(AP via blacknews.com) CHICAGO — The yellow school bus rumbles through vacant lots and past demolished buildings on a tour of what was once one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the country.
For the woman with the microphone, the “Ghetto Bus Tour” is the last gasp in a crusade to tell a different story about Chicago’s notorious housing projects, something other than well-known tales about gang violence so fierce that residents slept in their bathtubs to avoid bullets.
“I want you to see what I see,” says Beauty Turner, after leading the group off the bus to a weedy lot where the Robert Taylor Homes once stood. “To hear the voices of the voiceless.”
Turner, a former Robert Taylor Homes resident, has been one of the most vocal critics of the Chicago Housing Authority’s $1.6 billion “Plan for Transformation,” which since the late 1990s has demolished 50 of the 53 public housing high-rises _ including Cabrini-Green _ and replaced them with mixed-income housing.
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.” (more…)
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