The National Public Housing Museum: A House Museum for the Future

Two decades after public housing residents germinated the idea for a national museum about public housing in Chicago, the National Public Housing Museum is open on Chicago’s Near West Side. Within its permanent home—the last building of the Jane Addams Homes, a public housing development once owned and maintained by the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA)—the museum’s opening is a triumph of a long game that began with the largest demolition of public housing in United States history.

In 2002, Deverra Beverly, a lifelong resident of public housing and community leader of the ABLA Homes, approached Sunny Fischer, then the Executive Director of the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation—and a former resident of public housing herself—with a preservation challenge. Under the Chicago Housing Authority’s 2000 “Plan for Transformation,” the CHA would demolish much of its portfolio, 18,000 units total, including every one of its fifty-one remaining high-rise buildings, and the Jane Addams Homes. The CHA would then adjust to a model that focused on creating new public housing spread out across Chicago’s neighborhoods, undoing its legacy of siting public housing in isolated and segregated communities. Initially projected to be implemented over ten years, this revitalization would repair or replace 25,000 new units of public housing while bringing in new opportunities for investment. Beverly, and other residents of the ABLA Homes—ABLA is an acronym for the developments consisting of the Jane Addams Homes, the Robert Brooks Homes, Loomis Courts, and the Abbot Homes—were interested in saving a building within the Jane Addams Homes to create a museum that would tell the story of the people of public housing in the United States.

The National Public Housing Museum’s (NPHM) long game strategy has always centered on designing a knowledge culture around the significance of the people of public housing—the ways in which they established and maintained communities, built collective power, cared for their families and friends, and engaged in creative work. This is the antithesis of decades-long, racially charged national debates over who deserves to benefit from housing assistance (the answer is everyone). These debates disregard the fact that public housing agencies like the CHA are public entities that not only failed but leaned into policies that exacerbated segregation and housing inequality.

The NPHM refuses to rely on those narratives. Instead of ruminating on the failures of public housing as an aspect of the urban built environment, it reveals the successes of the people of public housing—the way that they worked, loved, lived, and made public housing home.

On April 4, the NPHM held its grand opening celebration in its permanent home, once a low-rise public housing building designed by architects Holabird and Root in 1938 and recently redeveloped by a team of architects and designers that are both Chicago-based and proficient in this kind of complex reimagining of a historic building. LBBA is the architect, while site design group created the landscape design. Both building and landscape are sophisticated, while also understanding the NPHM as a site of consciousness.

Before the move, the NPHM provided programming for over a decade from a temporary home in River North, in the space that once housed Archeworks, an alternative architecture school established by Stanley Tigerman and Eva Maddox in 1997. It was from this temporary space that the NPHM grew and cultivated programs, such as the Beauty Turner Academy of Oral History, a training program named after writer and activist Beauty Turner, a resident of the Robert Taylor Homes, who worked to elevate the voices of public housing residents. Open to current and former public housing residents, The Beauty Turner Academy provides participants with the opportunity to learn how to manage, conduct, and then use oral histories in creative and ethical ways.

Exhibits have been central to the NPHM since its inception, utilizing both the gallery-oriented spaces of Archeworks and the building within the Jane Addams Homes, highlighting it through the years in a depreciated or transitional state. In 2009, an exhibition projected video and sound throughout the vacant apartments of the last building standing of the Jane Addams Homes. In 2015, the NPHM partnered with the first iteration of the Chicago Architecture Biennial to present House Housing: An Untimely History of Architecture and Real Estate in Twenty-three Episodes. This exhibition, first presented by the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University in New York City, combined domestic media and objects from across the century in an interactive exhibit. 2024’s Evicted, inspired by Matthew Desmond’s book of the same name, was on view at the Archeworks site and followed the stories of families in Milwaukee as they navigated the conflicts, discrimination, and debilitating effects of eviction. Partnerships over time have raised the public’s awareness of the NPHM all over the city. A relationship with the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs led to a free concert in Millennium Park in 2023 highlighting nationwide artists from public housing.

Yet, as this programming continued, the museum’s groundbreaking and opening date continued to be projected into the next year, and then into the year after that, complicated by a transfer of control from the CHA to a nonprofit museum. In 2018, the CHA granted the NPHM a 99-year land lease, and the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) deeded the building to the museum.

The NPHM makes the most of the foundation it has built here in Chicago, yet its presence, and the issues it takes on, from housing insecurity to eviction to the art that came out of public housing, are and have always been thoroughly national. There is no better place than Chicago for this museum in terms of the complex history of public housing, particularly regarding its elimination, a significant factor in the lack of affordable housing in this city and others. As the National Public Housing Museum was working toward acquiring its permanent home, and developing programming and partnerships, the CHA was to implement the course for revitalization laid out in the Plan of Transformation. Yet, the CHA would not follow that course; instead, it embarked on a two-decades-long slide into commodifying the most valuable land for development, while whole blocks remained vacant. Many residents were promised opportunities to return that never came. Land acquired for public housing was used instead to build capital for corporations and for-profit housing developers.

In the twentieth century, nearly ten million people nationwide lived in public housing. In 1978, the year that Chicago would reach an all-time high population of 3.1 million people, five percent of Chicago’s population—more than 141,000 people—called public housing home.¹ Today, the CHA serves only 65,000, less than three percent of the city’s 2.6 million residents, while the city at large sustains a shortage of 126,165 affordable rental homes for those with the lowest incomes.² In 2022, ProPublica found that the CHA had failed to meet its original commitment under the Plan for Transformation to build 25,000 new units of public housing—a goal the CHA stated it would meet in ten years—and that it had added only around a fifth, 5,000 units, of the promised amounts in the twenty-two years since the Plan was launched.³ Yet, according to the Chicago Housing Authority’s 2023 fiscal year report, more than 200,000 families are on CHA waiting lists, with waits ranging from six months to twenty-five years. This heavy local context is in contrast with the optimistic mission of the National Public Housing Museum “to preserve, promote, and propel the right of all people to a place where they can live and prosper—a place to call home.”⁴

That public housing is home is apparent in the architecture of the National Public Housing Museum. The NPHM is designed both to look like an apartment building and to provide actual housing. The north wing provides fifteen units of housing, a practical and ethical use of the building’s past (more on this later). Within the south wing is the museum, entered on a secondary street and below a public art commission named Resilient Hues and designed by Amanda Williams and Olalekan Jeyifous. This work celebrates the eighty years of layers of colorful paint and vibrant wallpaper found on the walls of the Jane Addams Homes after they were vacated. This work is a testament to the creativity and style of public housing residents, as the CHA restricted residents to only a few paint color options, such as beige and light green.

Upon entering the museum, ambassadors greet visitors surrounded by salvaged wall fragments from the building. Artifacts are everywhere, and like the wall fragments, they convey a narrative of time, patina, and maintenance. The exhibition and content design here is the work of Amy Reichert Architecture + Design, responsible for the 2010 gut overhaul of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum on the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago. The Jane Addams Hull-House Museum’s exhibitions have aged well and still remain fresh and informative fifteen years later—a good sign for the NPHM. Further within the museum are exhibitions and temporary exhibit spaces. These experiences both zoom out—and focus in on—public housing as policy, and public housing as personal and domestic space. Within a gallery on the first floor, revolving guest curators are invited to explore case studies related to public housing. Currently on view is Paradoxes of Public Housing: The Case of Millers River, which centers on the Cambridge Housing Authority in Massachusetts. This platform gives the NPHM space to nurture creative work as well as new scholarship around public housing.

The Artist as Instigator program provides an opportunity for artists across mediums to design temporary installations for the museum. Currently on view is OOPS and HOOPcycle, a tricycle mounted basketball hoop accompanied by a matching court, the work of Marisa Morán Jahn and Rafi Segal. The fruits of an ongoing project, History Lessons: Everyday Objects from Public Housing will gather objects from public housing residents across the country, and work with residents to write their own labels. These objects (those currently on view are from people living in public housing in New York City, Chicago, and Houston) are as diverse as a CHA ID, a Pyrex dish, a wedding dress, and a wall-mounted rotary phone. Of particular note is an object on loan from LaTonya Floyd, the sister of George Floyd: a record album of the REO Speedwagon hit “Keep On Loving You.” Growing up in the Cuney Homes in Houston together, the Floyd siblings sang “Keep on Loving You” during the last phone conversation they would have before George Floyd was murdered in 2020.

On the second floor is REC Room, a celebration of both the music created by artists from public housing and the music that provided a soundtrack to their lives. This exhibition, co-created by DJ Spinderella of Salt-N-Pepa and a former resident of New York’s Pink Houses, is inspired by the rec rooms found in many public housing developments, and provides visitors an opportunity to thumb through a record collection of artists with a relationship with public housing that visitors can play via a QR code on each record, linked to a record player. It is here where you learn of Jimi Hendrix’s time in the Rainier Vista Housing Project, of Barbra Streisand’s childhood in the Vanderveer Estates, of Mary J. Blige’s life in the Schlobohm Houses, and of Open Mike Eagle’s youth at the Robert Taylor Homes. Rarely does a museum exhibit connect with popular pop culture in this way, and the opportunities to spin this into expanded programming are endless.

Another engagement with popular culture occurs in Good Times, an installation about the sitcom of the same name that aired from 1974 to 1979. Good Times was a comedy that depicted an African American family who lived in public housing. While the development was given a fictitious address in Chicago, its creators—Mike Evans and Eric Monte—grew up in the Cabrini-Green Homes, and the show implied that the characters lived there. Within the exhibit, Cabrini-Green residents were invited to share their favorite episodes, which are played on a loop in the gallery. This acknowledgement of where public housing was visible, and how it was positively depicted through art and media, allows the NPHM to connect to broad audiences while centering who the museum is ultimately for and about: the people of public housing.

Upstairs, three recreated historic apartments highlight the uniqueness of the lived experience of public housing at the Jane Addams Homes through objects and storytelling. In the first, the life of the Turovitz Family, who were among the first tenants of the Jane Addams Homes, is told through objects, including those found in a kosher kitchen. While a visitor might expect the second apartment to follow a standard chronological timeline, the second, titled “What Happened Next,” uses video and sound produced by Manual Cinema, based on a script written by writer and activist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, to explain how federal and local housing policies like redlining and racial covenants shaped cities like Chicago. This installation, vivid and immersive and projected on the apartment’s walls, provides important context for the next apartment, recreated to convey the life of the Hatch family, an African American family living in the Jane Addams Homes in the 1960s, forging a vital connection between public housing and community activism. These apartments, as well as Everyday Objects, are significant in that they are not remnants of the past that are precious or for the wealthy, but an expression of the experience of everyday people who live in public housing.

Back downstairs, the museum has a gift shop—the Corner Store Co-Op—that is the work of Civic Projects Architecture, who designed the space through collaborating with the co-ops own working group. The retail cooperative offers books, clothing, and tote bags, and partners with public housing residents and artists. The mission and vision of the NPMH is quite clear here too. Bowls of colorful buttons proclaim, “Housing is a Human Right.” While this exact phrase may not be in the museum’s mission statement, it is more than an underlying theme here; it is enshrined.

Making a return to the Jane Addams Homes are a grouping of seven monumental stone sculptures originally installed in the courtyard, conceived and designed by artist Edgar Miller (Animal Court, 1937). The boulder-like set consists of six jaunty hooved beasts, rendered with soft curves and smiling faces, along with a massive cow surrounded by cats, enveloped by stylized vegetation. These sculptures proved to be more than just art objects. For nearly eighty years they were a playground for the children that grew up in the Jane Addams Homes, and a source of powerful collective memory amongst the former residents. By restoring and reinstalling Animal Court, the NPHM hopes to revive these sculptures as a social hub.

The earliest historic homes in the US were considered worth saving because of their association with the wealthiest or most influential people, and many of those homes became house museums. This has contributed to precious few historic depictions of how people of different socioeconomic backgrounds lived. In Chicago, the museum opening has met Deverra Beverly’s preservation challenge. However, that challenge was met without preservation’s key tools for recognition: a Chicago Landmark designation and listing on the National Register of Historic Places. This recognition was not possible because of changes to the original floorplans of the Jane Addams Homes, an unfortunate reality regarding the stringency of preservation policy when a historic building encounters a change in function. Despite this, the design team has stayed true to the practice of preservation without policies or incentives, embracing key features of the original Jane Addams Homes, including reintroducing the characteristic curved art moderne balconies to the façade and filling window openings with new multi-pane casement windows evocative of the originals.

While the creation of fifteen apartments in the museum’s north wing is a net positive, they represent the complicated nature of the Plan for Transformation, the CHA, and housing affordability. The apartments, both public and affordable housing, are a part of Roosevelt Square, a 2,000-unit mixed-income development that has come to be built on a section of land once occupied by the Jane Addams Homes, which at its peak consisted of 1,027 homes spread across thirty-two buildings. Only 120 total apartments in the Roosevelt Square development, now in its third phase, are public housing, with the rest, including 222 affordable units, owned by Related Midwest, a subsidiary of the Related Companies, a global for-profit real estate company.⁵

Included in the Related Midwest portfolio is Lathrop, formerly the Julia C. Lathrop Homes, a public housing development built in 1938 on the north side of Chicago. Only one section of the Lathrop Homes—the mixed-income, for-profit housing—has been redeveloped, while the south section continues to deteriorate under the CHA’s continued ownership, another failed promise of the Plan for Transformation. The Lathrop Homes development has been celebrated as a win for preservation and for housing, but until the south side is renovated, and CHA apartments are offered once again, Lathrop is a failure. While Related Midwest adheres to the City of Chicago’s Affordable Requirements Ordinance (ARO) both at Roosevelt Square and Lathrop, providing apartments for households earning a designated percentage of the area median income, they shouldn’t be patted on the back for adding a trickle of affordable housing by law, or because of their partnership with the CHA. The kind of three-bedroom, family-sized apartments that the CHA demolished on the Near West Side in the early aughts are now being offered by Related Midwest starting at $3,725 a month. If Chicagoans are searching for a relationship between the commodification of housing and the affordable housing shortage the city is experiencing, here it is.

Several blocks around the National Public Housing Museum are empty, part of the more than 130 acres of vacant land and buildings—including the south side of Lathrop Homes—that the CHA owns, according to a 2024 Impact for Equity study.⁶ The sodded lots are a strange sight in an otherwise dense neighborhood. Knowing that this land was once home to over a thousand families, one might ask “where did all the people living in public housing go?” This question makes the National Public Housing Museum all the more vital as a place that centers and welcomes the people of public housing. While former residents of the Jane Addams Homes, the Robert Taylor Homes, the high-rises of Cabrini-Green, and the Henry Horner Homes—all demolished—now call other places home, the National Public Housing Museum calls them all home.

Upon entry into the National Public Housing Museum, visitors are invited to answer a question, “What is public housing?” This question is both rhetorical and answerable at the National Public Housing Museum. Housing is vital for survival and stability, a universal need that draws both curious interest from the public (because there isn’t a section of the public that isn’t affected by it) and scholarship across architecture, planning, and organizing. The nuanced history of public housing presented at the NPHM provides an opportunity for fresh eyes and perspectives to look upon it and to develop creative and radical solutions. Ultimately, the National Public Housing Museum is for anyone and everyone who knows the importance of home.