Abstract
For several years during the first decade of the new century anthropologist Catherine Fennell lived and worked on Chicago’s Near West Side, specifically, in an enclave that has come to be known as Westhaven (or West Haven). The Westhaven place-name emerged following the demolition of the Chicago Housing Authority’s (CHA) Henry Horner Homes, a mid- and high-rise public housing development that had included more than 1,700 apartment units. Fennell rented an apartment in Westhaven, volunteered at a local neighborhood development nonprofit organization, observed public meetings, read planning documents, and most crucially, spent many hours in the company of Westhaven activists and rank-and-file residents.
Last Project Standing is the product of Fennell’s research. It is a volume that approaches public housing redevelopment in a fashion that is decisively different from the more characteristic policy analytical lens employed by scholars such as Edward Goetz (2013) or Lawrence Vale (2013). To illustrate, Fennell (6, 8) observes that “this book is not a social autopsy . . . of public housing reform. It does not dissect these reforms’ failures or unintended consequences, nor does it offer any proposals to improve their outcomes.” Rather, her book “is . . . about what it is like to live in a place caught up in tremendous social and material flux—Horner on its way to becoming a mixed-income new community called Westhaven.” Of course, there are many locales within contemporary cities undergoing “social and material flux.” Fennell’s research and this volume seek to interpret a specific variety of flux. Again, in Fennell’s (26) words, her research began as an effort to track how public housing’s redevelopment redistributed the work of caring for poor people across private citizens and entities. Yet it became focused on the nascent public congealing around Chicago’s housing experiment. . . [W]hen I refer to a public, I have something very particular in mind: a large-scale, mass subject that emerges through shared attention to a form in circulation. (italics in original)
With this volume, Fennell aims very high, but her prose often drifts from the “very particular” to the refuge of opaque formulation.
Westhaven is bounded by north/south Ashland and Western avenues (to the east and west, respectively), Lake Street (and overhead, the Chicago Transit Authority’s Green Line [north] and Van Buren Street [to the south]). Separating the northern and southern portions of the neighborhood is Madison Street, an often busy thoroughfare that runs alongside the United Center sports and entertainment complex. The old Henry Horner complex—with the exception of a single, outlying midrise building—was aligned along Lake Street. Like several of Chicago’s post–World War II public housing developments, Horner was sited in an undesirable location (adjoining the thundering CTA line) that, with the passage of time, has become increasingly desirable. In effect, Chicago’s Loop has marched west, bringing with it loft conversions, new condominium developments, and along Randolph Street, an impeccably hip bar and restaurant corridor.
The emergence of Westhaven has also been shaped by the particulars of the Horner redevelopment process. The clearance and redevelopment of the Horner area have been governed by a federal court-mandated agreement between the public housing development’s residents and the CHA. The settlement to Henry Horner Mothers Guild v. Chicago Housing Authority and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development preceded the U.S. Congress’s termination of the “one-for-one” replacement rule governing the demolition of public housing units. As a result, an unusually large portion of former Horner Homes residents have resettled in the mixed-income Westhaven residential developments. In addition, former CHA resident representatives have exercised more influence than typical HOPE VI (or in Chicago, Plan for Transformation) public housing residents in neighborhood “replanning” activities.
Fennell’s book is a series of thematically overlapping essays that include a discussion of how the physical decaying of the Horner development shaped residents’ view of the subsequent redevelopment process; an examination of the often excessive heating of Horner apartments, and the behavioral consequences of this experience; a paired portrait of Westhaven old-timers—that is, former Horner residents—and incoming renters and home purchasers as they shared space in the new neighborhood; an exposé of the “care industry” in Westhaven, that is, the social service agencies and community activists seeking to uplift the poorest of the former public housing residents; and, an interpretation of the aims and likely impact of the new National Public Housing Museum to be located on the site of the former ABLA development (another CHA site on Chicago’s Near West Side, a short distance from Westhaven).
As a group, these essays often seem to slight empirical reporting in favor of extended interpretation. For example, the shared space essay (chapter 4) promises to explore how both Westhaven old-timers and newcomers viewed their new neighbors, “used” space in the neighborhood, and understood notions such as the presumed distinction between public and private space. In fact, the chapter 4 narrative is heavily dependent on old-timers’ observations and recollections, and Fennell’s commentary on newcomers and their views is distinctly speculative. In the case of chapter 6, Fennell’s account of the planning of the public housing museum, which as of this writing still has not opened its doors, must jump a substantial analytical hurdle. What Fennell is able to discuss is the varied and evolving intentions of the museum’s sponsors; what she cannot begin to specify is whether or not a truly “sympathetic public” can be evoked by this institution. There is simply no public available to visit the as-yet unopened facility.
For this reader, the most compelling chapter in Last Project Standing is Fennell’s analysis of the local care industry, the array of organizations and activists that has sought, over the long run, to stabilize the Horner neighborhood, or in the shorter run, to reconstitute community in the emergent Westhaven neighborhood. The grand neoliberal federal policy innovations of the 1990s, public housing transformation and welfare reform, were based on a series of assumptions about responsible communal behavior and the techniques that would induce individual and group responsibility. Fennell’s portrait of the machinations within Westhaven’s local care industry yields a very telling critique of the tortured logic animating many of the public housing/welfare reform’s prescriptions.
Yet I was also struck by a lacuna in Fennell’s (179) profile of local activists/organizational leaders and their relationship to their constituents: Just as transitioning Horner residents expected primary recipients of resources to redistribute them, so too did they expect resident leaders to parlay their leadership positions into goods and services for their constituents. In fact, the main thing that recommended a person to leadership was a capacity to amass and redistribute resources.
This point is both plausible, and as presented by Fennell in subsequent pages, empirically confirmed. What Fennell does not pursue is an explanation of this mindset, so many readers will be left to ponder if what Fennell has observed is an attribute of low-income urbanites in general, or possibly, of former Henry Horner residents in particular. But what of the following: are longstanding Chicago Near West Siders prone to a set of assumptions about political participation, leadership, and leader/constituent relations that can be considered a legacy of their city’s many decades of domination by the highly localist and very clientelist Democratic Party? That Fennell never even considers this possibility seems to fly in the face of her expressed commitment to understanding transitioning Horner residents within a comprehensive framing of history, institutional practices, and their lived experience.
Near the end of Last Project Standing, Fennell (237, 250) refers to anthropologists as “sympathetic interpreters,” social scientists whose research and writing link the lives of populations on the geographic or social margins, even “the suffering of others,” to an audience that can be construed as western or modern (“the expansive, sympathetic imagination of the West”). In this volume, Catherine Fennell’s work of interpretation is often asymmetric, keen to absorbing the thoughts and experiences of her subjects, not so attentive to producing description and analysis that can be used by an expansive audience. It is revealing that Fennell closes Last Project Standing with an exhortation directed specifically to anthropologists, encouraging them to rethink both how they present their subjects and the ends their ethnographies ought to serve. Her advice to fellow anthropologists rings true. It is, however, ironic that a book aspiring to bring the story of public housing transformation to a “sympathetic public,” in the end, defines its audience so narrowly.