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October, 2007
Many people connected with the United Neighborhood Organization, known as UNO, have landed top-level government appointments and jobs---some even while they're still working with UNO. Through them, this community organizing group has built a network of influential people with strong ties to city and state governments.
* As 25th Ward alderman and president pro tempore of the Chicago City...
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October, 2007
In the fall of 2003, Mayor Richard M. Daley spent an hour in a closed-room session fielding the questions of some 20 young Latino professionals---nearly all previous strangers.
In varying accounts of the night, the mayor was either so taken aback by the candid inquiries, or alternately, so enraptured with the flow of the Q...
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September, 2007
Ledall Edwards doesn't want to jump to the conclusion that a statue of A. Phillip Randolph---the civil rights leader who organized Pullman train porters---cost his Roseland Business Development Council some $27,000 in federal anti-poverty funds. But, in retrospect, he realizes that his support of the statue may have not only cost him a city contract but standing with an alderman and a voice in...
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September, 2007
Each year since 2000, the Chicago Housing Authority has altered its schedule for completing the rebuilding and rehabbing of 25,000 public housing units. And now, according to a draft version of the CHA's 2007 Annual Plan, the agency is pushing the deadline back six years to 2015.
Until now, the CHA has long maintained that the massive $1.6 billion plan for tearing down high-rises, rebuilding...
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September, 2007
"We lost a lot of people last year," said Christopher Curtis, 36, a lifelong resident of the Harold Ickes Homes. "You don't ever hear about it in the news." Curtis knows the development---and its residents---well. Most days, he might be found coaching an Ickes youth soccer team, rounding up residents on a school bus for neighborhood police meetings or fretting endlessly about how the...
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September, 2007
With two working parents and an annual income of $36,000---about three times higher than the average family at the Altgeld Gardens-Murray Homes complex at Chicago's southern end---Anita Williams and her family would appear to be ideal role models for public housing.
But Williams, her husband and their two adult children aren't sure whether it's worth sticking it out at Altgeld-Murray....
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September, 2007
While the teardowns of high-rises has dominated talk of the Chicago Housing Authority's sweeping transformation of public housing, more than half of the agency's buildings will not be torn down. Many changes to public housing are occurring through rehabs of existing developments.
Nearly all of the CHA's scattered-site and senior developments have been rehabbed. And, during the past year, the...
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September, 2007
This is a story about "Belushi" and "Little Belushi"-Manuel Feliciano and his son Jovanny.
This story takes place inside the Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet, just like the film "The Blues Brothers." But unlike the film, this story runs longer on tragedy than comedy. It is about the power of living up to a family name and the bonds that push fathers and sons in and out of prison...
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September, 2007
When Mayor Richard M. Daley coasted to re-election in 2003, he attributed his landslide victory to his broad support in neighborhoods north to south, black to white and Latino to Asian. But in the months leading up to his election, a more narrowly drawn army of nearly 2,850 circulators-more than a third of them city workers and often from the fringes of the city-collected signatures to put Daley...
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