No contest. Charles Wheeler III writes in Illinois Issues (February) that “in only 17 Senate and 53 House districts [in Illinois] did both major parties field candidates. In the other 42 Senate and 65 House districts, only one party’s hopefuls are on the March ballot.”
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“Relocation, demolition, and redevelopment activities [at the Chicago Housing Authority] continue to outpace the services available to support families in transition,” write Robin Snyderman and Steven Dailey II of the Metropolitan Planning Council in a recent report on CHA relocation activities (fact sheet number three, February). “The Service Connector Program, for example, has not been fully operational to assist families with lease compliance issues. Procedures now in development to standardize and refine relocation and mobility counseling were not available to households that had already relocated.” Furthermore, there is a “lack of accurate information surrounding the whereabouts of residents (both former and present) affected by demolition, consolidation and relocation.” Translation from the ever-polite MPC lingo: the CHA is kicking the poorest people in the city out of their homes, giving them little help in finding new ones, and then letting them disappear so that they can’t be helped later.
Abe’s bicentennial–you read it here first. According to a February 8 press release, state comptroller Daniel Hynes has already convened a forum of scholars and experts to “identify measures worthy of the 2009 bicentennial celebration of the birth of our sixteenth President.”
