Taura Willhite says drug-dealing and other crimes make her want to move from the apartment on South Homan she leases with a CHA voucher. | Brian Jackson / Sun-Times
Mick Dumke
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Tim Novak
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Chris Fusco
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Brett Chase
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After moving around the city for years, Taura Willhite is glad to now be in a comfortable apartment, with a landlord who’s prompt to respond when she calls with a maintenance request.
What she doesn’t like, though, is the area around the three-story greystone in the 1600 block of South Homan in North Lawndale where she lives. It’s bad enough that she wants to move out.
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“The neighborhood is trouble,” says Willhite, 40, a disabled mother who lives there with the help of a Section 8 voucher from the Chicago Housing Authority. “There’s a lot of drug sales and gun violence.”
Under its “Plan for Transformation,” the CHA demolished badly managed, high-rise housing projects in “the largest, most ambitious redevelopment effort of public housing in the United States.” The aim was to help people find better housing options and, with that, to improve their prospects for work, education and quality of life.
“We want to rebuild their souls,” former Mayor Richard M. Daley said of the city’s public housing residents.
More than a decade and a half later, Willhite lives on a trashed-out block that includes 76 CHA-subsidized residents — among them former tenants of the long-gone high-rises. Amid vacant lots and boarded-up homes, they live in 14 buildings, some of them with a history of code violations.
In 1966, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. lived just a short walk away from here while waging his Chicago campaign “to help eradicate a vicious system which seeks to further colonize thousands of Negroes within a slum environment.’’
Fifty years later, vacant lots dot the block where Willhite lives. The buildings there include a century-old single-family home and four three-flats built during the housing boom of the early 2000s.
In the past year, the police have logged 67 crimes on this block — including drug dealing, armed robbery and aggravated battery. Shootings, sexual assaults and other violent crimes have been reported on neighboring blocks.
Mick Dumke
@mickeyd1971 | email
Tim Novak
@tnovaksuntimes | email
Chris Fusco
@FuscoChris | email
Brett Chase
After moving around the city for years, Taura Willhite is glad to now be in a comfortable apartment, with a landlord who’s prompt to respond when she calls with a maintenance request.
What she doesn’t like, though, is the area around the three-story greystone in the 1600 block of South Homan in North Lawndale where she lives. It’s bad enough that she wants to move out.
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“The neighborhood is trouble,” says Willhite, 40, a disabled mother who lives there with the help of a Section 8 voucher from the Chicago Housing Authority. “There’s a lot of drug sales and gun violence.”
Under its “Plan for Transformation,” the CHA demolished badly managed, high-rise housing projects in “the largest, most ambitious redevelopment effort of public housing in the United States.” The aim was to help people find better housing options and, with that, to improve their prospects for work, education and quality of life.
“We want to rebuild their souls,” former Mayor Richard M. Daley said of the city’s public housing residents.
More than a decade and a half later, Willhite lives on a trashed-out block that includes 76 CHA-subsidized residents — among them former tenants of the long-gone high-rises. Amid vacant lots and boarded-up homes, they live in 14 buildings, some of them with a history of code violations.
In 1966, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. lived just a short walk away from here while waging his Chicago campaign “to help eradicate a vicious system which seeks to further colonize thousands of Negroes within a slum environment.’’
Fifty years later, vacant lots dot the block where Willhite lives. The buildings there include a century-old single-family home and four three-flats built during the housing boom of the early 2000s.
In the past year, the police have logged 67 crimes on this block — including drug dealing, armed robbery and aggravated battery. Shootings, sexual assaults and other violent crimes have been reported on neighboring blocks.
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