CHA Shortcomings
Around 1939, when I was ten years old, my mother taught piano at the Abraham Lincoln Center social settlement house on Oakwood Blvd., a block from where the Ida B. Wells housing project was being built in the black ghetto (roughly, along 39th Street between Cottage Grove and South Park, now King Drive). Watching this early project go up, I noticed something disturbing.
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The project could not have housed more than about 10 percent of the poor people who were displaced from those crowded slums that got torn down. So for each person who lucked into one of the new project apartments, about nine others were forced into even more crowded quarters elsewhere in the black slums, since they couldn’t move out of the ghetto. Young as I was, this struck me as a really bad deal.
Sick Transit
To construct a new CTA type rail line along the Metra lakefront alignment would cost one to two billion dollars, which no one is going to spend for a two-week event—even with leaving a legacy for the south side communities. Using the Metra Electric to provide service between the lakefront Olympic venues will not work without fare and service integration with adjacent CTA rail and bus services.
The New New Journalism: Crowdsourcing
