This article appears in the June 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
CHICAGO – The country’s only museum dedicated solely to public housing sits in a three-story brick building on a large, otherwise vacant lot on Chicago’s West Side. In April, the fields surrounding the building had just started to turn spring-green, and a community garden behind the public library next door was in its early stages of growth.
The National Public Housing Museum opened in April 2025 after decades of work by public-housing advocates, residents, and historians. It sits in the last remaining building of the original 32 that made up the Jane Addams Homes, a public-housing community that opened in 1938 and was demolished in the early 2000s. The vacant lots surrounding the building are a reminder of how sprawling a community the Jane Addams Homes once was.
Since its opening, the museum has become a focal point for the community. A large room on the first floor has hosted political events and cultural celebrations alike. During warm months, the doors to the room open to a large courtyard outside, home to seven stone animal sculptures designed in a modernist Art Deco style.
The blending of indoor and outdoor space, said Tiff Beatty, the museum’s associate director, is “just like when you’re at home, you have the back porch, and somebody’s barbecuing, and then you’ve got the conversation with adults in the living room.”
While the adults chat politics, said Beatty, kids climb over the soft, rounded silhouettes of the stone lions and rams. Nearly a century ago, when the stone animals stood at the Jane Addams Homes, the kids who lived there would play on them in the exact same way.
The museum also hosts resident artists for their “Artist as Instigator” program, which blends arts and advocacy. One resident artist, Natasha Florentino, created a documentary about public housing with the museum’s support. Her project, “A Home Worth Fighting For,” focused on New Yorkers who were actively fighting the demolition of the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses in Manhattan. Florentino connected Chicago and New York public-housing residents “so they can learn from each other, because what happened in Chicago is basically being replicated in these other places,” said Beatty.
Though the museum is rooted, physically and conceptually, in Chicago, it still seeks to be a truly national space. By telling the history of Chicago’s struggles to build public housing for those who need it, the team behind the museum hopes it can help those in other cities, like New York. And maybe it can revive the story of public housing itself, which has been denigrated by fearmongering, disabled by restrictive laws and diminished funding, and blocked as part of a potential solution to a historic and shameful housing affordability crisis.
THE MUSEUM IS HOME TO PUBLIC-HOUSING RESIDENTS both past and present; an hour-long tour takes visitors through three mock apartments that were modeled after the homes of real residents in the Jane Addams Homes. In a different wing of the building, there are 15 units of currently occupied mixed-income housing (the museum has a partnership with the Chicago Housing Authority to have affordable housing on the premises).
This blending of the past and present is where the museum is at its best. The airy space is filled with meticulously collected and reconstructed artifacts from public-housing residents, both famous and anonymous. Items belonging to Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who grew up in New York’s Bronxdale Houses (now named the Justice Sonia Sotomayor Houses in her honor), are displayed with the same care as a kinked and dusty garden hose that belonged to a “Miss Juanita.”
There is no detail too small or quotidian to archive. During a break from wandering the museum, I took a seat on a patterned purple floor cushion that the museum had recreated from fabric found in public-housing residents’ homes in collaboration with the artist Jayah Arnett.
These crushed velvet and corduroy fabrics “show how beautifully and resiliently residents were using style as an act of resistance against the monotony of the green paint that everyone had their apartments painted,” said Lisa Yun Lee, the museum’s executive director.
Throughout the museum, rusted trash chutes and defunct intercom systems are preserved with as much care as old family recipes and handmade clothes.
A dark-wood desk sits in the museum entryway. It was donated by Sunny Fischer, who sits on the museum’s board and grew up in public housing in the Bronx. “My father’s desk, smelling of lemon oil, stood under a window in my parents’ small room,” a sign next to the desk reads. “My father seemed most happy there; it gave him an aura of importance and busyness, a respite from his job as a mailman.”
There is dignity in these artifacts, the museum asserts. There is dignity in public housing. There is much worth preserving, especially in Chicago, with its history of destroying public housing.
The building that houses the museum is the last remaining structure from the Jane Addams Homes. The city tore down the other 31 buildings as part of the “Plan for Transformation,” a public-housing redevelopment initiative that the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) began in 2000 and which was the impetus for the museum’s creation.
On its surface, the Plan for Transformation made sense: Many of Chicago’s public-housing communities were old and hadn’t been maintained. In some cases, the buildings were unsafe and unsanitary. The poor conditions fed into an image of rampant crime and drug use, making revitalization sound reasonable. CHA proposed demolishing 18,000 “obsolete” public-housing units and replacing them with mixed-income housing, where public-housing units are mixed in with market-rate ones.
The turn toward mixed-income housing had similarly noble goals—a CHA report said that it would “reintegrate low-income families and housing into the larger physical, social and economic fabric of the city.”
But Lee is skeptical of the mixed-income housing model. “In my analysis, there also is a long-standing mythos about how you deal with poverty, which has to do with criminalizing the person who’s poor,” she said, “and that if you somehow put them in proximity to people with money, the uplift is going to make everything better. Instead of dealing with the root causes of poverty.”
Change was certainly necessary in Chicago’s public housing. By the mid-1990s, these communities had been so poorly maintained that the federal government took over CHA; Henry Cisneros, then housing secretary, called it the “worst public housing in America.” According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, 11 of the 15 poorest areas in the country were CHA public-housing communities.
Once the federal government handed control back to CHA, it began the Plan for Transformation, demolishing housing complexes across the city. The Ida B. Wells and Robert Taylor Homes in Bronzeville, the Henry Horner Homes on the Near West Side, and, of course, the Jane Addams Homes were just some of the communities demolished as part of the initiative.
Experts like the historians and advocates at the National Public Housing Museum say that the Plan for Transformation failed to meet its goals and instead displaced thousands of Chicagoans from their homes. Today, CHA has at least 16,000 fewer public-housing units for families than it did before the demolitions.
Though the museum engages deeply with issues of housing injustice, it never does so at the expense of telling stories of leisure and joy.
A 2017 investigation by WBEZ, Chicago’s local NPR affiliate, found that, 17 years after the Plan for Transformation began and $3 billion later, less than 8 percent of the households whose homes were demolished actually lived in mixed-income communities. The rest had mixed outcomes. Some continue to live in public housing, others use Section 8 vouchers, while around 34 percent live without any government subsidy.
In 2022, CHA claimed that the Plan for Transformation had finally “achieved the goal” of revitalizing 25,000 housing units. A ProPublica investigation threw that into question, finding that the agency padded over one-fifth of the 25,000-unit total with different types of housing that weren’t included in the original plan.
Meanwhile, the dream of dignified affordable housing for all Chicagoans remains unfulfilled. The city’s housing commissioner said that Chicago needs 100,000 more affordable units to meet demand. And over 100 acres of CHA-owned land and buildings remains vacant.
Whatever America devises to mitigate a severe deficit of affordable places to live, public housing is unlikely to play a role until Congress repeals the Faircloth Amendment, which since 1999 has blocked any net increase in the total amount of public housing in the country. Any new construction has to be offset by destroying older housing stock or removing it from public-housing inventory. It also caps how many units CHA or other local authorities can own. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and others have called for a repeal, but they have thus far been unsuccessful.
When public-housing residents saw wrecking balls crash into their former buildings, the need to preserve the stories of those homes became clear.
THE HIGHLIGHT OF THE MUSEUM is a tour of three apartments, two of which are based on the homes of specific families who lived in the Jane Addams Homes. Led by one of the museum’s capable and kind guides, we stepped into a stairwell and through the front door of the Turovitz family apartment, a recreation of a Jewish family’s home from the late 1930s.
We sat on a green striped couch in the mock Turovitzes’ living room (though the family did live in the Jane Addams Homes, they lived in a different unit), thumbing through artifacts lovingly placed throughout the space: Yiddish-language newspapers, war ration food stamps, and even an old Superman comic book that praises public housing (“emergency squads commence erecting huge apartment-projects [and] in time the slums are replaced by splendid housing conditions”).
The second apartment does not correspond to a specific family’s home, but includes 1950s-style decorations and explains the history of redlining and racial covenants. An excellent shadow-puppet style film created by Manual Cinema with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor distills the complex web of racist housing policies into a clear narrative.
The final apartment of the tour, modeled after the home of the Hatch family, told the story of what it was like to be a Black family in Chicago public housing during the civil rights movement. The Hatch home was colorful, with a big television set in the center of the living room and stacks of classic literature filling the bookshelves. An oral history that included snippets from the Hatch sisters described how the family enjoyed reading Charles Dickens and listening to Aretha Franklin.
“Along with the stories of crumbling buildings and police acting with impunity, there’s stories of joy, wonder, family, community. People helping one another,” said Lee.
Though the museum engages deeply with issues of housing injustice, redlining, and displacement, it never does so at the expense of telling stories of leisure and joy. One standout exhibit, the REC Room, is a cozy, dimly lit wood-paneled room filled with records. The twist? Most of the albums were recorded or produced by former public-housing residents, from Thelonious Monk to Mary J. Blige. It’s an homage to old-school record stores and rec rooms where families would go to chill out and listen to music.
“I (Who Have Nothing)” by Sylvester—a disco singer who lived in Los Angeles’ Aliso Village as a child—was on the record player. Beatty turned it up, and the entire second floor was filled with music and light.
This article appears in Jun 2026 issue.
