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It is not enough to provide accessible, costeffective , quality health care; the population for whom it is intended—the community— must have faith in its quality, and must feel that their health is the primary concern of that provider, that there is no ulterior motive involved and that the providers are sensitive to and knowledgeable about their lifestyle and culture. —Medical student, in Bridging the Gap program, 1997 There are two RCSIP programs that are essentially grassroots in nature. One began at Henry Horner Homes, a Chicago Housing Authority project on the Near West Side, and the other at Casa Guatemala, in the Uptown community area on the Far North Side. In 1935 as a building block of the New Deal, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Congress created the Works Progress Administration, later called the Works Project Administration (WPA), for the primary purpose of getting the unemployed victims of the Great Depression back to work. Besides building national parks, bridges, and new highways and supporting major works of art, the WPA constructed public housing for poor families. The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) was made possible by the WPA and the Federal Housing Act of 1937. Prior to World War II, four low-rise projects (two- to four-story buildings) were constructed on the Near West and South Sides. The Ida B. Wells Homes, one of the first built, was strictly for blacks. This was the outcome of a policy, the so-called Neighborhood Composition Rule, that laid the foundation for de facto racial Community-Based Grassroots Programs Chapter 4 79 segregation and governed these developments in future years. Gerald Suttles (1968) writes about this in his classic study, The Social Order of the Slum. During World War II, CHA was redirected to create housing for workers in war industries. After the war, CHA provided several thousand units of temporary housing for veterans and their families. In the 1950s and 1960s the new trend in public housing was to construct high-rise apartment buildings reaching sixteen stories. Built in 1962, the Robert Taylor Homes, the largest housing project in the United States at that time, consisting of 4,415 units in twenty-eight identical sixteen -story buildings, was spread from Thirty-ninth to Fifty-fourth Street along the Dan Ryan Expressway. By the late 1980s CHA was the third-largest housing authority in the nation, with more than 130,000 residents in approximately 67,000 units. If it were a city, in its heyday it would have been the second largest in Illinois. Some sociologists have estimated that at its peak the number of residents was closer to 200,000 (more than a third not listed on the lease). The expansion of the CHA, along with urban renewal as a guise to salvage the city, is really a case study in the power of latent racism and government deceit and an example of a self-fulfilling prophecy of deterioration and disintegration . The majority of the housing complexes—the most extreme example was Robert Taylor Homes—are spread out along corridors of expressways that divided community areas into racially segregated districts. (Chicago is still referred to by many as the most segregated city in America.) Residents were trapped in enclaves without access to grocery and convenience stores but within walking distance to package liquor stores and currency exchanges. The “projects ,” outside those strictly for the elderly, provided ideal conditions for anomie and insurgency. Residents tended to be single women with two or more children. When the children became teenagers and young adults with poor primary education , they had few, if any, job opportunities. This environment was an ideal breeding ground for drugs, gangs, and violence. William Julius Wilson has written about these conditions in one of the major studies of modern urban sociology, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (1987). By the start of the 1990s the political corruption and theft of resources had become so blatant that the federal agency Housing and Urban Development (HUD) moved in to run the CHA. In 2000 HUD introduced the Plan for Transformation, based on the principles of renewal of physical structures, the promotion of self-sufficiency, and the reform of the agency’s administration.1 The Henry Horner Housing Project Henry Horner Homes was located on a twenty-six-acre site on the Near West Side. Completed in 1957, it was named after the Illinois governor who held 80 Doctors Serving People [3.145.74.54] Project...

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