On Jul 2, 7:17*am, Mike Hussein Hunt wrote:
Well, it would appear that Barack Hussein Obama stint at a "community
ogranizer", State Senator and his one year in US Senate was pretty
much a failure. *Grove Park is in B. H. Obama's district.

Here's the key part:

"Jamie Kalven, a longtime Chicago housing activist, put it this way:
"I hope there is not much predictive value in his history and in his
involvement with that community."

It keeps looking worse for Obamessiah - every time you turn around
another shoe about his "skill" as a "community organizer" and State
Senator appear.

````````````
07.02.08

Boston Globe

Grim proving ground for Obama's housing policy

The candidate endorsed subsidies for private entrepreneurs to build
low-income units. But, while he garnered support from developers, many
projects in his former district have fallen into disrepair.

Presidential hopeful, residents' complaints

(Boston Globe) At a dilapidated Chicago housing project, some see
problems with Obama's favored housing policy.

Produced by Scott LaPierre / Globe staff
Globe Staff / June 27, 2008

CHICAGO - The squat brick buildings of Grove Parc Plaza, in a dense
neighborhood that Barack Obama represented for eight years as a state
senator, hold 504 apartments subsidized by the federal government for
people who can't afford to live anywhere else.

But it's not safe to live here.

About 99 of the units are vacant, many rendered uninhabitable by
unfixed problems, such as collapsed roofs and fire damage. Mice
scamper through the halls. Battered mailboxes hang open. Sewage backs
up into kitchen sinks. In 2006, federal inspectors graded the
condition of the complex an 11 on a 100-point scale - a score so bad
the buildings now face demolition.

Grove Parc has become a symbol for some in Chicago of the broader
failures of giving public subsidies to private companies to build and
manage affordable housing - an approach strongly backed by Obama as
the best replacement for public housing.

As a state senator, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee
coauthored an Illinois law creating a new pool of tax credits for
developers. As a US senator, he pressed for increased federal
subsidies. And as a presidential candidate, he has campaigned on a
promise to create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund that could give
developers an estimated $500 million a year.

But a Globe review found that thousands of apartments across Chicago
that had been built with local, state, and federal subsidies -
including several hundred in Obama's former district - deteriorated so
completely that they were no longer habitable.

Grove Parc and several other prominent failures were developed and
managed by Obama's close friends and political supporters. Those
people profited from the subsidies even as many of Obama's
constituents suffered. Tenants lost their homes; surrounding
neighborhoods were blighted.

Some of the residents of Grove Parc say they are angry that Obama did
not notice their plight. The development straddles the boundary of
Obama's state Senate district. Many of the tenants have been his
constituents for more than a decade.

"No one should have to live like this, and no one did anything about
it," said Cynthia Ashley, who has lived at Grove Parc since 1994.

Obama's campaign, in a written response to Globe questions, affirmed
the candidate's support of public-private partnerships as an
alternative to public housing, saying that Obama has "consistently
fought to make livable, affordable housing in mixed-income
neighborhoods available to all."

The campaign did not respond to questions about whether Obama was
aware of the problems with buildings in his district during his time
as a state senator, nor did it comment on the roles played by people
connected to the senator.

Among those tied to Obama politically, personally, or professionally
a

Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Obama's presidential campaign and
a member of his finance committee. Jarrett is the chief executive of
Habitat Co., which managed Grove Parc Plaza from 2001 until this
winter and co-managed an even larger subsidized complex in Chicago
that was seized by the federal government in 2006, after city
inspectors found widespread problems.

Allison Davis, a major fund-raiser for Obama's US Senate campaign and
a former lead partner at Obama's former law firm. Davis, a developer,
was involved in the creation of Grove Parc and has used government
subsidies to rehabilitate more than 1,500 units in Chicago, including
a North Side building cited by city inspectors last year after chronic
plumbing failures resulted in raw sewage spilling into several
apartments.

Antoin "Tony" Rezko, perhaps the most important fund-raiser for
Obama's early political campaigns and a friend who helped the Obamas
buy a home in 2005. Rezko's company used subsidies to rehabilitate
more than 1,000 apartments, mostly in and around Obama's district,
then refused to manage the units, leaving the buildings to decay to
the point where many no longer were habitable.

Campaign finance records show that six prominent developers -
including Jarrett, Davis, and Rezko - collectively contributed more
than $175,000 to Obama's campaigns over the last decade and raised
hundreds of thousands more from other donors. Rezko alone raised at
least $200,000, by Obama's own accounting.

One of those contributors, Cecil Butler, controlled Lawndale
Restoration, the largest subsidized complex in Chicago, which was
seized by the government in 2006 after city inspectors found more than
1,800 code violations.

Butler and Davis did not respond to messages. Rezko is in prison; his
lawyer did not respond to inquiries.

Jarrett, a powerful figure in the Chicago development community,
agreed to be interviewed but declined to answer questions about Grove
Parc, citing what she called a continuing duty to Habitat's former
business partners. She did, however, defend Obama's position that
public-private partnerships are superior to public housing.

"Government is just not as good at owning and managing as the private
sector because the incentives are not there," said Jarrett, whose
company manages more than 23,000 apartments. "I would argue that
someone living in a poor neighborhood that isn't 100 percent public
housing is by definition better off."

In the middle of the 20th century, Chicago built some of the nation's
largest public housing developments, culminating in Robert Taylor
Homes: 4,415 apartments in 28 high-rise buildings stretching for 2
miles along an interstate highway.

By the late 1980s, however, Robert Taylor Homes and the rest of the
Chicago developments had become American bywords for urban misery. The
roughly 30 developments operated for poor families by the Chicago
Housing Authority were plagued by crime and mired in poverty.

In Stateway Gardens, a large complex just north of Robert Taylor, a
study of 1990 census data found the per-capita annual income was
$1,650. And the projects were falling apart after decades of epic,
sometimes criminal, mismanagement.

Similar problems plagued public housing in other cities, leading the
federal government to greatly increase funding to address the
problems. Many cities, including Boston, mostly used that money to
rehabilitate their projects, maintaining public control.

Chicago chose a more dramatic approach. Under Mayor Richard M. Daley,
who was elected in 1989, the city launched a massive plan to let
private companies tear down the projects and build mixed-income
communities on the same land.

The city also hired private companies to manage the remaining public
housing. And it subsidized private companies to create and manage new
affordable housing, some of which was used to accommodate tenants
displaced from public housing.

Chicago's plans drew critics from the start. They asked why the
government should pay developers to perform a basic public service -
one successfully performed by governments in other cities. And they
noted that privately managed projects had a history of deteriorating
because guaranteed government rent subsidies left companies with
little incentive to spend money on maintenance.

Most of all, they alleged that Chicago was interested primarily in
redeveloping projects close to the Loop, the downtown area that was
seeing a surge of private development activity, shunting poor families
to neighborhoods farther from the city center. Only about one in three
residents was able to return to the redeveloped projects.

"They are rapidly displacing poor people, and these companies are
profiting from this displacement," said Matt Ginsberg-Jaeckle of
Southside Together Organizing for Power, a community group that seeks
to help tenants stay in the same neighborhoods.

"The same exact people who ran these places into the ground," the
private companies paid to build and manage the city's affordable
housing, "now are profiting by redeveloping them."

Barack Obama was among the many Chicago residents who shared Daley's
conviction that private companies would make better landlords than the
Chicago Housing Authority.

He had seen the failure of the public projects in the mid-1980s as a
community organizer at Altgeld Gardens, a large public housing complex
on the far South Side.

He once told the Chicago Tribune that he had briefly considered
becoming a developer of affordable housing. But after graduating from
Harvard Law School in 1991, he turned down a job with Tony Rezko's
development company, Rezmar, choosing instead to work at the civil
rights law firm Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, then led by Allison
Davis.

The firm represented a number of nonprofit companies that were
partnering with private developers to build affordable housing with
government subsidies.

Obama sometimes worked on their cases. In at least one instance, he
represented the nonprofit company that owned Grove Parc, Woodlawn
Preservation and Investment Corp., when it was sued by the city for
failing to adequately heat one of its apartment ...

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Hey Mike... take your Harry obcession elsewhere, we are having enough
trouble with him as it is, without you and he, having a mindless cut
and paste party... Thanks.. I think I know who you are, and you
should already know how much trouble we have had trying to control
this idiot for the last few months/years.. "Everyone" here is and has
always treated you with respect and considered you a friend, hopefully
you can respect our fight here and decide which side of it you want to
be on....