D. Bradford Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing (University of Chicago Press, 2009).

Winner, Lewis Mumford Prize for best book in American planning history in 2008-2009, awarded by the Society for American City and Regional Planning History.

Honorable Mention, Kenneth T. Jackson Prize for best book in American urban history, 2009, awarded by the Urban History Association.

Now considered a dysfunctional mess, Chicago’s public housing projects once had long waiting lists of would-be residents hoping to leave the slums behind. So what went wrong? To answer this complicated question, D. Bradford Hunt traces public housing’s history in Chicago from its New Deal roots through current mayor Richard M. Daley’s Plan for Transformation. In the process, he chronicles the Chicago Housing Authority’s own transformation from the city’s most progressive government agency to its largest slumlord.

Available from the University of Chicago Press.