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New Towne Project Is For All Of Us

New Towne. The debate is fierce, the fears of the residents are alarming, and the Rockford Housing Authority is stuck between a rock and a hard place.

I was at the resident meeting in Fairgrounds following the death of a young mother murdered while watching a video with her four children in their bedroom. A stray bullet went through the wall and killed her. The police arrived to find the four children hugging their mother as she lay dying on the floor.

At the meeting, another young mother spoke in anguish about watching her mother shot and killed when she was eight. Now her children are afraid to wait for the school bus.

Yes, I agree Fairgrounds is a compound. All they need is a concrete wall and machine gun towers. It would be safer, yet a prison by any other name…

New Towne can be an opportunity for the entire community to participate in developing and managing the project. It can be different. Rockford can choose to do the right thing because it is the right thing.

If everyone -- and I mean everyone -- is in the game, the outcome can and will be different.

I will never forget the anguish of those mothers and the young faces taking it all in. They looked like refugees standing at the border asking, who will let me in?

My questions: If not New Towne, where? If not now, when?

I’m Lou Ness, and that’s my perspective.

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