My name is Jason Webb and I'm a sociology doctoral student. This is my notebook on homelessness, inequality, citizenship, and urbanism.
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Data Dispatches and Diagrams
Data Dispatches and Diagrams
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The Fall Of Public Housing
Ben Austen writes in Harper’s about the demolition of Chicago’s infamous Cabrini-Green public housing high-rises, as part of the Chicago Housing Authority’s so-called Plan For Transformation.
Deborah Hope lived in the Cabrini row houses for nearly twenty years before moving to a fourth-floor unit in the newly built Parkside of Old Town. … It all began, Hope said, when she was ten years old and her mother moved the family into the projects, to Rockwell Gardens on the West Side. That was the start of the disasters for them, the murders and drugs and alcohol and what they call the felonious society. Her sister was stabbed to death in the elevator, and Hope, at thirteen, took charge of raising her eight-month-old nephew. She pointed to a portrait of her sister on the wall above the dining room table, a pretty girl of eighteen, heavy-lidded, seated in a rattan lounge chair. A photograph on top of Hope’s television showed a brother who had died of AIDS. She counted off fifteen family members—including the sister, another brother, an aunt, and two of her own children—who got killed by guns or knives.
Hope later moved into an apartment on the North Side, in an all-white neighborhood. Yuppieville, she called it. They paid full rent, $1,500 a month, no assistance, food stamps, or medical card. She was raising four kids at the time, working three jobs, one for American Airlines at O’Hare, another at a skating rink, and the third as a school crossing guard. Hope would come home to drop off money and head right back out, riding the train or a bike. Then her mom died, at the age of fifty-two, Hope’s age now. And her brother went to prison, for being a “menace to society,” the court said. He got twenty years for selling drugs. Hope said there were weak men and strong men, and her brother was strong… But her landlords found out about her brother and said they didn’t want that kind. They raised the rent up so high Hope couldn’t manage, and she ended up in eviction court. She was given two weeks to get out and either head into emergency housing or be homeless. She didn’t want to go back to the projects, but she had no other choice.
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Great Acceleration
The second half of the 20th Century is unique in the entire history of human existence on Earth. Many human activites reached take-off points sometime in the 20th Century and sharply accelerated towards the end of the century.
The last 50 years have without doubt seen the most rapid transformation of the human relationship with the natural world in the history of humankind.
Understanding Income Inequality
