April 25, 2025 Ι Bloomberg CityLab
The items on display at the new National Public Housing Museum in Chicago are almost defiant in their ordinariness. There’s a hammer once used by a resident of the city’s Stateway Gardens development; an iron skillet from a family living in Houston’s Cuney Homes; a hose that once watered communal vegetable gardens at leafy Lathrop Homes, one of Chicago’s first federally funded public housing projects. A future famous face peers out: US Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor, who grew up in New York City’s Bronxdale Houses, in her middle-school graduation gown.
One of the flashiest items in this opening exhibit, “History Lessons: Everyday Objects from Public Housing,” is a studded leather vest with “Raiders” spelled out in sparkling silver Gothic text, a garment that belonged to Chicago housing advocate Marion Stamps. A resident of Cabrini-Green Homes on the Near North Side, Stamps negotiated gang truces and led a rent strike against the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. But she had a life beyond protest and politics; on a motorcycle, “she could just be Marion, and not the activist, freedom fighter, all of the titles that went with it,” says her daughter Tara Stamps, who spent her early years in Cabrini-Green and is now a Cook County commissioner. “People who put their bodies and their lives on the line in service to other folks need a place to just be themselves.”
The weathered vest signifies activism steeped in the everyday, which means it’s a decent metaphor for the entire NPHM, which opened in early April. One of the museum’s goals, says executive director Lisa Yun Lee, is to normalize a topic often viewed through an intensely polarized lens. Housing is not just an abstraction that policymakers battle over; it’s also a place to put your stuff.
“We want people to pay attention and realize that everyday people’s stories have critical things to teach us about, not just the way that we relate to one another, but also how we relate to the government, and how we related to the future of public policy,” she says. “We want to see these stories as extraordinary in their ordinariness.”
Eighteen years in the making, the museum is billed as the first to focus entirely on the history of American public housing, which provided homes for more than 10 million people across US cities over the last 100 years. While its collection draws from public housing in cities across the US, Chicago plays a prominent role, and the city makes an appropriate host for such an institution: It was the home of the largest federally supported public housing complex, Robert Taylor Homes, as well as the one whose poor condition and reputation for crime made it synonymous with the failures of 20th century public housing, Cabrini-Green.
The NPHM occupies a renovated 37,000-square-foot building that’s the last remnant of one of the city’s oldest projects, Jane Addams Homes, a New Deal-era apartment complex demolished more than a decade ago. Its fundraising and development period encompassed the Great Recession and Covid-19, and it debuts amid a raging US housing crisis and a flurry of Trump administration moves to cut staff at HUD and claw back federal housing grants. Just before the opening, Lee received a letter from the National Endowment for the Humanities explaining that support for her museum was in jeopardy because its “vision and mission didn’t align with the executive office,” she told the Chicago Crusader.
It would be hard to imagine a more hostile political climate for a cultural institution dedicated to the notion of promoting the idea of housing as a human right. But Lee says that’s also why the museum is so necessary.
“We have to be engaging with on-the-ground struggles today and also trying to create a future where housing is part of the commonwealth at a time when things are increasingly privatized,” says Lee. “Putting housing and housing precarity into the civic sphere, giving people the history to inform their current conversations, giving people space to do the work where they’re crossing boundaries of race and class is the most important civic mission that we have.”
From the Ruins
The museum’s roots lie in an infamous act of mass housing destruction. In 2000, the Chicago Housing Authority committed to the Plan for Transformation, an initiative to tear down some 20,000 units of public housing stock, mostly located in poorly managed and maintained high-rise complexes like Taylor Homes and Cabrini-Green. It remains the “largest net-loss of affordable housing in the United States,” says Lee. The CHA has still not built back the units they pledged to restore over 20 years ago.
Unlike many Chicagoans, “We can’t go home again,” says Tara Stamps.
Among the targeted developments was ABLA Homes, a collection of four projects on the Near West Side that at its peak housed more than 17,000 Chicagoans. The “A” in the acronym stood for Jane Addams Homes, completed in 1938 and named for the 19th century social reformer. Designed by John Holabird, an architect best known for Art Deco skyscrapers in the Loop like the Chicago Board of Trade, it comprised 32 low-rise buildings hosting 1,000 units. Residents were moved out in 2002 and most of the complex was demolished in 2009.
A longtime ABLA resident leader, Deverra Beverly, came up with the idea for the museum, rallying community members and lobbying the CHA to save a fragment of Addams Homes in order to establish a cultural institution on the site. Beverly died in 2013, but the notion of a national public housing museum took root. For much of the NPHM’s lengthy development phase, curators staged housing-themed exhibitions in sites around the city — including the vacant ruin of the sole surviving Addams building.
Design-wise, this red-brick structure has little in common with Chicago’s doomed public housing high-rises. It’s only three stories tall, with graceful proportions and setback balconies. A cozy internal courtyard is filled with playground-scaled sculpture of animals by Chicago artist and architect Edgar Miller, originally commissioned for the complex by the Works Progress Administration in 1936.
Local firm LBBA, which specializes in designing affordable housing, was an intuitive fit to lead the renovation, as the reborn building would also include 15 units of public and affordable housing — a collaboration with developer Related Midwest and the CHA. The architecture has to work as both an intimate residential experience and as a cultural institution filled with gallery and event spaces. Carefully modulating between the upper floor apartments, accessed through narrow residential corridors, and the white cube galleries on the ground floor was an important job for the designers.
These two different experiences are linked by a three-story open staircase that unites each level with a monumental floor-to-ceiling mural called ReCreation by Marisa Moran Jahn. The mural celebrates citizen-led organizing and activism in Baltimore’s Black communities, with black-and-white archival photos of people in dynamic motion (stepping in time to a marching band, cartwheeling, dancing, swinging a baseball bat) on a background of hand-dyed blotches of color.
Two Apartments, Two Eras
Visitors can also explore restored apartments that reflect different eras in the complex’s history, full of period-appropriate artifacts and furniture sourced from the descendants of original residents.
The narrative begins in the 1940s with the Turovitz apartment, home to a Jewish family that moved in soon after Jane Addams Homes opened. For the Turovitzes, public housing meant being able to keep their own kosher kitchen: In an audio recording, Mollie Turovitz’s granddaughter Tina Birnbaum explains her grandmother’s domestic preferences and the finer points of gefilte fish preparation. Mollie’s son Jack, a photographer, converted a closet into a darkroom to develop photos and advertised his services in the housing project’s local newsletter. There is a persistent aura of dignity, duty and sacrifice. Mollie’s war ration book sits next to the Torah on a coffee table; a framed picture of FDR — a fixture in many Addams homes of that time, Lee says — looks on from the corner of the room.
Across the hall, the apartment of the Hatch family, who lived in Jane Addams in the 1960s, offers a snapshot of Black families caught up in the era’s civil rights history. The Reverend Elijah J. Hatch and his wife Helen Holmes Jackson bought their children a set of World Book encyclopedias instead of a television, but that changed in 1966 when Martin Luther King, Jr., moved to the West Side of Chicago to protest racist housing discrimination. King’s campaign dominated the news and the Hatch family’s home life. On display are copies of Jet from 1961, punched CTA transit tickets, and a family recipe for peanut brittle.
The demographic change from the Turovitzes to the Hatches was typical. Initially, Jane Addams was 99% white, and very few Black families were offered a place to live there; when it closed, it was 99% Black.
The museum is very much a multimedia experience, with a recording studio for oral histories and podcasts. The Rec Room, filled with LPs of artists that lived in public housing (from Elvis Presley to the Wu-Tang Clan), was curated by Salt-N-Pepa DJ and former public housing resident Spinderella. One of the most joyful and ebullient spaces in a museum full of contested histories, its wood paneling and wall-to-wall album cover art make it a place for cross-generational nostalgia.
Throughout the facility, the “Care to Look” exhibition places artifacts from the museum’s former life — mailboxes, an incinerator door, a medicine cabinet — into its current one. This exhibition, says Lee, is a way to maintain the homey familiarity of the space. “As you’re walking through, if it feels too much like a gallery, then you see the mailboxes,” she says.
Making a Case
To help ensure that the stories it tells reflect those that know this world best, the museum’s leadership crosses borders of race and class. Six of the 27 members of the NPHM board have lived in public housing. “Public housing, to me, has always been a community,” says Francine Washington, a board member who lived in Chicago public housing. “It’s been a lifeline.”
Such sentiments stand in opposition to the conventional image of life in US public housing — especially in Chicago, where places like Cabrini-Green are generally recalled as irremediable breeders of crime and dysfunction. That historically sweeping condemnation, Lee says, took hold because there was “one mainstream narrative about public housing and its failure.” The museum seeks to expand and revise that account: “Never again will a single story be told as if it’s the only one,” she says.
“Part of the failure of the policy is perceived as the failure of the people,” says Brad Hunt, a history professor at Loyola University-Chicago, and a NPHM board member. “That’s the wrong frame entirely.”
While current exhibitions look back at the everyday experience of public housing, the museum also engages with current policy debates. One gallery will explore a rotating cast of modern variants, including Millers River, a 19-story complex for the elderly and disabled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that was recently given a privately funded facelift. This case study illustrates how “public housing” is often a misnomer, as funding incentives for private developers dominate the current affordable housing conversation. The resulting process is byzantine and rife with paradoxes the exhibit lays bare.
There are various workshop and organizing spaces in this activist museum, but the most explicit moral and economic case for public housing is made in a first-floor gallery filled with New Deal posters from the WPA’s Federal Art Program. With exhortations like “Planned Housing Fights Disease,” “Cure Juvenile Delinquency in the Slums by Planned Housing,” and “Better Housing: The Solution to Infant Mortality in the Slums,” the campaign presented public housing as a tested and vetted technocratic solution.
That rings true for board chair Fischer, who was raised in public housing in the Bronx. “People would say constantly, ‘I never dreamed I could live in such a nice place,’” she says.
Such confidence that the government could help struggling Americans is a reminder that, not too far outside of living memory, a right to housing was a mainstream political demand, encompassed in FDR’s Second Bill of Rights in 1944. “It’s not utopian,” says Hunt, the Loyola history professor.
The American reluctance to treat affordable shelter as a public good, he says, has exacerbated a housing crisis that will give the NPHM direction and motivation for the foreseeable future. As an activist endeavor, the museum will measure its success on its ability to build a coalition and articulate demands where they can exert pressure. “We need to think more collectively,” says Hunt, “about our rights and what we want as a society.” That question will always have a home at the NPHM.