

A 1936 poster promoting planned housing as the solution to a host of inner-city problems shows an inkblot on which elements of inner-city life are drawn.  Photo courtesy Library of Congress

Though that era is now long over, the ad still feels relevant. We’ve reached a record high of unhoused people across the country: new housing construction is slow, rent costs burden more than 50 percent of Americans, and building housing is only getting more expensive. We may have driverless taxis coasting through cities and technology that delivers anything you desire in a matter of hours…but why not housing, indeed?

The advertisement is one of many artifacts on display at the new National Public Housing Museum (NPHM) in Chicago, the country’s only museum devoted to U.S. public housing, which opens April 4. Unlike other types of history museums which seek to keep the past alive, the NPHM is in a unique position because public housing itself isn’t, technically, extinct. People still inhabit public housing developments built across the country after the U.S. Congress boldly declared in 1935 that housing is a human right. As such, the NPHM is doing something a bit different. They’re not preserving objects and artifacts to encase public housing in amber; instead, the space squarely seeks to reinvigorate our interest in collective well-being by tackling public housing’s dominant narrative—one of crime, poverty, and eventual destruction—head on.

Located in Chicago’s Little Italy neighborhood, the NPHM is housed in the remaining structure that was once part of the Jane Addams Homes—a 1937 low-rise public housing development that was mostly demolished beginning in 2002. According to NPHM executive director Lisa Lee, the building itself is the museum’s biggest artifact, saved by a group of former public housing residents when the City of Chicago embarked on its 1999 Plan for Transformation that got rid of 18,000 public housing units and displaced more than 16,000 people. At that point, it had been the largest net loss of affordable housing in the entire United States, says Lee.

"[Residents] knew that one of the reasons it was so easy to dismantle their homes was because there was one mainstream narrative about public housing and its failure, but it actually didn’t reflect their stories, their experiences, their families lives," she explains. "So they wanted to have a place where their voices could be heard, to not just preserve public housing, but also make sure that there was a future for it."

The building has been meticulously restored by LBBA Architects, a Chicago practice known for its excellence in designing affordable housing. Unlike contemporary gallery and museum spaces, NPHM’s layout is intimate—no sweeping, cavernous atriums, only a few double-height spaces in the entryway. Throughout its four floors (including offices), individual galleries feel more like apartment units connected by residential hallways. Dotting the museum are recurring installations called Care to Look, which display artifacts from New Deal-era public housing developments like intercom systems and medicine cabinets. It all amounts into a rather contemporary living environment—objects and installations feel less like peering at displays and more like visiting a stranger’s house and encountering their personal decorative choices.

It’s a sensation that is particularly acute in the third-floor apartment re-creations, where three units from three different decades were meticulously reconstructed from the recorded memories of past public housing residents and their relatives. NPHM has spent years collecting a vast oral history archive which informs furniture choice and placement, color schemes—family photos from the actual residents hang on the walls. Visitors can listen to these specific oral histories in a self-guided audio tour. Yet they aren’t only about the families who occupied the units; in one restored apartment from the 1950s, a video produced by Manual Cinema narrated by MacArthur Genius Grant recipient Dr. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor tells the story of how racial covenants and redlining created urban segregation and eventually produced the conditions—and dominant stereotypes—that color our current beliefs about public housing.