Barack Obama's Polite Fiction

A close friend and senior adviser to Barack Obama (on his finance committee--you could say she's the new Rezko for Barack), Valerie Jarrett takes some heat for the slow pace of public housing redevelopment in Chicago in Sunday's Tribune:

"We looked for a balance, with the goal being a healthy community, and we were extremely cognizant and mindful of not wanting to recreate horizontally what we had torn down vertically," said Jarrett, a former top official in Mayor Richard Daley's administration.

Under the Plan for Transformation, the city has lost more than 13,000 housing units for the poor at a time when low-income families face one of the worse housing crises in recent history. After years of neglect and abandonment, many residents doubt that Jarrett and CHA officials have their interests at heart.

"They was going to do what they was going to do," said Carmen Hart, who moved to Stateway Gardens in 1960 and has been waiting three years to go back.

Habitat has earned $6.8 million in fees and $10.8 million in administrative expenses since the plan started in 2000, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The company also earns millions as a property manager for the CHA.

This follows on the Boston Globe article last week which exposed chronic mismanagement and corruption in Barack's old legislative district, which he of course says he knew nothing about. Public housing is a failed concept, and public-private partnerships lead to corruption among politically connected cronies, with the private firms getting fees up front and often abandoning the buildings soon after. (BPI is mentioned as holier than thou--puh-leez. Related housing posts here, here and here:

Rezmar made its money on upfront development fees. And Rezmar got paid first -- $6.9 million in all from its deals.

The development fees ultimately came from taxpayers. For years, city and state officials maintained the polite fiction that these deals were working, while raking in Rezko's campaign contributions for themselves.

A related story in the Trib shows how this all works, with Obama's old boss Allison Davis writ large in the redevelopment of Stateway Gardens:

The development team, including Allison Davis, leased that land from the CHA for 99 years in exchange for a one-time payment of about $200,000. It then built the storefronts that were later sold to a firm controlled by Davis and Vanecko, the mayor's nephew, which used money from city employee pension funds to purchase the space for $4.2 million.

The pension funds, in turn, are paying Davis and Vanecko fees to manage their investment in the property.

Besides controlling the retail space that holds the Starbucks, Davis is also an official of the property management firm at Stateway, state records show. The firm, Urban Property Advisors, or UPA, is run by Davis' son Cullen.

Shortly after the firm was created in 2001, Allison Davis, UPA and other companies connected to Davis began donating to the Democratic organization in the 17th Ward. That is the political base of Terry Peterson, then the CHA's chief executive.

By the time Peterson left the CHA five years later, Davis and the companies had donated more than $22,000. Peterson told the Tribune those contributions did not influence CHA decisions.

It's business as usual. And these are all the people who gave Barack Obama his start in politics in Chicago. They think they can run the country...yeah, into the ground. Obama is not the new politics, he's the old politics with a polite fiction for a face. Heavy on the fiction.

UPDATE: Dennis Byrne on Obama's phony spin of his donors.