CHICAGO—Residents of the Carney Gardens neighborhood on Chicago's South Side are opposing an effort by asshole real-estate developer Royce Messner to build a godawful $45 million strip mall and condominium complex in the crime-ridden shithole they call home.

Residents march to protect their beloved, execrable squalor.


The Save Carney Neighborhood Foundation, the most organized non-criminal group in this part of town, has filed a lawsuit in federal court to block the scheduled April 2008 groundbreaking. While halting the project would surely prevent a tragic urban-planning nightmare, it would also mean keeping the run-down, economically depressed community exactly as it is.

"Carney is where I was born and raised, and it remains a tight-knit community," said Foundation chairman Althea Hynes at a fundraising block party held Monday on a broken bottle- and condom-strewn stretch of Carney Avenue where the money-grubbing Messner wants to put a soulless indoor food court. "Lots of young kids still play in the empty lots around here."


Messner, 54, a three-time Chicagoland "Builder of the Year" and all-time unbelievable scumbag who made his fortune in the 1990s converting public parks and cheap, blighted properties into high-rise luxury residences, is seeking to "revitalize" Carney Gardens by razing it and replacing it with a damned cookie-cutter mixed commercial-residential development that would benefit no one who lives there now.

Unrepentant prick Messner.


"What people like this can never get through their heads is the fact that progress isn't always painless," the rapacious bastard said, as if he were not talking about driving thousands of poor benighted fucks out of the place that, pestilential hellhole or not, is the only home they've ever been able to afford. "They complained about the expressway over their heads too, but its easy-on, easy-off access makes Carney Gardens a prime area for development. Once we get a few more chain restaurants in that area, the whole economy will turn around."

A hellish 16-block stretch of burned-out buildings and howling poverty, Carney Gardens has never recovered from its economic slide in the late 1960s. However, many of those who live in the human sewer say they can't just allow Messner to squat his bloated fat-cat ass over their neighborhood and dump a big concrete-and-glass yuppie turd onto everything they've ever known.


"There's no way this city can allow some developer to just come in here and ruin our community," said liquor store owner Carlos Jimenez, demonstrating willful ignorance of Chicago history, the conditions immediately outside his door, and even his role in Carney Gardens' downfall.

"Where are all these people supposed to go if they put up that mall here—Gary, Indiana?" said Hynes, as if living in a filthy, dangerous joke of a city was some kind of affront to her standards.


Urban planning experts say that any opposition to the colossal asshole faces an uphill battle, as Carney Gardens has been a wart on the ass of Chicago for too long. Despite this, it seems that the determined Save Carney group will not abandon its hope of rejecting the only development proposal their hopeless pit will see in the next two decades.

"Poor communities are at a disadvantage against this type of developer, who speaks the language of City Hall," said Jackson Eisenberg, an architecture professor at Loyola University who has studied the effects of short-sighted, profit-oriented renewal and gentrification on dozens of crap areas. "It's the same dilemma faced by the working-class [losers] in [rotten-ass] urban neighborhoods across America. As a [shrivel-dicked] businessman looking for a lucrative investment, [evil] Messner sees a ripe opportunity here."


Mayor Richard M. Daley has yet to speak publicly about whether he will oppose Messner's human hamster cage, or allow the vile prick to wipe the bleeding wound that is Carney Gardens from existence.