LetMaps shows evidence of forced relocations

Many of you know of the link between this blog and LeftMaps - and the latest LeftMaps offering exposes a very serious issue.

One of the big local and national stories throughout the '90s and '00s was the closure of public housing. Most residents were never asked whether they wanted their housing razed. It also elicited this very urgent question: Where were residents supposed to go?

Most people who supported eliminating this housing wanted them to go...away. That's where. Relocation plans were inadequate and were made with almost no input from residents.

In brief, these were forced relocations.

Often, these were relocations to the streets, to homeless shelters, and even to morgues. Hardly any new affordable housing has been built in the region in years.

LeftMaps shows evidence of this campaign: The maps' dull pink land use shading is used for urban prairies. Not all urban prairies marked on these maps result from loss of public housing. But the urban prairie on the west corner of Newport - north of 4th Street - did.

With the completion of our fifteenth map last night, it seems as if we can now add another urban prairie resulting from the forced relocation of the poor. When we read about the fact that almost the entire Cincinnati neighborhood of English Woods - which had consisted primarily of public housing - had been abandoned since the last time I was near it, we drew a LeftMap of this small neighborhood.

The pinkish shading coincides with the site of this pogrom.

Ironically, the housing project was demolished despite Cincinnati City Council's opposition to this relocation.

To view the LeftMaps of English Woods and other local neighborhoods, click here:

http://bunkerblast.info/maps