In a freezing morning in feb-ruary four years ago, Verna Berryman, 46, packed up her things, bade goodbye to the Cabrini-Green housing project and embarked on a journey that she would probably rather forget. Forced out of the 16th-floor apartment that had been her home for six years, Berryman and her youngest child, Vernon, 17, joined a small group of other Cabrini families in what were the first steps of a massive plan to empty and demolish Chicago's decaying high-rise projects. The program is ambitious, envisioning no less than a revolution in housing the poor. Other cities―Atlanta, Boston, Miami and Oakland―are also in the midst of knocking down public housing and relocating tenants, but no city plan matches the scale of Chicago's. The Windy City intends to move some 60,000 people out of crowded, bullet-scarred projects like Cabrini and into private apartments or new low-rise public housing in mixed-income neighborhoods scattered around the city.
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