CHICAGO (AP) — The yellow school bus rumbles through vacant lots and past demolished buildings, full of people who paid $20 for a tour of what once was among the most dangerous areas of this or any other city in the U.S.
But for the woman with the microphone, this “Ghetto Bus Tour” isn’t just another way to make a buck from tourists. It’s the last gasp in her crusade to tell a different story about Chicago’s notorious housing projects, something other than well-known tales about gang violence so fierce that residents slept in their bathtubs to avoid bullets.
“I want you to see what I see,” Beauty Turner said after leading the group off the bus to a weedy lot where the Robert Taylor Homes once stood. “To hear the voices of the voiceless.”
Miss Turner, a former Robert Taylor Homes resident, has been one of the most vocal critics of the Chicago Housing Authority’s $1.6 billion “Plan for Transformation,” which, since the late 1990s, has demolished 50 of the 53 public housing high-rises and replaced them with mixed-income housing.
City officials have heralded the plan. But Miss Turner said the city that once left residents to be victimized by violent drug-dealing gangs is now pushing those same people from their homes without giving them a place to go.
“I have people becoming homeless behind this plan, people that’s living on top of each other with relatives,” said Miss Turner, who had given informal tours for years before the community newspaper she works for began renting the bus in January. “For some, it has improved their conditions, but for the multitude of many, it has not.”
Chicago Housing Authority officials say Miss Turner glosses over the failures of public housing. They say the 25,000 units being built or rehabbed are enough for the number of people whose buildings were demolished.
“She is running out of bad things to show people,” housing authority spokesman Bryan Zises said. “She is taking a circuitous route so she doesn’t have to drive by the new stuff,” including, he adds, Miss Turner’s own home in one of the new mixed-income communities.
On the tours, Miss Turner highlights strong, black women like herself who raised their children in the projects.
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