APRIL 2001

Elected public housing resident leaders and lawyers representing residents demanded changes to the Chicago Housing Authority Plan for Transformation in recent letters, press releases and phone calls to Mayor Richard M. Daley and CHA officials.

The Chicago Housing Authority recently put out a large contract to the City Department of Human Services to run the Service Connector program, which is supposed to start this summer. But the Service Connector program started last November. Residents who applied to the Service Connector program were supposed to be trained by AmeriCorps.

The Chicago Housing Authority is making all of its 58 senior citizen buildings seniors-only by excluding new people with disabilities under the age of 50.

The stores on Tobacco Road are losing business because of the relocation of residents of the low-income areas surrounding the stores. As I walked down the legendary 47th Street, better known as Tobacco Road, in early March, I noticed a lot of boarded up stores. The Michigan Garden Apartments, better known as the Rosenwald complex, lay barren. The Rosenwald once housed approximately 500 low-income families. Now it's a ghost town. No children are outside playing; no one is standing outside of the once very busy dwelling.

Under new private management, in the case of Harold L. Ickes Homes, is truly a play on words; the management company that replaced CHA employee managers is a well-known established organization that has a reputation for managing good and lasting housing, social and other community services on the South Side of Chicago, The Woodlawn Organization, known as TWO.

The Cermak Teachers Training Academy is being built at Cermak and Dearborn Streets within the boundaries of Harold Ickes Homes. It has been in the planning stages for the last two years and the residents of the Ickes public housing development are awaiting the fulfillment of the promise that the children who live within the boundaries will attend the school.

All low-income Chicagoans will have less housing to choose from if a coalition of Section 8 tenants, lawmakers, grassroots organizations and activists is not able to save thousands of subsidized housing units by 2005. The Chicago Rehab Network, Tenants United for Housing and the National Housing Law project held a briefing March 16 on the "State of Project Based Section 8s" at the Palmer House Hotel in downtown Chicago.

This past winter was rough on a lot of us - and not just because of winter and the frigid cold that came with it. But this winter, for a lot of people, came a big problem and that was due to the high increase in gas bills.

Two hours after I got into the Model T Ford a few miles north of Marksville, five Cajuns and myself pulled into a yellow two-car garage in the rear of a yellow duplex house on Holly Street in Alexandria, Louisiana.

Young Chicagoans debated with City officials in February and March about the provision of summer jobs. In February, Chicago youths rallied at City Hall to protest cutbacks in the number of jobs offered through Mayor Richard M. Daley's office. They demonstrated again earlier this month at the State of Illinois building to ask the governor and state legislature for funds to provide 16- to 19-year-old African American and Hispanic young people with employment this summer.

I covered the recent trial of the man accused of raping Girl X in room 400 of the federal court building downtown. Girl X, now 14, was assaulted, raped and given some type of poison in a Cabrini-Green hallway in 1997. This incident left the girl mentally damaged and blind. She was marked with gang signs on her stomach.

A group of Illinois legislators believe that people who have had a brush with the law should be allowed a second chance.