Reply #54: Thanks for the info - Old Town Chicago is near and dear to my heart from the 60's but few of my

[papau]

relatives still live there (Housing costs have got out of hand) - other relatives that lived near Greek Town were of course blasted away by the State for the interstate and IIT.

I don't even know what ethnic comunity is living in what area of Chicago these days (the Polish community around 100 south still around?) - and I agree much "urban renewal" has been for "gentrification" and not to help the poor.

But the Hope VI launched in 1992 was $5 billion that was to address ONLY the replacement of severely distressed public housing projects, occupied exclusively by poor families, by building redesigned mixed-income housing - with housing vouchers to enable some of the original residents to rent apartments in the private market. It is Bush41's gift of gentrification to the nation.

But when passed I thought it was a small program that would only look to replacing roughly the 86,000 of the 1.3 million public housing units nationwide - only 86,000 were thought to qualified as severely distressed per the 1989 report.

It sounds like the definition of "severely distressed" got changed with not enough media attention to make the change known to me.

I wonder if any of our candidates - perhaps the one living in Chicago with a public housing background - will speak to this changing of the program.

:-(