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“There was a time, much like now, when housing insecurity was one of the foremost issues facing people.” Lisa Yun Lee ’91 is referring to the 1930s, when the country was in the wake of the Great Depression. People needed housing, and the United States government stepped in to help. Tens of thousands of people entered a lottery to move into new, affordable homes managed by Uncle Sam. 

Lee is the director of the National Public Housing Museum, which opened its doors this past April in the sole surviving building of the Jane Addams Homes in Chicago. The Jane Addams Homes, named for the cofounder of Hull House and the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, were built in 1938. 

“There was a real belief in investing in people,” Lee says. “The idea was, public housing was for anyone and everyone who needed it, and at the time, anyone and everyone really did need it.” 

However, public housing’s egalitarian mission was undermined in the wake of World War II. White veterans returning home found low mortgage GI Bill loans easy to come by, while discriminatory practices denied Black veterans the same opportunity. By the 1960s, public housing was primarily inhabited by Black families, leading to stigma, disinvestment, and neglect. 

In Chicago, “those high rises really became the image of what bad public housing was around the country,” says Susan Popkin, a fellow at the Urban Institute and an expert on public housing programs and policy. 

The Clinton administration led an effort to overhaul public housing, demolishing many of the old buildings in the process. 

“There were real communities there and families who had lived there for generations by the time they started tearing them down,” Popkin says. Even though the buildings were deteriorating, “it had become people’s home.” 

The Jane Addams Homes were largely demolished during this time, though former residents and preservationists successfully fought to preserve one of the buildings with the idea of making it into a museum. 

Lee was recruited by some of those residents more than 18 years ago, while she was director of the Jane Addams Hull House Museum. They liked what Lee was doing, that it wasn’t just a house museum preserving the past in amber, but linking the history to current social issues. 

The goals for the National Public Housing Museum were to amplify the voices of residents and educate people on the history of public housing but also to inspire them for the future, to treat everyday items as important artifacts, and to face biases head on.

With degrees from ����Ӱ��ý and Duke University and vast museum experience, Lee, who is also an associate professor of public culture and museum studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, had the skills to tackle these disparate goals. 

“There was a notion about what it meant to live in public housing, and so we had to challenge those narratives,” Lee says. “The shortest distance between people is a story, so we knew we had to start collecting the stories of public housing residents.”

Their first project, before the museum even opened, was to collect oral histories. In addition to the museum exhibits, the team painstakingly recreated three apartments, complete with guided audio tours. 

The main exhibition is composed of everyday objects from public housing residents in Houston, New York, and Chicago. Each year, the exhibition will feature different cities, a seemingly endless opportunity given that there are thousands of public housing authorities across the United States, in both urban and rural areas.

“We want to harness the power of place and memory,” Lee says, “but also, this should be a national museum so that people can understand that public housing is something that touches everybody’s lives.”

Policy exhibits will be a mainstay of the museum. As housing prices hover near record highs and wealth inequality dominates the national conversation, the topic of public housing is as important now as in the economic wreckage of the 1930s. 

“We are in an ongoing affordable housing crisis that is worse, I think, than the Great Depression,” Popkin says. “We haven’t built enough in a generation to keep up with the need.”

Notably, there are also 15 units of affordable housing on the museum site. Lee cites an essay by museum expert Elaine Heumann Gurian called “Museum as Soup Kitchen” that interrogates the civic responsibilities of cultural organizations. 

“We need more arts and cultural organizations, and we need more housing, and these things can exist together,” Lee says.

Many parts of the original building were preserved and integrated into displays, from the stone sculptures of the Edgar Miller “Animal Court” to the bricks of the walls. This fall, the museum was the recipient of the Landmarks Illinois Richard H. Driehaus Legacy Award for their efforts. 

You can tell the story of public housing through large movements, Lee says, and they do. “But for us, this museum is also dedicated to the everyday lives, and the everyday forms of resistance, and the everyday objects for everyday people. And for us to reclaim this space and say it’s valuable is really transformative for how we understand whose stories are worthy of being told.”