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ARCHIVING JOY  
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Emma Janssen
May 29, 2026
The American Prospect
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_ At the National Public Housing Museum in Chicago, the past is alive
and fighting. _

The National Public Housing Museum is located in the last remaining
building of the Jane Addams Homes, which were demolished in the early
2000s, Peter Sekaer/Library of Congress; Jim West/Alamy

 

_This article appears in the __June 2026_
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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
[[link removed]]
after decades of work by public-housing advocates, residents, and
historians. It sits in the last remaining building of the original 32
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that made up the Jane Addams Homes, a public-housing community that
opened in 1938 [[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]].

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
[[link removed]], 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
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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
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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.

Artifacts from former residents are preserved in the museum’s sample
apartments. Erin Hooley/AP Photo

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.”
[[link removed]]

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 [[link removed]].

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
[[link removed]].
“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
[[link removed]]
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 [[link removed]] 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
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the “worst public housing in America.” According to the Department
of Housing and Urban Development, 11 of the 15 poorest areas
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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
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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 [[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]]
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
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that Chicago needs 100,000 more affordable units to meet demand. And
over 100 acres of CHA-owned land and buildings remains vacant
[[link removed]].

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
[[link removed]], 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
[[link removed](singer)] as a child—was on
the record player. Beatty turned it up, and the entire second floor
was filled with music and light.

EMMA JANSSEN is a writing fellow at The American Prospect, where she
reports on anti-poverty policy, health, and political power. Before
joining the Prospect, she was at UChicago studying political
philosophy, editing for The Chicago Maroon, and freelancing for the
Hyde Park Herald.

_The American Prospect_ is devoted to promoting informed discussion
on public policy from a progressive perspective. In print and online,
the _Prospect_ brings a narrative, journalistic approach to complex
issues, addressing the policy alternatives and the politics necessary
to create good legislation. We help to dispel myths, challenge
conventional wisdom, and expand the dialogue.

Founded by Robert Kuttner, Paul Starr, and Robert Reich, read the
original 1989 prospectus for the magazine.
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To learn more about our history, check out this 2015 piece by Starr
and Kuttner
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reflecting on 25 years of politics and change.

American Prospect, Inc., is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation
headquartered in Washington, D.C.

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