By Zach Mortice
The Rockwell Gardens public housing project in Chicago, demolished in 2006. Photo by Paul Goyette.
The founders of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) started off with a bang. The small but influential cadre of advocates for walkable and traditional-looking urbanism began meeting in 1993?the first big gathering was held at the historic Lyceum in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia, with its ?enormous entablature,? as the historian Vincent Scully noted in his opening remarks. The CNU?s beginnings dovetailed with the passage of a piece of legislation that enshrined the group?s approach to city building as federal policy: the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development?s HOPE VI program. After decades of crumbling, dysfunctional government-built-and-managed public housing projects, housing would instead be at least partially constructed and controlled by private developers and management companies. They would build lower-density, ?mixed-income? communities of row houses and garden apartments. By the numbers, the lower density was made easier because Congress, in 1995, ended what had long been the ?one-for-one? replacement rule for any public housing to be demolished. Housing vouchers, to be used to pay private landlords (who are not required to accept them), were considered sufficient for tenants not accepted into newly built units. At any rate, the policy change posed no obstacle to architects and planners. But the 2016 election of Donald Trump was a tidal ...