Cabrini Green

Cabrini Green

The visit to Cabrini Green really surprised me. From everything I have herd about and seen about the area on the news I was surprised to see a completely changed setting. Maybe since we were there during the middle of the day the area is different but I never got the felling of being unsafe. Instead there were women with strollers and lots of people walking their dogs. When our tour guide talked about the idea of mixed housing income area it seamed not to be the best of plans. The tare down of the high rises was necessary I feel since the area seamed to be so dangerous, but when they torn down the high rise houses they displaced a lot of people that were not offered housing in the area.  The new mixed income housing only offers so many houses for the people that need CHA housing. The rest of the low-rise housing is supposed to be high priced and market value housing. The problem comes with incorporating theses people into one new mixed income neighborhood. People that are live in different types of communities because of income have different social norms and different values this can cause problems in a community.

The Zorbaugh readings about the slums paint a very different picture of the north side then we see today. The area was highly industrialized with the gas plant (that still exist) or various types of other industrial companies most witches are gone now or only remain on Goose Island. The housing around this area was not highly sought out because of the pollution and noise of the factories. This is why areas on the north side were often considered slum and low-income housing. This made the people that lived in these slum areas isolated and caused then to adopt separated values from the rest of the city (another reason I don’t believe mixed income housing works). Little hell was commonly known as a slum area until federal money was used to tare down the housing and put up the large high rises of Cabrini Green. But when the city did not pay to upkeep the CHA housing that was originally supposed to be mixed income as well, if scared away the more wealthy residents. The new low rise housing that is now there was supposed to be a solution to the solution of little Hell but we will have to see how well these new mixed income low rises housing works.