[Crazy Canuck]

Just curious.

[nape]

Articles like that make me laugh. These places have been around forever, now the neighborhoods have gentrified and all the sudden the factories are the worst things there. People seem to think that these factories are just sitting there pouring toxins down the drain or blowing them out of the stacks for fun. That is industry! Shut those places down and you're getting rid of people's jobs and your tax base. Also, want to know why those homes were so close to the factories? Because the people that used to live in the home used to work at the factory! That was before your brick bungalow on a city lot was worth $400,000 though.

I've worked in most of the coal burning power plants around the city (Fisk [the one in the picture], Crawford, Joliet). Yes, the places are crapholes full of coal dust, asbestos, and who knows what else but do you want to live in the 21st century with the lights on or go back to the 19th century without power? The eco-nazis are pushing stricker air emissions standards on coal burners all over the state and I can't wait to laugh when they get their bills and bitch about how the rates have gone up. If you want to get all NIMBY about it then you'll have to move because hell will freeze over before any of the suburbs let a coal burner be built there.

Nearly two dozen of the region's top polluters are within 8 miles of the Altgeld Gardens public housing project off 130th Street on the Far South Side, where nearly all residents are African-American. The two-story brick apartments are surrounded by steel mills, abandoned factories, landfills and a sewage treatment plant.

"We're like a big environmental lab for all of the mistakes industry has made over the years," said Cheryl Johnson, a lifelong Altgeld resident who is carrying on the environmental activism her mother, Hazel, started in the 1980s. "We see and smell and live with this pollution every day. I may not have a science degree, but it isn't good."

If you don't like it, move out of the PROJECTS! If you're living for free, I don't know how much of an argument you can make over the conditions...