I’m off to Battle Creek, MI, for this year’s Diakonos trip. Diakonos is the CVCA service group that helps with Habitat for Humanity. This year there is a group of about 25 students going, and we’ll be gone about 6 days (over spring break). I’ll try to keep notes like I did last year (check out postings here if you want an idea of what goes on).
I just read that there are still 176 families (of the original 15,000) living in the remaining (condemned, BTW) Cabrini Green buildings of Chicago (Division and Halsted). Housing has been provided for 1733 of these 15,000 families, but only 3267 more living spaces are in the works (to be completed by 2010, and that date may just have been pushed back to 2015). I have no idea where the rest of these families have been relocated, other than to the poverty pockets Chicago’s South and West sides. There’s a waiting list of 90,000 families who are eligible for public housing, and that’s in Chicago alone:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/us/18cabrini.html?em&ex=1174363200&en=2f755e9de004b858&ei=5087
People like you through your work with Habitat for Humanity give families like this hope.