A high-rise cluster along the twelve-lane Dan Ryan ("Death Ryan") Expressway, on Chicago's Near South Side, the Robert Taylor Homes are—rather, were—28 buildings, each 16 stories high, and containing a total of 4321 apartments housing up to 20,000 people after their construction in the early 60s. When authorities in 1997 determined that the whole compound was to be demolished, Robert Taylor Homes had about 11,000 residents; families often lived on an average of $12 a day, some of them so poor that they could not afford the minimum monthly rent of $44.

Their very name betrays the efforts of the man who was a founding member of the Chicago Housing Authority and became its first African American chairman in 1943. Robert Taylor was an ardent spokesman of the ideas that had led to the foundation of CHA in 1937, when its program declared that a central concern was to build subsidized apartments for low-income families unable to afford decent, safe and clean housing.

From the first days that CHA was in operation, the South Side was—has been—a mainstay of activity. It had once been middle class; but by the 1920s, the South Side was fast becoming a slum, the last resort of poor African American migrants flocking in in large numbers from the rural South. In the 1930s, the area deteriorated dramatically; in fact, the city council declared the South Side a threat to the whole city—a health hazard, a hotbed of crime, and, worst of all, a danger to the real-estate market in surrounding areas. The municipal government realized that providing subsidies for affordable housing was imperative; but no agreement could be had as to where such housing ought to be built. The CHA and influential white members of the city council quarreled. While the CHA wanted those projects to be integrated in their various neighborhoods, the city council members feared that this plan would ruin the real estate markets in those neighborhoods, and they insisted that the new public housing be built on the site of the old slums. African Americans should remain where they were—far away from white prosperity, white schools and hospitals. Robert Taylor lost the struggle and resigned; the city council members had their say; the old slums were replaced by new ghettos.

The compound called Robert Taylor Homes—actually two projects—was the last and largest of a series of similar projects; in fact, it was, in its time, the largest urban housing project in the world.