Breaking Ground on the National Public Housing Museum

BREAKING GROUND ON THE NATIONAL PUBLIC HOUSING MUSEUM

The National Public Housing Museum (NPHM), a 15-year dream of housing advocates, broke ground October 11 at the former Jane Addams Homes on the Near West Side. The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) in 2018 transferred the last standing structure of the Jane Addams Homes to NPHM, and the building will be extensively rehabbed to become the museum’s physical home.

Although located in Chicago, NPHM is a national museum. Input during its formation came from not only the CHA and its residents, but from housing authorities in Akron, San Diego, Los Angeles, Yonkers, NY; Corpus Christi, Fort Worth and Waco, Texas. NPHM is the nation’s first cultural institution that interprets the American experience in public housing, and it is dedicated to the belief that all people have a right to a home – a viewpoint that has gained traction since the COVID-19 pandemic.

NPHM is a “house museum,” like George Washington’s Mount Vernon or Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and hundreds of others across the United States dedicated to white men (and slave owners, in Washington’s and Jefferson’s cases), said Lisa Lee, NPHM executive director, in a telephone interview. NPHM will show the homes of working class people through their possessions, oral histories and art, in an effort to highlight their struggle, hope, entrepreneurship, achievement – and overall resilience.

Three apartments at NPHM, restored with historic artifacts, will portray life for a Jewish family during the 1930s birth of public housing, followed by Italian, Puerto Rican and Polish families adapting to changing neighborhoods and a Black family during the civil rights era.

Among the museum’s permanent exhibitions will be the Joseph and Bessie Feinberg Foundation Storytelling and Everyday Objects Gallery, featuring a rotating collection of objects from public housing residents nationwide. A music room curated by DJ Spinderella, who grew up in New York’s Louis Heaton Pink Houses, will showcase significant works created by public housing residents.

Jay-Z, for example, grew up in the Marcy Houses in Brooklyn, country music legend Kenny Rogers in public housing in Houston, and Elvis Presley in Memphis public housing, according to the archives of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which oversees public housing.

Other public housing alumni include the band Earth, Wind & Fire and singers Barbra Streisand, Prince and Diana Ross, Lee said. Mr. T of the movie Rocky and The A Team television show also spent his childhood in Chicago public housing.

Museum artifacts collected from public housing residents across the U.S. range from a wooden bowl used by a Jewish family to make gefilte fish to the gold medal boxing belts of Chicago Golden Gloves champion Lee Roy Murphy. Ursula Burns, the first Black female CEO of a Fortune 500 company, Xerox, is also represented.

Burns grew up in New York City public housing. Her single mother worked multiple jobs to support her three children, but she never made more than $4,400 a year, Burns told CNN’s Poppy Harlow in 2017.

Burns learned from her mother to accept support from friends and family, people in the neighborhood, government organizations and nonprofits. Her $60 application fees to seven colleges, for example, would have been a huge chunk of her mother’s salary, but the fees were waived, thanks to various programs.

"Institutions both private and public had to help [my mother]," she said. "Her responsibility was to parlay it into something else. That's the American Dream."

The diversity of these public housing success stories counters the racist, mainstream notion of public housing failure, which made it so easy to demolish housing developments, Lee said. It’s time for a new conversation.

“We really believe that these stories of the lived experience of public housing can and should inform the future of public policy around public housing. The unique aspect of our work is that we bring together arts, culture and public policy around housing. We really are hoping to bridge movements to address homelessness and advocacy for public housing efforts to increase affordable housing. Sometimes these movements are siloed from one another.

“It’s a groundbreaking undertaking, and we wouldn’t be here or able to undertake it without our visionary founders and funders,” she added.

One of the original voices behind the NPHM was Deverra Beverly, a long-time president of the resident council at the ABLA Homes on the Near West Side and a CHA commissioner. Beverly died in 2013, but her son Kenneth Beverly was on hand to witness the October 11 groundbreaking.

NPHM advisor Crystal Palmer’s family also comes from the ABLA Homes and was raised in the Henry Horner Homes.

“We need a National Public Housing Museum to tell our stories as public housing residents in a way that isn’t driven by the old stereotypes, and that lifts up our voices.”

“We believe that housing is a human right, that the need for affordable and decent housing is serious, and that a cultural institution could raise these issues and deepen the understanding of the public,” said NPHM Board Chair Sunny Fischer, who also grew up in public housing in the Bronx. “The museum will be a place for inquiry—raising and responding to current issues and seeking solutions— discussion, illumination, ensuring that we learn from history to create a more just society for the future.”

“The epicenter of the public housing story has been Chicago; therefore, it is appropriate that the National Public Housing Museum be located in Chicago, said former HUD Secretary and former National League of Cities President Henry Cisneros, who serves on the NPHM advisory council. Lee said that Cisneros was referring to not only the Robert Taylor and Cabrini Green Homes, but to legal struggles by residents, such as the landmark federal lawsuit filed in 1966 by Dorothy Gautreaux of the Altgeld Gardens Homes on the far South Side. In response, the federal court here found that the CHA had deliberately segregated public housing residents both racially and economically. The court’s solution was scattered-site housing.

The museum has received funding from the Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Kresge Foundation, the Builders Initiative, the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Mac- Arthur Fund for Arts and Culture at Prince, the Joseph and Bessie Feinberg Foundation, the Lohengrin Foundation and the State of Illinois. It was $4.5 million in pandemic recovery funds from the City of Chicago that allowed NPHM to finally reach its $14.5 million construction budget, Lee said. The museum is in the process of raising the remaining $2 million for exhibits.

“For a long time, people thought the role of the museum was to look backward, that public housing was over and done,” Lee said. “But since the pandemic, people realized the need for housing all people and the role of the government in providing it: a role that needs to be explored and debated in the public arena.”

The city partnership entails oral history training and a museum store owned by public housing residents. During the groundbreaking, Mayor Lori Lightfoot called NPHM “an innovative civic and cultural anchor” — an economic engine for the Near West Side.

“With a cultural workforce program focused on equity and access, a museum store that is cooperatively owned by public housing residents, and an archive that amplifies public housing residents' voices, this museum demonstrates Chicago's history and commitment to housing. I look forward to the much-needed, national dialogues and advocacy for the future of housing.”