Advocates for affordable housing are hoping to pack the Chicago School Board meeting Wednesday, and demand that the board not build a new high school on South Side land once occupied by public housing.
Former public housing residents delivered petitions signed by a couple hundred people, led by Roderick Wilson of the Hope Center in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood.
“This is an anti-black measure,” Wilson said. “Right here, we showed the community does not support this.”
Wilson stood on the sidewalk with a woman who was born in the Harold Ickes Homes in 1955 and continues to live in public housing.
“I am hurt, I am displaced, and I am dismayed about it,” she said. “We want to go back home. That’s home.”
The activists said they don’t oppose a new Chinatown or South Loop High School. Anna Davis, a public housing resident, said when the previous public housing was torn down, new low-income housing was promised.
“All of us black and brown people have been displaced and gentrified from that area,” Davis said. “Now they decide to come in and say they’re building a school for us. Well, I say that it’s not a school for us. It’s a school for everybody but us.”
Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez supported the effort.
“It is reprehensible to even think about giving away public housing land,” Sigcho-Lopez said. “What we’re asking is to make sure that we don’t build a high school at the expense of public housing.”
Sigcho-Lopez, and the activists opposing this plan, said it’s the City of Chicago has a pattern of displacing the poor.
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