JOB VACANCY ADMIN PURCHASING GAJI TINGGI

 But for residents, a strong sense of community remains. Cairo is known regionally for its historic churches — some of which still gather a spirited crowd on Sundays — ties to American history, music festivals, acclaimed barbecue and standout high school basketball teams over the years. It’s one of the few small towns in southern Illinois to offer a children’s orchestra and ballet lessons.

A public housing high-rise, planned for demolition, sits on the banks of the Ohio River. Credit:Julia Rendleman for ProPublica

For many of the seniors and people with disabilities who live at the Smith building, the prospect of heading out of town — for some, the only place they’ve ever lived — is daunting.

“A lot of people are scared. I’m scared,” said Logan, 55, a disabled woman who has spent her entire life here. “I don’t want to leave Cairo.” I heard many neighbors echo her concerns as I knocked on doors that afternoon. “I don’t know where I’m gonna go. I’m 83 years old,” said Harry “Mack” McDowell Jr., a retired car salesman who is still grieving the death of his wife in July and who is dreading having to apartment shop and move during the holidays.

Few federal agencies have a mission so squarely aligned with what Cairo needs: to uplift disadvantaged people and places and, as HUD describes it on its website, “to deliver on America’s dreams.”

But HUD has let generations of Cairo residents down time and again. And although HUD could oversee the building of new apartments in the city, it has no plans to do so.

Cairo was once a thriving city. Now, its streets are home to boarded-up buildings and vacant lots. Credit:Julia Rendleman for ProPublica

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Cairo isn’t just another Midwestern river town befallen by hard economic luck.

he storied epicenter of a region colloquially known as “Little Egypt,” Cairo holds a central place in the American story. The town, the most southern point in a northern state, was a key station on the Underground Railroad and a It had been a mostly white city until thousands of formerly enslaved Black Americans fled on steamers headed north along the Mississippi River during the height of the war. The federal government sent them to Cairo and housed them in what were called “contraband camps,” shanty tents set up near the riverbanks where people had At the war’s end, the camps disbanded and many people left. But at least 3,000 Black Americans stayed in Cairo and established a vibrant, though largely segregated, community of churches, schools and businesses. By the early 1900s, nearly 40% of the population was Black, and the strongly organized community leveraged its political espite those gains, white supremacists maintained the balance of power and ensured that Cairo’s Black population remained locked out of the best jobs and public schools. Jim Crow-era policies that followed Housing discrimination was a common thread.

In the 1940s, the town built two large family housing complexes: one for Black families using cheap wood materials at the site of the old “contraband camp” and one for white families built of brick.

In 1972, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission held hearings in the town. Numerous Black citizens testified about being forced to live in the segregated and dilapidated public housing complex; they were terrorized by rodents and white vigilantes who, for months, fired into the apartment complex from the Mississippi levee, shattering windows and streets lights, to intimidate a Black civil rights leader and his followers who lived there. The commission concluded that federal housing officials had known about the town’s defiance of federal fair housing laws for years but done little.

More than 40 years later, I, along with several colleagues from The Southern Illinoisan, documented in the same  in the federal report. They had fallen into even worse disrepair. There were severe foundational issues. Homes were overrun with mice and roaches. Doctors expressed alarm at the number of mothers bringing in children with asthma and other breathing problems from mold. The heating system was so poor that many families used their gas ovens to stay warm in the winter. Similar to the commission’s findings, our reporting revealed that HUD had known about problems and done little. In 2016, on the heels of our investigative series, HUD exercised its rarely utilized authority to remove the housing authority based in Cairo from local control and place it into federal receivership.