Robert Taylor Homes

I mean, it's why Cabrini Green in Chicago doesn't exist anymore.

It's why they tore down the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, those neighborhoods were absolutely horrific danger zones in terms of crime.

That's where all the concentrated low-income housing was.

So do you get the impression the city is not interested in converting your neighborhood like they did in Over the Rhine to this wonderful urban hipster paradise, which they ultimately got criticized for, Corey?

Good mornin' Singapore, I'm bringin' the sun with me.

From the Robert Taylor Homes to Africa slum cities.

I am American mentally with Japanese tendencies.

Parisian sensibilities, so stay out the vicinity of.

I want the revolution.

But then I became a police reporter several years later in Chicago, and I covered these housing projects, among other things, called Cabrini-Green and Robert Taylor Homes.

And they had been built by academic sociologists in an attempt to revolutionize the lives of people in these poor neighborhoods.

And they never talked to the people in the neighborhoods.

We had that.

It was called Cabrini Green, Rockwell Gaulders, Robert Taylor, Stateway Garden.

The gains control it, and it smelled like constant urine 24 hours of the day.

Somebody made money.

And it's an amazing story.

And the other book I have lectured on, and actually I used to show the documentary to the students, was, uh, Sudhir Venkatesh's Dislocation, which is about the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago.

And the reason I, I bring this up is because it's the same theme that you find in rural America, that despite sometimes socioeconomic conditions that you would want to leave, that the social capital is so strong and these communities are so strong that people stay anyway.

Now, I don't think that's the case, obviously, in a prosperous town in Iowa or Pennsylvania.

I loved it.

This one is directed by Scott Weintraub, and it traces the path of Mr. T from a childhood in Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes housing projects, one of 12 children raised by a minister father, to a global fame as Mr. T.

So before Hollywood, he worked as a bouncer and then built a decade-long career as a bodyguard to major stars, including Muhammad Ali, Michael Jackson, Steve McQueen, and Diana Ross, reportedly charging $3,000 a day and claiming that he never lost a client.

So $3,000 back then, imagine what it would be now.

Still holding on to her crutches, she tells me she fell over as she tried to run for cover last Saturday night in Washington Park.

She was at a picnic there, a reunion for the former residents of the Robert Taylor Homes.

It's the public housing project she grew up in.

It was demolished in 2007, forcing all the residents to find new homes.