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October, 2007
Mario Perry, 20, Air Force recruit
Reporters often paint a grim picture of life in Englewood. Whenever the South Side community makes the news, the story always seems to be about poverty, crime and despair.
Twenty-year-old Mario Perry sees something different. The lifelong Chicagoan, who has lived in Englewood since he was in preschool, knows a community of working men and women taking...
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October, 2007
1840: A settler named Wilcox claims land in a swampy prairie area seven miles south of what is now the Loop. Part of the area lies on a ridge that would become Vincennes Avenue.
1852: Railroad companies begin laying tracks and building stations in the area. The intersection of 63rd and LaSalle streets takes on the name "Chicago Junction" or "Junction Grove." An early resident reports looking...
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October, 2007
For Myra D. Silas and her family, life was far from perfect on the 13th floor of their Cabrini-Green high-rise on the Near North Side. Silas said she saw four children killed in the mid-1990s and "can't say how many I saw actually get shot."
But the violence receded after a 1997 gang truce, she said, and her building, at 500 W. Oak St., became more of a community. "We were like a family,"...
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October, 2007
The Habitat Co. ended up in the public housing business because of the "incompetence and intransigence" of the Chicago Housing Authority, Alexander Polikoff recalls.
Polikoff, a staff attorney for Business and Professional People for the Public Interest, a public interest law firm, was a 39-year-old lawyer in 1966 when he filed a federal class-action lawsuit on behalf of CHA resident Dorothy...
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October, 2007
Community areas on the West and South sides registered the highest rates of accidental deaths among children between 1992 and 1997. In contrast, neighborhoods on the North and Northwest sides had the lowest rates–"including five that recorded no deaths.
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October, 2007
Two of every three residents surveyed this spring at the Robert Taylor Homes on Chicago's South Side oppose the Chicago Housing Authority's proposal to demolish the development and move some tenants into the private housing market with federal Section 8 subsidies, The Chicago Reporter has learned.
The Reporter's analysis of preliminary results for April and May show that 68 percent of 193...
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October, 2007
Redevelopment plans for the South Side's Robert Taylor Homes call for a lower percentage of replacement units than any other "distressed" Chicago Housing Authority development. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development required that the CHA produce revitalization plans for nine such developments. Robert Taylor's plan would shrink the available units by more than two-thirds, while other...
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October, 2007
In August 1966, as Martin Luther King Jr. and others marched through thousands of screaming white residents in Marquette Park, Elbert Ransom Jr. heard a familiar melody.
It sounded like an Oscar Meyer Weiner commercial, but the chant spoke to the crowd's virulent resistance to the marchers' demands that the neighborhood open itself to black residents:
I wish I were an Alabama trooper...
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September, 2007
The Chicago Housing Authority has all but abandoned a decades-old effort to end the isolation and segregation of public housing residents by moving them into white neighborhoods.
And nearly one in six units built toward that goal–"through the scattered-site housing program–"will be demolished or sold, CHA officials told The Chicago Reporter.
Forced upon a recalcitrant CHA by a federal...
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