Cabrini green pique my interest. Speak more into detail before and after effects. I'm a Candyman fan!
Carbini green was a old housing project that was built in the 1940's
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini_Greenbasically the area known as "little hell" was originally inhabited primarily by Italians and was known as Little Sicily, however for the last 40 years, the area is about 99-100 percent African American, what happened is that a large number of African Americans had migrated to Chicago from the South and Chicago was heavily segregated at that time (and still is to this day) based on neighborhood, there was some housing discrimination practices that took place and African Americans were known to have lower income than say someone of white background and so many of them ended up in the housing projects such as Cabrini Green.
Basically what happened is that over the last 30 years or so as different gangs formed in Chicago, many of the African American gangs in the area started using the public housing for drug distribution and ended up turning it into a criminal turf, it was so bad that the mayor of Chicago at that time ended up trying to prove it was safe living there for a week and she left after only a couple of days due to it being unsafe, she even had a metal bulletproof door installed as well as armor on the windows, unfortunately when she left, the criminal gangs that occupied Carbini Green ended up using that area to snipe their rival gang members from the area and it was constantly being raided. The drug issue and violence was so out of control that the whole project ended up just being completely demolished, the place was completely unsanitary and a mess, also a waste of tax dollars.
you can actually see how a nice neighborhood turns into a crime infested neighborhood as soon as you hit the projects in this video and the segregation that still exists.
to give you a better idea, Cabrini Green was mainly demolished for political and sanitary reasons, which is why much of the African American population shifted towards lower income areas in general, unfortunately as you and I know, the lower income areas of course tend to have more crime.
My personal opinion is those public housing units scare the crap out of me, they remind me of the gray apartments from the soviet union or something.