Sam and David Senior Project

For those of you who don't know, David and I are traveling around the eastern United States on a road trip to do a documentary on housing/the foreclosure crisis and to work with Habitat for Humanity, while documenting their contributions to help fix the crisis. Jana and Sara are doing a documentary on a different project, but the four of us are traveling on the same itinerary in the same car.

Immediately following our AP Calculus tests on Wednesday morning, David and I left for Chicago with Jana and drove for six hours to David's Aunt and Uncle's house in Deerfield, IL (about 20-30 minutes outside of downtown Chicago). We arrived after dark, talked logistics with our incredibly wonderful and generous hosts, had some nice conversations, then proceeded to go to bed after a nice dinner of chicago-style pizza.

On Thursday morning, we woke up around 8:00am Chicago time, had breakfast with David's aunt and uncle, and then left to meet up with Sara, who flew into Chicago early in the morning, since she had a chorus concert the night before. We met Sara at a Caribou downtown, then David and I took about twenty minutes to verify our travel route for the day. Jana and Sara had interviews throughout the day in the same area, so David and I used the car while the two girls remained downtown for their appointments. For those of you familiar with the Chicago area, David and I went to Riverdale, Park Forest, and western Will County. All three of these areas have been notably effected by the foreclosure crisis, so we got plenty of film footage and pictures of foreclosed, vacant, boarded up, and for sale houses. Since we are working with Habitat, David and I went to several houses that the Chicago chapter of Habitat for Humanity has built or rebuilt. We took multiple photos of these houses. Also, Will County had the highest foreclosure rate in all of the Chicago area, so it was a great opportunity for us to get content for our documentary. You guys might find this interesting - Will County looks very much like areas near Hawken: South Russel, Moreland Hills, Solon, etc. with developments of large houses, and it had the highest foreclosure rate. When David and I were driving through, we stopped in some of the developments, and were (at least I was) genuinely surprised to see how many of these houses were for sale per development. Sometimes two or three out of every five of these large houses were vacant or for sale as a result of the housing crisis, which is interesting because I only thought of the economic downturn as having effected the urban areas.

Today we are continuing to do the same thing, except yesterday we traveled farther than we expected (it took us about an hour and a half to get from Will County to Clark Street where Sara and Jana were) so we are staying closer to the city and getting more urban footage. We only will be at the hosts' houses in the morning and at night, so we have to stop into internet cafes to type our posts during the day, which is why this is coming at 1:48, in the middle of our project.

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo
Sam and David