Dear Mr. Henderson:
How dare you even mildly claim that overall the scattered site program by the federal government is a success [“Scattered Successes,” October 14]!
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The federal government has been doing this program to us in Humboldt Park for years and all we have to show for it is old abandoned CHA housing attracting gangs and drugs and masses of new housing drawing the same. Humboldt Park, the city’s dumping ground of unwanteds, has enough problems without a new influx of more poorer people than we already have. Did you even come over here to see for yourself? Don’t you see the same discrimination going on that they claim they’re trying to rectify? Did you only listen to them? Have you talked to the professor who wrote the book at the University of Chicago? Were you bought off?
My opinion about you as a journalist is: you were paid to write what someone else told you to write OR you were completely hoodwinked by the so-called authorities AND you did not do your homework. (By the way, did you know that the oversight committee formed to oversee the scattered site implementation is comprised of Polikoff, the Leadership Council, and a host of HUD and CHA bureaucrats? Where’s the watchdog?
Harold Henderson replies:
I lavishly quoted black, white, and Latino opponents of scattered sites. Some of them have a conspiracy theory about Gautreaux, which I didn’t buy.
