Not in Kansas…
I grew up on a farm in rural Michigan. From our kitchen window, you could barely see the neighbor’s house on the other side of the fields.
I spent my childhood planting pine trees in the cold, dark mornings and chasing runaway cows down our dirt road.
It was furthest place from public housing you can imagine. There were no concrete stairwells, open galleries or basketball courts. The closest kids lived a half a mile away. It was acres of tall grass as far as you could see.
This makes me a strange public housing reporter. I don’t have any street cred.
farm face
Some people can hide where they come from, but when I meet my sources for the first time, no one has any doubt that the tiny white girl with big gray eyes ain’t from around here.
But I’m here. And I’m doing the job. Talking to people. Learning. Exploring. Listening to the history, digging up the facts and participating in the present.
An unlikely tour guide, I suppose. But I want to be more than a tour guide. I want to be your eyes in the city.
I’ve been writing this blog for a few months at ChicagoNow. I’m in the process of moving to True/Slant to share my ideas with more people.
I have this thing for Laura Ingalls Wilder. Read every book of hers over and over as a kid. If you watched Little House on the Prairie, you probably know the older sister, Mary, goes blind when she’s barely a teenager. Laura always loved words, loved writing, and so when Mary wanted to know about something, she would ask Laura to “see” it for her. And Laura would lovingly describe every detail of that lush Dakota prairie so that her sister could see it too.
That's me in the red. You're in the blue.
I have no Harvard degree in urban planning. No hard knocks tale of growing up in the ‘hood. I just have eyes. So, I guess my job is just to see things as I see them and tell you about them. And I want to hear about what you see too.
Chicago’s public housing is like Tolkien’s Middle Earth or something. It’s really just that complicated. Every place has two and sometimes three names. Abbreviations galore. Plans gone awry. There are rulers of every kingdom. They battle for control.
What’s the difference between a HAP and the HOP? Lakefront, Lathrop and LeClaire? The head of the CHA and the president of the CAC?
It’s a wild world, but one that’s so incredibly important. Public housing is the root of understanding who lives in our city and where they are.
It’s the base of the urban poor, the springboard for the working class. Public housing is dividing the pie of our fair city, deciding who can live where and what they have access to. It’s fascinating, exciting, complicated and sometimes disturbing.
So, I hope you’ll take this journey with me. I’ll do my best to tell you the plain truth and why it matters.
Send me your honest, raw thoughts and help me create a space for dialogue about this amazing subject.
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