Posted on 05/19/2017 6:34:54 PM PDT by Lorianne
Cairo, Ill., has a population of fewer than 3,000 people. A plan to demolish two public housing developments would force many residents to leave and cut the school enrollment in half. ___
The authorities announced last month that the cost of fixing the developments was out of reach, and that replacing them altogether would cost almost 10 times as much. For hundreds of residents, the decision may mean not only leaving these crumbling buildings, but also moving from Cairo altogether.
“For sure they needed to fix this place up a long time ago,” said Nena Ellis, 38, a mother of three who lives in the McBride development, which, along with a second complex, Elmwood, is now set for demolition. “But there’s really nowhere else for us to go around here — even with a housing voucher, there just aren’t other places.”
“Are we all supposed to just scatter to other cities — to big cities?” she asked. “Our kids grew up in Cairo. Our memories are in Cairo. And if you take this place out, it’s knocking everything else down in Cairo with it.”
This is the problem of decaying public housing complexes in a small, fading and remote city.
In an age when mixed-income and scattered, voucher-based housing has long overtaken the old model of large public complexes, Cairo (pronounced CARE-oh) has a shrinking population now down to fewer than 3,000, no functioning grocery store or gas station, and a main thoroughfare with an ornate, arching entry that reads “Historic Downtown Cairo” but one that features shuttered storefronts, vacant lots and, on a recent day, not a person in sight.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Get a frigging job!
I guess the buildings are alive in Cairo, Illinois.
I’ve been to that town. One of the most hopeless places I’ve ever seen.
“For sure they needed to fix this place up a long time ago,” said Nena Ellis, 38, a mother of three who lives in the McBride development, which, along with a second complex, Elmwood, is now set for demolition. “But there’s really nowhere else for us to go around here — even with a housing voucher, there just aren’t other places
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysKhbaLyIFw
Any comments from the husbands of these families?? /sarc. (or is it sarc/)
Only on Fathers’ Days
It probably would make a great background for a zombie show or movie. =)
Two major issues that causes these things to happen.
1) Freeloading leeches living for nothing have no investment in where they live so they trash the places
2) Government agencies that would rather spend money on building New Taj Mahal type building then put maintenance and upkeep money in what they already run.
Not much pisses me of more than listening to public entities claim they need NEW buildings because the ones they have are falling apart that are 20-40 years old.
How many Americans need a new house that is that old because it’s falling apart
Maintain it you freaking MAROONS!
on the average, an American moves 11.4 times in their lifetime. This must be one of those times. Suck it up and start packing.
This is kind of a local story for me. The background is that the leader of the local “housing authority” made off with the funds to maintain the housing units. HUD took over and realized that there was no way to refurbish the housing units. They are unfit for human habitation—at least by American standards. The local TV station did a report showing what the units looked like and they were beyond disgusting. Some units didn’t even have front doors.
So they were rightly condemned and the occupants have to leave. There is no replacement housing for them in the Cairo area, so who knows where they’ll end up. Cairo is an unbelievably sad place. You can buy a hundred-year-old mansion (it used to be a thriving place) for just 10s of thousands of dollars. No one who has a choice in the matter wants to live there. It’s kind of like the pictures you see of Detroit, except Cairo is much smaller and has no prosperous parts. Most houses and buildings are abandoned. A few liquor stores and mini marts are the only businesses that survive.
Cairo is an example of how bad race relations can destroy a place. Blacks started a boycott of white-owned businesses because the businesses were glad to do business with blacks, but wouldn’t hire them. The boycott worked. The white-owned business went out of business, but nothing and nobody replaced them. Cairo is much like Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. Even though the whites did treat them unfairly, the blacks were much better off when Cairo was prosperous. Now, it is all despair.
This makes me sad, Cairo (KAY-RO) was a fun place years ago......many relatives in Southern Illinois. But yes, the leeches have no reason to keep it going. They know they can just go somewhere else and live off the working people. Never mind they killed the town in which they lived.
My mother was from Equality, on a farm near “the old slave house”. That would make the lib’s heads explode.
Cairo, East St. Louis, Gary Indiana, Benton Harlem Michigan. The most depressing places I’ve ever seen.
Gonna give em vouchers, and maps to YOUR neighborhoods.
Mainstreaming.
Clicking on the link shows the article lead with a photo of the “projects”. And what do I see? Satellite TV dishes mounted on them.
Used to be a thriving gunboat-building city in the Civil War period before the railroads. For a long time after the railroads it and the region to the north up to Carbondale grew the produce that supplied Chicago and St. Louis. The region is excellent for growing stone fruit, apples, etc. Then the interstates started killing off small towns everywhere and all the power was concentrated in the largest cities, and then the city dwellers take control of the state and death taxes wipe out the farm families by forcing land sales to pay taxes.
And it’s not good when the potential workforce makes more on welfare than it could from picking produce. My grandfather grew up in the region and was an expert orchard man, augmenting his income by catching and selling fish... until he opted to become a steelworker up north for a steadier income with bennies and the work in the mills gave him emphysema.
Now it’s just multigenerational welfare recipients who wouldn’t know good soil if they stood on it, unwilling to even pick up the litter in their town. They could be growing produce in the vacant lots to feed themselves, and catching fish in the sloughs, and filling their freezers with the best venison south of Calhoun County, and crafting furniture or other items from the fine lumber, but why bother when you can buy junk with an EBT card and hope for free FEMA stuff when it floods?
Why bother until there is no one around to accept the card because the slum atmosphere and the state’s awful taxes have driven people with any means to move on rather than serve dying businesses.
It’s truly a beautiful place where the rivers meet, but the people blighted it... and the handouts kept them there long after the economy dried up and disappeared.
What's missing from this entire article?
Anyone?
Bueller?
A plan to demolish two public housing developments would force many residents to leave and cut the school enrollment in half.
_______________
I would guess that is the reason. We are going to look like Brazil soon. Shanty towns surrounded by high rises.
Why do they have to have housing projects in tiny towns of 3000 people? For 70 years the Democrat public housing plague has destroyed countless communities from sea to shining sea.
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