Giving Compass' Take:

• Zach Mortice at CityLab reports that the National Public Housing Museum, which will tell the history of American public housing in a remnant of a 1930s public housing complex on Chicago’s Near West Side, is set to open in 2021.

• What can we learn from the history of public housing? How are charities and philanthropists successfully planning to provide assistance for the housing crisis? 

• Here's how technology can help solve issues with housing affordability. 

When you’re working to establish a museum with such contested subject matter as the National Public Housing Museum (NPHM), it pays to have a few shorthand expressions within easy reach, lest anyone get confused about creating a curatorial platform for an institution many associate with failure.

Crystal Palmer, a former public housing resident and vice chair of the museum’s board, says the museum will tell “the good, the bad, and the ugly” of public housing. Lisa Lee, the museum’s executive director, says (quoting another board member) that it will “tell the stories of our in-laws and our outlaws.”

Lee is attempting to encapsulate this complicated legacy on the Near West Side of Chicago, inside the only remaining building of the Jane Addams Homes, a public housing complex built in the 1930s. It took 10 years of administrative wrangling to get the building from the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), and the museum hopes to open in 2021. Since 2010, however, it has been mounting exhibitions at a variety of other venues.

Read the full article about the National Public Housing Museum by Zach Mortice at CityLab.