I don’t know about you, but I feel as if I’m looking down the barrel of a loaded summer. In addition to the usual challenges that we face as public housing residents, it is apparent this summer, more than ever before, that we face a new challenge: the redevelopment of public housing.

This redevelopment process started over eight years ago under then-CHA Chairman Vincent Lane, with a federal program titled Hope VI, suggesting the arrival of hope for the hopeless residents of public housing. Today, the process has simply become the redevelopment of public housing and is moving at a much faster pace, offering little hope for too few residents.
Read more »

Approximately a year and a half ago, the Sinai Health System started a new program called Sinai Senior services. They are offering their services free of charge to seniors living in the Chicago Housing Authority buildings and low-income dwellers in Chicago and surrounding communities, near or far, north, south, east, and west.

Men and women 55 years of age and older are welcome to participate in the Sinai Community Institute Program called Premier Years. You will have access to all the medical benefits and social activities they have.

The people living in CHA buildings and low- income neighborhoods are their first priorities. The healthy, sick and the reclusive. They want the seniors that are afraid to leave their apartments and the ones that fear standing on the corners waiting at the bus stops. Read more »

The month started with me covering the case of Jonathan Tolliver. The jurors had come to a deadlock on the first trial and I covered the retrial.

Tolliver was on trial for the death of Police Officer Michael Ceriale. Ceriale and his partner, Joseph Ferenzi, were staking out a Robert Taylor Homes building on an undercover drug sting Aug. 15, 1998 when Ceriale was shot and killed.

First there was a new set of jurors to be picked. This took two days. Two jurors asked to be excused, one because he said he had a history of mental problems. Read more »

We always hear the bad more than the good about men in the Chicago Housing Authority. So I have been saluting the good men, as we say, and telling them to keep on with the positive work in the developments.

‘It may seem like no one cares about what you do,’ I tell the men. ‘But to know you’ve tried to help make a change will never be forgotten, even though it seems the more you try and do good, someone always tries to find the bad. Try and think positively and keep on working for change. I know it can be done and your effort does make a difference.’ Read more »

The policeman had come to Miss La Nora’s farm for me. That was something that I learned when the policeman called out loudly, “Hey you, n—r, get over here.”

“His name is Popcorn and you call him Popcorn as long as you’re on my property,” said Miss La Nora angrily.

“As you say, Granny, as you say,” the officer said apologetically. “It won’t happen again. But I got to take this little n…boy down town because Mister Fuquay says that he been getting fresh with his daughter, Mona, and he don’t want him in this neighborhood any longer. This is a neighborhood where white folks live and Blacks are not allowed to live among white folks. Read more »

Advocates for public and subsidized housing tenants provided residents and activists with new information about HUD and CHA at a conference April 28 in downtown Chicago. The conference was held in the beautiful surroundings of the Holiday Inn located on the corner of Columbus and Ohio streets. This conference in many ways resembled the one held March 16 by the Chicago Rehab Network at the Palmer House Hotel. This conference was far more interactive that the March 16 event; participants attended various workshops.

The workshops were geared towards the distribution of new information. Due to the workshops’ small size, the atmosphere was that of an intense training ground for activists. It was an atmosphere in which everyone appeared excited and eager to get involved. Everyone – whites and Blacks, rich and poor, scholarly and unlearned harmonized. Read more »

Robert Taylor Homes resident leaders went on a trip in April to Springfield and Peoria where they saw beautiful new homes that were built by the same developers that will re-build Robert Taylor. But the homes that they saw weren’t for all but a few of the former residents that used to reside in the John Hay Homes and Warren Homes.

Before the redevelopment of Robert Taylor started, many of the residents thought the development teams would be no more than scheme teams, only out to get their land.
Read more »

“I can just slip on a pair of slippers and walk across the street to the store.”

“Overjoyed is how I feel due to the fact that we have clean and modern laundry facilities. I like that I’m on a lower floor in a cleaner, spacious unit.”

These are just some of the views expressed by former residents of the last two buildings of the Robert Brooks Extensions as the wrecking ball slowly knocks down pieces of many memories. These residents were moved into the relocation building at 1440 W. 13th St.
Read more »

When and wherever we residents of Harold L. Ickes Homes start to realize any improvements, it takes just a little time to figure out that soon and very soon you’re back at square one.

Adding to the list of many good and very visible new developments that began to take place after the first of the year is the front entry doorway. From open steel gates and slit windowed doors, residents now have full doors and glass bricks to beautify and protect from Chicago’s cold harsh winds that circulated through the first floor lobby as one waited for the elevator. Read more »

For the last 4 years, a former resident of Robert Taylor Homes, Mary Sistruck, a young single mother of six, has been moved around from slum to slum after receiving a Housing Choice Voucher  formerly known as a Section 8.

I wrote about her in Residents’ Journal’s February 2001 edition. Sistruck once lived in the “Hole,” a notorious cluster of buildings that once towered over the State Street Corridor at 53rd Street. Sistruck described herself as “moving around like cattle” since she received the Housing Choice Voucher. Her children have attended six different schools since her first move. Read more »