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This collaborative project between the National Public Housing Museum and My Projects Runway brings together a deep history from Chicago and New York City. To provide more context to the stories and images, a brief history of the Chicago and New York City Housing Authorities can be found below.


The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) was founded in 1935 by Mayor Fiorello Henry La Guardia to help alleviate housing-related financial strain caused by the Great Depression. NYCHA was the first of its kind, an agency dedicated to providing publicly-funded housing to those in need of financial assistance. Its model would eventually be followed by other housing authorities across the country, including the Chicago Housing Authority in 1937. To this day, NYCHA is the country’s largest housing authority and serves 1 in 15 New Yorkers.1

The first public housing complex built in New York City was the First Houses in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1936. Though the First Houses complex was planned as a rehabilitation of the Victorian-era tenement buildings that had stood on the lot, their infrastructure was found to be too unstable. Instead, the tenements were demolished and the First Houses were built from the ground-up, delaying the project’s completion. Langdon Post, NYCHA’s first chairperson, reflected on this monumental step towards housing for the city’s most impoverished, saying, “The name First Houses, therefore, is appropriate in that these are the first dwellings which are predicated upon the philosophy that sunshine, space, and air are minimum housing requirements to which every American is entitled, no matter how small [their] income.”2

Not far behind the building of the First Houses, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) was established in 1937 through the Public Works Administration and the Housing Act of 1937. Beginning with the construction of the Julia C. Lathrop Homes in 1938, and the Jane Addams and Trumbull Park Homes in 1939, the CHA similarly aimed to create safe and affordable housing to low-income Chicagoans. 

Following World War II, housing was a central issue for millions of urban dwellers in the country’s two biggest cities, Chicago and New York.4 Chicago saw a boom in construction, with large high-rises including the Francis Cabrini-Green Homes and Stateway Gardens in 1959, and the Robert Taylor Homes, the country’s largest collection of public housing complexes, in 1962.3 New York City saw a similar construction surge,  with over 100 complexes being built between 1945–1965. In 1965 alone, 20 complexes and additions were built.5

Though the immediate post-war years saw this major investment in the public good, the end of the century saw disinvestment and downfall. National disinvestment in public housing began in 1973 when President Richard Nixon curtailed federal funds to public housing construction. In a statement from the President, he called the current state of public housing in the country  “monstrous, depressing” and even “wasteful”.6 A year later, his administration put a complete moratorium on funding for subsidized housing, as well as a shift from funding and decision making from a federal to state level.7 Gregory Umbach, Assistant Professor of History at John Jay College, recounts the impact of federal policy and poor financial decisions on New York City public housing. “As New York falls apart in [the Fiscal Crisis of] the 1970s, in ways that have been largely forgotten, the housing authority’s projects were anchors of stability and safety. They were places that you wanted to get into, as the neighborhoods were deteriorating around you. All of this changes in the late 1980s. The 1980s is the first time when you’re more at risk of criminal violence on NYCHA property than you are in the surrounding neighborhood.”8

As the cracks in the initial promise of public housing began to show in New York City and throughout the country, the Housing Voucher Program, commonly known as Section 8, was introduced as an alternative to traditional public housing in 1974. Section 8 provides low and moderate-income families vouchers to rent housing in the private market. According to NYCHA’s website, they administer the largest Section 8 program in the country, with approximately 85,000 Section 8 vouchers in use and over 25,000 property-owners currently participating in the program.9

In 2000, building renovation displaced around 1500 residents from the 368-apartment NYCHA complex, Prospect Plaza.10 The residents were promised the “Right to Return” to the building after renovations were completed. In [ ]/Later that year, developers’ but after plans changed, and the building was slated for demolition. Fourteen years after the initial plans for renovation, the final towers of Prospect Plaza were razed. This marked the first NYCHA property to be demolished since its founding in 1934. In 2017, the new Prospect Plaza was built with 80 units of public housing.11 

Similarly in Chicago saw a similar overhaul of, the Plan for Transformation, which saw its start in October 1999, was developed by the CHA to overhaul the face of public housing in the city. The plan would take place in two major halves, beginning with the demolition of high rises and temporary displacement of residents, and finishing with a shifted focus to Section 8 mixed income housing. The demolition phase was an enormous undertaking which would include 25,000 apartments in total.12 As of 2019, the 25,000 units have yet to be rebuilt, and the CHA has changed how it defines a “new unit of affordable housing,” which has made it difficult to assess a true 1 for 1 rebuild of affordable housing.13

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  1. New York City Housing Authority. (2021, March). NYCHA 2021 fact sheet – nyc.gov. NYCHA 2021 Fact Sheet. Retrieved February 24, 2022, from https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nycha/downloads/pdf/NYCHA-Fact-Sheet_2021.pdf
  2. ”City-Built Homes Will Open Dec. 3.” (1935, November 21). New York Times, p. 3. Retrieved February 24, 2022, from https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1935/11/21/97148822.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0
  3. Choldin, H. M. (2005). Chicago Housing Authority. Encyclopedia of Chicago. Retrieved February 28, 2022, from http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/253.html
  4. See Joshua Freeman, “A Decent Home” in Working Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II (New York: The New Press, 2000), 105–124.
  5. NYCHA Performance Tracking and Analytics Department. (2021, March). NYCHA Development Data Book 2021. Retrieved February 24, 2022, from https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nycha/downloads/pdf/pdb2021.pdf
  6. Fried, J. P. (1973, September 29). Nixon’s housing policy. The New York Times. Retrieved February 28, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/1973/09/29/archives/nixons-housing-policy-opponents-say-proposal-for-cash-payments-wont.html
  7. Salpukas, A. (1973, April 16). Moratorium on housing subsidy spells hardship for thousands. The New York Times. Retrieved February 28, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/1973/04/16/archives/moratorium-onhousing-subsidy-spells-hardship-for-thousands-stricter.html
  8. Ferré-sadurní, L. (2018, June 26). The Rise and Fall of New York Public Housing: An Oral History. The New York Times. Retrieved February 25, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/25/nyregion/new-york-city-public-housing-history.html
  9. NYCHA. (n.d.). About Section 8. About Section 8 – NYCHA. Retrieved February 25, 2022, from https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nycha/section-8/about-section-8.page
  10. Kinstler, L., & Smith, G. B. (2019, January 10). NYCHA’s $148m ghost town. nydailynews.com. Retrieved February 28, 2022, from https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nycha-148m-ghost-town-article-1.1124206
  11. Devlin, S. (2017, August 26). Final phase of massive, long-promised Prospect Plaza Affordable Housing is rising in Brooklyn. Brownstoner. Retrieved February 25, 2022, from https://www.brownstoner.com/development/prospect-plaza-affordable-housing-brooklyn-development-dattner-ocean-hill-1835-sterling-place/
  12. Popkin, S. J., Levy, D. K., Buron, L., Gallagher, M., & Price, D. J. (2010, August). The CHA’s Plan for Transformation: How have Residents Fared? Urban.org. Retrieved February 28, 2022, from https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/29046/412190-The-CHA-s-Plan-for-Transformation-How-Have-Residents-Fared-.PDF
  13. Bittle, J. (2019, April 19). What is the CHA doing? South Side Weekly. Retrieved February 28, 2022, from https://southsideweekly.com/cha-plan-for-transformation-haunts-chicago/