Although Frederick Wiseman, the implausibly prolific standard-bearer of American vérité, often claimed to undertake all his projects without a thesis in mind, it is difficult to imagine that he approached his 1997 film Public Housing, which follows the lives of a handful of people who live and work in Chicago's Ida B. Wells Houses, with the same neutral gaze. That's because by the mid-1990s, decades of systematic disinvestment had turned public housing from a promising New Deal-era social program into an object of fearful stereotyping. Wiseman chose the Windy City because "in my mind Chicago was synonymous with public housing. The Chicago Housing Authority, the city agency responsible for operating public housing, has always had difficulties; and what happens in Chicago has always been national news." Indeed, one of the Authority's campuses, Cabrini-Green, had become so notorious that its name had turned into a byword for squalor and crime; in Bernard Rose's 1992 supernatural slasher Candyman (which Wiseman, at a recent Q&A, claimed to have never even heard of), a graduate student investigates an urban legend associated with a string of ritual murders that have recently taken place there, and Brian Robbins's facile 2001 heart-string-tugger, Hardball, has Keanu Reeves playing white savior to a group of Black children who live in the bedraggled complex.
If indeed Wiseman had no preconceived notions about Ida B. Wells Houses or public housing in general, the contours of a thesis nevertheless coalesces early on in the film's 195-minute runtime. As soon as we're brought into the interstitial public areas between the campus's high- and medium-rise buildings, we're introduced to a unit of the Chicago Police Department, whose regular harassment of residents soon emerges as a sad leitmotif. "I still see potential in you," an officer tells a down-and-out woman whose only crime is loitering. "You gonna be my special project. Every time I see you I'm gonna pull over." As in his 1969 film, Law and Order, Wiseman carefully avoids the formal trappings of propaganda, but precisely because he opts for a pure observational style the implied political argument is even stronger. These cops are clearly not monsters; we spend enough time with them to intuit that their overbearing energy derives less from a penchant for brutality than from boredom combined with a totally uncritical internalization of the authority they imagine their badges grant them.
The cop storyline is only one strand in Wiseman's motley tapestry. We meet the Men of Wells, an all-male resident group who meet to strategize about how to be better role models for the local youth ("In order to be strong as a group, you have to be strong for yourself"); a Family Preservation Center case worker who coaches struggling parents on how to avoid having their kids taken away by CPS; a sex-ed teacher showing teenagers how to put a condom on a dildo; and Ron Carter, a retired-NBA-shooting-guard-turned-HUD-spokesman who proselytizes on behalf of Section 3 and a federal career development program called Campus of Learners. But perhaps the most dynamic figure is Helen Finner, the feisty chairperson of the housing complex’s Resident Advisory Council. We first meet her in a dingy office as she berates someone over the phone: "Nobody under the sun should be homeless with all of these vacancies in public housing!" By identifying the causal link between homelessness and the 200 vacancies "in Ida B. Wells alone," Finner summarizes the recent arguments of many housing scholars, including Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern in their 2022 book Homelessness is a Housing Problem. Although risk factors like substance use and mental illness can help explain individual trajectories into homelessness, they have very little to do with wider trends that are far more closely tied to systemic factors like absolute rent levels and vacancy rates.
Further suggesting an underlying—if vague—argument is the way that Wiseman turns to tropes in his B-roll. Between the deeply insightful character-driven sequences, we get montages of the tritest inner-city imagery: guys freebasing on street corners, billboards for pawn shops and Newports, broken windows and crying children. Maybe it's just honest reporting, but maybe Wiseman allowed the tabloid image of public housing to blur his vision just a little.
Public Housing screens this afternoon, February 21, at Film at Lincoln Center as part of the series “Frederick Wiseman: An American Institution.”
