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Tracing the Histories, Present, and Futures of Housing Justice at the National Public Housing Museum
Abstract:
When the Chicago Housing Authority announced its Plan for Transformation in 1999, a policy that would go on to demolish tens of thousands of units of low-income public housing with the supposed goal of creating safer communities, public housing residents in the Near West Side wasted no time in organizing. Though they knew they would be unable to stop the city completely, they wanted to be sure that their cherished public housing experiences of community, innovation, and solidarity would not fade away, chucked into the dustbin of history. Working collectively, they successfully advocated for one building of the Jane Addams Homes to be saved from demolition. After decades of fundraising, institution building, programming, and planning, this building now holds the National Public Housing Museum, the only cultural institution in the country devoted to telling the story of public housing. Its mission is to preserve, promote, and propel the right of all people to a place to call home. This poster will share images and stories from the development, construction, and opening of the National Public Housing Museum in Summer 2024. It will spotlight the way that NPHM uses oral history as a tool of empowerment, advocacy, and community-building through its Oral History Archive, Collective, and other related programs such as the Beauty Turner Academy of Oral History. It is with these oral history interventions, combined with NPHM’s emphases on history, arts, culture, and public policy, that the museum invites its visitors to dream about the futures of housing justice and how to build a world in which all people have to a place to call home.