We were extremely glad to hear this week that the Public Housing Museum is moving forward and could possibly open as soon as this year.

Chicago has a lot of history with public housing, and obviously a good deal of it isn’t pretty. However, that means the new museum will obviously have a lot of compelling material to deal with, from Jane Addams’ Hull House to Cabrini Green.

Tucked into one of the last former ABLA homes, the museum will appropriately be a place for folks to come and look at the past, as well as study how to make it better in the future.

We hope that Roosevelt Square can coalesce around the museum too, so that visitors to the museum will be able to see a successful present for public housing.

One of the ways these things can all be helped along as they come together is through meaningful community involvement. The Near West Side’s newest community group, Connecting4Communities, can help facilitate that.

We’re hopeful that Dennis O’Neill’s experience will help make the area stronger, and will encourage more folks to come out and have a say in their community. Whatever you think about the University Village Association, they’re certainly not one of the more active neighborhood groups in the city.

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By Dennis ONeill from Little Italy
Posted: 02/02/2012 3:18 PM

The National Public Housing Museum is intended to be more than a museum. It is intended to also be essentially a housing studies and public housing policy institute with an academic affiliation. Chicago, if it is to be a truly international city, must address its legacy issues of public housing and learn from them to successfully implement the CHA Plan for Transformation. We are still the most racially segregated city in American and failed public housing policy helped contribute to that.