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City
officials have heralded the plan. But Turner believes
the city once accused of leaving residents to be victimized
by violent drug-dealing gangs is now pushing those same
people from their homes without giving them all a place
to go.
"I
have people becoming homeless behind this plan, people
that's living on top of each other with relatives,"
said Turner, who has given informal tours for years
before the community newspaper she works for began renting
the bus in January and charging tourists $20 for the
ride. "For some it has improved their conditions,
but for the multitude of many it has not."
Chicago
Housing Authority officials say Turner glosses over
the failures of public housing. They say the 25,000
units being built or rehabbed are enough for the number
of people whose buildings were demolished.
"She
is running out of bad things to show people," housing
authority spokesman Bryan Zises said. "She is taking
a circuitous route so she doesn't have to drive by the
new stuff," including, he adds, Turner's own home
in one of the new mixed-income communities.
On
the tours, Turner talks about the strong, black women
like herself who raised their children in the projects.
"This
is where people lived, played, stayed and died here,
just like in your area. ... Children played here,"
she tells the students, academics, activists and residents
of Chicago and surrounding suburbs who take the tour
_ most of them white and visiting a part of Chicago
they've only seen on television or from the expressway.
"The
same thing that you do in your community is what the
residents of public housing did in theirs," she
says.
Turner
takes her group by the home of Carol Wallace, 63. As
the visitors make their way into a dreary looking low-slung
building that has not been rehabilitated, Wallace tells
of her suspicions that she and a lot of people like
her are going to be left out of the "Plan for Transformation."
"Overall,
I think it's just a way of getting us out of here,"
said Wallace, standing in front of the iron security
door she lives behind. "Because they're not letting
everyone back in."
Wallace's
home stands in stark contrast with the nostalgic picture
Turner paints of the old projects. She recalls when
parents like her kept an eye on the neighbor's kids,
a time when the projects shined every bit as much as
the buildings now going up in their place and lawns
were kept as neat as putting greens.
She
downplays the years of violence, saying that all those
news reports distorted what day-to-day life was like.
"All
the horror stories that you heard about in the newspapers,
it was not like that at all," she said.
But
the stories loom over the tour. They are impossible
to forget. By the time the city started pulling down
or rehabilitating the projects in the late 1990s, each
one had its own headlines that spoke to the failure
of public housing in Chicago.
At
Cabrini-Green a boy was struck by a bullet and killed
as he walked hand-in-hand with his mother. At the Ida
B. Wells project, a 5-year-old boy was dangled and then
deliberately dropped to his death from a 14-story window
by two other children.
And
at Robert Taylor, where the illegal drug trade thrived,
a rookie police officer was shot to death on a stakeout
outside a gang drug base.
Turner
could even add her own story. She saw a teenage boy
shot on the very day she arrived at the Robert Taylor
Homes in 1986.
Her
approach had some on the tour shaking their heads.
"Are
they romanticizing these communities?" asked Mark
Weinberg, a 44-year-old Chicago lawyer. "These
were drug-ridden, violent neighborhoods where people
wanted to live a good life but couldn't."
D.
Bradford Hunt, a Roosevelt University professor writing
a book about Chicago's public housing, said he appreciated
that Turner told the story from the perspective of tenants
but wasn't quite sure what to make of the commentary.
"People
got killed," he said. "You don't make that
story up."
Still,
Turner says the city has a duty to keep the community
that law-abiding citizens of public housing built up
over the decades, despite their challenges. That is
what she fears is being lost, and why she'll keep giving
the bus tour.
"People
that come in don't want to look across the street and
see seven little black churches in a three-block radius,"
she said. "What they want to see is a Dominick's
and sushi joints and a Starbucks."
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