In the opening minutes of Frederick Wiseman’s Public Housing a woman named Helen Finner argues on the phone with an official from the Chicago Housing Authority. “But it is an emergency,” Finner insists. “She’s a young girl with a baby and no place to stay.” The scene distills to a single conversation Finner’s two decades of battling the CHA. She complains about the red tape that leaves 200 units at the Ida B. Wells Homes vacant when there’s a waiting list of applicants–like the homeless teenage mother who sits in her office, wrapped in a white blanket. “I can’t seem to get anybody to hear our cry,” she tells the official, “so I guess what they want us to do is just to go crazy and act crazy.”
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Public Housing will be broadcast at 9 PM Friday and again on Monday, December 15, on WTTW, Channel 11. –Bill Stamets
