Demolished

This is Tiffany Sanders. She was about 10 years old in 1993 when this photo was taken at the Clarence Darrow high-rises, an extension of Chicago’s oldest public housing development, the Ida B. Wells Homes.

Before Chicago built projects like the ones where Tiffany lived, the city’s poor lived in privately owned tenements in often terrible conditions. The tenements were teeming, with people living anywhere they could find space — in basements without light, alongside livestock, in tiny rooms with nothing but a bed and chicken-wire “walls.”

Over time, as Chicago’s economy evolved, many of the jobs in those neighborhoods became obsolete. Working-class families left for better neighborhoods. And with a shortage of residents paying rent, the housing projects slid into disrepair and came to be dominated by the drug trade and organized crime.

The buildings became hulking symbols of urban dysfunction to the suburbanites who saw them from the expressway on their daily commute.

In the early ’90s, when Patricia Evans started documenting public housing, she had already established herself as a successful urban photographer. She had seen a lot while working in cities around the world. But when she settled in Chicago, she recalls, she was surprised by what she saw in that major American city: a place the rest of the city had seemingly abandoned.

By the time she got there, the original promise of affordable housing for the working class was broken. Over the next two decades, the Chicago Housing Authority would tear down dozens of high-rise buildings and attempt to relocate more than 24,000 families and seniors.

“I sort of woke up to where the neighborhood was.”

She woke up at a turning point. Within a decade, parts of the city would begin to disappear in the transformation of public housing. Rather than looking away after her attack, she and her husband would spend years working in and around the projects.

As she moved deeper and deeper into the community — past the kids on the playgrounds, through the building exteriors, beyond the drug dealing in lobbies, upward in the barely working elevators and into homes where people lived — after enough time, after making enough friends, Evans stopped feeling like an outsider.

While some have described public housing as a tangle of failed policies and urban planning, to the people who lived there, it was home. But at the end of the 1990s, like the tenement residents before them, they were told that their world would be “transformed.” Many would not be able to live there anymore.

“Closing Stateway could’ve been done a lot better. It split up many families. They loved each other,” Myia Fleming, a former resident, told us.

The projects were demolished. In their place, the Chicago Housing Authority, the city of Chicago and their institutional partners such as the MacArthur Foundation proposed new, better housing for the families and seniors living in public housing.

Here’s what happened.

In 1999, Housing and Urban Development counted 16,846 nonsenior households in Chicago’s projects, considered to be “in good standing.”

It’s always been difficult to know exactly how many individuals that would be. One University of Chicago report estimates that on average, there were 3.2 people per household.

That would have been at least 53,900 people total.