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.
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Washington Park Local Advisory Council President Mary Wiggins is facing a dilemma. She is concerned and wondering, searching high and low for an answer to a question that lays heavy on her mind like a wrecking ball against a Chicago Housing Authority wall.

She is confused and a bit puzzled why Saint Edmund’s Church Association, a group contracted by the CHA, will not rehab or open up a stretch of closed public housing row houses that dot the South Side like a bunch of choir lines, all in straight rows. Wiggins would prefer that residents live in the rehabbed row houses instead of the high rise at 62nd and Calumet, which now houses approximately 200 families. Read more »