About the National Public
Housing Museum

In 2002, Deverra Beverly, a Commissioner of Housing and a longtime public housing leader, organized with residents to create a public housing museum. They worked to save the last building of the Jane Addams Homes. Together with preservationists, housing advocates, and cultural activists, they spent the next two decades working to create a permanent home for their vision. You are standing in that museum.

Beverley’s activism was in reaction to the Chicago Housing Authority’s 1999 launch of the Plan of Transformation. For some, the plan represented the opportunity to address deteriorating buildings, unsafe housing projects, and entrenched racial segregation. New mixed-income developments would create healthy communities and integrate public housing residents into the larger social, economic, and physical fabric of Chicago, one of the most segregated cities in the country. For others, the plan was the cruel manifestation of decades of intentional neglect and the abandonment of the city’s most needy citizens. One of the first actions of the plan was the bulldozing of eleven public housing developments that resulted in the forcible relocation of tens of thousands of families without any guarantee of affordable replacement housing for all. This demolition was the largest net loss of affordable housing in the history of the United States.

Residents profoundly understood the power of place and memory in the struggle for self-determination. The museum would preserve and share the stories of public housing residents and serve as a site for resistance against erasure and forgetting. The National Public Housing Museum presented dynamic exhibits and programs for seventeen years. Miss Beverly passed on November 9, 2013. But we persisted and opened our doors in this space in 2024.