Wednesday, July 31, 2019 4:41:14 PM
Obama's Slum Lord Connection
July 1, 2008
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.
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.
Jarrett takes Grove Parc right into the toilet
Woodlawn Preservation hired a new property manager, Habitat Co. At the time, the company was headed by its founder, Daniel Levin, also a major contributor to Obama’s campaigns. Valerie Jarrett was executive vice president.
Residents say the complex deteriorated under Moorehead’s management and continued to decline after Habitat took over. A maintenance worker at the complex says money often wasn’t even available for steel wool to plug rat holes. But as late as 2003, a routine federal inspection still gave conditions at Grove Parc a score of 82 on a 100-point scale.
When inspectors returned in 2005, they found conditions were significantly worse. Inspectors gave the complex a score of 56 and warned that improvements were necessary.
They returned the following year and found things had reached a new low. Grove Parc got a score of 11 and a final warning.
Three months later, inspectors found there had been insufficient improvements and moved to seize the complex from Woodlawn Preservation.
Those living there expected Obama to give a damn but learned a lesson.
And look at what the guy who helped Obama get that fabulous real estate deal got for himself:
One of the largest recipients of the subsidies was Rezmar Corp., founded in 1989 by Tony Rezko, who ran a company that sold snacks at city beaches, and Daniel Mahru, who ran a company that sold ice to Rezko.
Neither man had development experience.
Over the next nine years, Rezmar used more than $87 million in government grants, loans, and tax credits to renovate about 1,000 apartments in 30 Chicago buildings. Companies run by the partners also managed many of the buildings, collecting government rent subsidies.
Under Rezko tenants suffered
People who lived in some of the Rezmar buildings say trash was not picked up and maintenance problems were ignored. Roofs leaked, windows whistled, insects moved in.
“In the winter I can feel the cold air coming through the walls and the sockets,” said Anthony Frizzell, 57, who has lived for almost two decades in a Rezmar building on South Greenwood Avenue. “They didn’t insulate it or nothing.”
Sharee Jones, who lives in another former Rezko building one block away, said her apartment was rat-infested for years.
“You could hear them under the floor and in the walls, and they didn’t do nothing about it,” Jones said.
Then Rezko simply walked away
Shortly thereafter, Rezmar switched from subsidized housing to high-end development, fueled by the money it had made in subsidized work. Rezko’s companies also stopped managing the subsidized complexes.
Obama claimed not to know what was going on with these properties but he sure knew where Rezko was
All the while, Tony Rezko was forging a close friendship with Barack Obama. When Obama opened his campaign for state Senate in 1995, Rezko’s companies gave Obama $2,000 on the first day of fund-raising. Save for a $500 contribution from another lawyer, Obama didn’t raise another penny for six weeks. Rezko had essentially seeded the start of Obama’s political career.
As Obama ascended, Rezko became one of his largest fund-raisers. And in 2005, Rezko and his wife helped the Obamas purchase the house where they now live.
Eleven of Rezmar’s buildings were located in the district represented by Obama, containing 258 apartments. The building without heat in January 1997, the month Obama entered the state Senate, was in his district. So was Jones’s building with rats in the walls and Frizzell’s building that lacked insulation. And a redistricting after the 2000 Census added another 350 Rezmar apartments to the area represented by Obama.
But Obama has contended that he knew nothing about any problems in Rezmar’s buildings.
Did Obama learn anything from this?
Even as Lawndale Restoration and Rezmar’s buildings were foreclosed upon, and Grove Parc and other subsidized developments fell deeper into disrepair, Obama has remained a steadfast supporter of subsidizing private development.
Sure, because that’s where the campaign money was coming from.
And here’s the metaphor for this election:
“I’m not against Barack Obama,” said Willie J.R. Fleming, an organizer with the Coalition to Protect Public Housing and a former public housing resident. “What I am against is some of the people around him.”
Obama met these people, he knows these people and unless he’s stupid he knows what they’re doing.
And he’s not stupid, but those who support Obama are.
And they’ll still like him despite his disastrous choices. It’s no different from today. Obama has made disastrous choices as President, all them for his own political and financial benefit and none for the benefit of the country or for those who actually pay the bills.
Just as he did with Grove Parc. We are all Grove Parc tenants now.
http://www.floppingaces.net/2012/06/29/we-are-all-grove-parc-tenants-now-reader-post/
From NPR News, this is News & Notes.
I'm Farai Chideya. The quality and safety of low-income housing can help make or break the life of a city. As an Illinois State Senator, Barack Obama supported subsidies for private companies to build and manage low-income housing. But instead of improving, many of the projects in his Chicago district fell into disrepair. A recent Boston Globe article dug into Obama's connections with the property owners. To tell us more, we've got the article's author, Binyamin Appelbaum, plus Illinois State Representative Julie Hamos. Welcome to both of you.
Representative JULIE HAMOS (Democrat, Illinois): Thank you.
Mr. BINYAMIN APPELBAUM (Staff Writer, Boston Globe): Thank you.
CHIDEYA: So, Binyamin, let me start with you. Your article focuses on Grove Parc Plaza. It's is a development located in the district that Obama represented for eight years when he was a state senator. So tell us why you zeroed in on this development.
Mr. APPELBAUM: We were interested in Obama's years as a state senator because it's sort of his largest body of work as a politician, and so we thought it would be instructive to look at how he did. And the issue of affordable housing was a signature issue for him. It was one of his major focuses, both before becoming an elected official and during his time as an elected official.
And what we found is that the policies he supported, in many cases, produced developments that have failed.
And furthermore, many of the major beneficiaries of those policies have been his friends and supporters, and many of the people who have suffered were his constituents, people who lived in his state senate district.
Grove Parc is one of the outstanding examples of this problem. It sits on the border of Obama's district. It is 504 apartments of subsidized housing, fully renovated in the early 1990s, that have fallen into such disrepair that the plan now is to demolish them and start all over again. It was built by a nonprofit led by a number of Obama's supporters. It was managed during the period of its greatest decline by a company called The Habitat Company, which is led by Valerie Jarrett, who is the senior advisor to Obama's presidential campaign, and it is, as I said, in his district, so it struck us as sort of emblematic of the issue that we wanted to write about.
CHIDEYA: You did reach out to Senator Obama. What did he tell you about his perception of the issues that you raised?
Mr. APPELBAUM: The Obama campaign affirmed Senator Obama's support for the policy of subsidizing private developers and managers of affordable housing. It did not respond to questions about whether the senator was aware of the problems in his district.
CHIDEYA: Now, Julie, let me go to you. From your perspective, as someone who is a state representative, what did you think of the article? And what do you think of the entire issue of privatizing public housing, whether or not it's worked, and whether or not there is a hint of perhaps too much leeway being given to developers linked to the senator?
Representative HAMOS: Well, first of all, I thought the article was unfair in the way that it focused on some projects, and in this particular case, Grove Parc is a great example. Grove Parc was built in 1970 under a very - really under a failed policy of the federal government. It was called the Project-Based Section 8, it was built as a Project-Based Section 8 program, and these projects typically did not have enough money put into them by the federal government to become a maintenance that we really need long term to make sure that they succeed.
This is exactly the kind of programs that we are not really building anymore, and Grove Parc is an example of that. Those have been replaced now by more innovative and successful policies, and those policies are, in fact, the private-public partnership that we should be really applauding. They are the partnerships using tax credits that have now created thousands of units of much smaller developments, a lot of mixed-income developments, and really revitalizing neighborhoods.
So I fully support, as a public policy maker, what we are trying to do now, which is to bring in private developers using market-based incentives to get them to build affordable housing. This is still a very big issue in most communities. It certainly is here in Illinois, but it is the model that is working. Grove Parc is an old model that didn't work, and we replaced it.
CHIDEYA: But it sounds, in a way, as if there was an old model which you and many others think didn't work, and then there was a kind of middle model, which was this hybrid, you know, older building, new private redevelopment, private-public partnerships. So are you saying that that model also doesn't work?
Representative HAMOS: No, I would say that what we are using, the model that we are still continuing to use now, which we started here with Harold Washington era, of really creating tax credits and then also doing that at state level is, in fact, the only model that seems to be creating affordable housing units. And now, in more mixed-income communities, it is what we are doing.
We are not going to go back to an era where we are going to expect the federal government and the state government to be the developers and managers and operators. We have to depend on private developers to really be our partners. And we have to subsidize them and assist them and support them to make these projects work long term.
CHIDEYA: Binyamin, let me bring this back into a larger framework, which is Democratic politics. The issue made headlines during the Democratic primary. Let's listen to Senator Clinton in South Carolina.
Senator HILLARY CLINTON (Democrat, New York): I was fighting against those ideas when you were practicing law and representing your contributor, Rezko, in his slum landlord business in inner-city Chicago.
CHIDEYA: That's Senator Clinton attacking Senator Barack Obama for his connection to Antonin Rezko, and Rezko was a major Obama fundraiser. Give us a little bit more of a context, Binyamin, on what exactly the connection is between Rezko and Obama.
Mr. APPELBAUM: Rezko is a really interesting example. Rezko is one of Obama's primary fundraisers, particularly for his earlier political campaigns. He was a friend of the senator. He was involved in Obama's purchase of a home in 2005. But what's really interesting about Tony Rezko is that he was the developer on the model that the representative was just describing, which is that he built mixed-income housing and mixed-income communities scattered across Chicago, small number of developments. The model that was supposed to replace Grove Parc, and that also failed spectacularly.
And it failed for the same reason, which is that the private managers and the private developers were inadequately supervised by the government. They all say that they didn't get enough money to manage these projects. Perhaps that's true, although some of them succeed and some of them fail. The ones that succeed say that they do have enough money. The ones that fail say they don't have enough money. But whether or not that's the issue, the fact of the matter is that this new, new model, this third generation of subsidized development, so far, does not have a noticeably better track record than the generation that included Grove Parc, which incidentally was most recently redone after the administration of Harold Washington.
And one broader note here, which is that, you know, as much as this is a story about what happened in Chicago, it is also a story about what did not happen. And specifically, we're not in any way finding that, you know, Barack Obama directed the money to these developers or that he was directly responsible for the suffering of his constituents. What's interesting here is that Obama did not stand up and point his finger at the problems, and he did not participate, as best we can tell, in an effort to correct the problems. That, to me, is as much the issue as what went wrong.
CHIDEYA: Representative Hamos.
Representative HAMOS: Well...
CHIDEYA: Yeah, please comment. Do you think that Senator Obama may have turned a blind eye to things that were going on on the ground?
Representative HAMOS: You know, I think there's a couple of different parts of Barack's career during that period. He was a lawyer, and he - as I understand it, that Hillary Clinton quote refers to a situation where he went into court, like once, to file an appearance in a long-standing case and was not actively involved and even representing that particular client. But he was a lawyer, and lawyers do represent clients. So although he wasn't as actively involved in that, as Hillary Clinton would have suggested, that's him as a lawyer.
As a policy maker, I can tell you, I am one of the champions of affordable housing here in Illinois. I worked very closely with Barack when he was the state senator, who I often went to, to spearhead these important initiatives in the Senate. And we do look to initiatives that will incentivize(ph) developers to get involved in building more affordable housing. We understand that these affordable housing developments don't have a lot of cash going through them. They're for very low-income people. And it's a challenge to manage these well, and it's a challenge to get enough money to have good on-site management operations.
So we understand this, that some developments do better than other developments. And yet, we don't stand up and accuse or blame the people that we are trying to bring into the process. It is one of the challenges of building housing for very low-income people. Continues until today. Not unique to Barack, it's not unique to anybody. It is the work that I'm in engaged in all the time, and we understand that some of these are going to be better developments than others.
CHIDEYA: A little bit later in the show we actually are going to talk to a resident who can give us another perspective on Grove Parc. But I do want to mention that we contacted the Obama campaign for comment and they sent us a statement that read, in part: "Throughout his career in public service, Barack Obama has advocated for the development of mixed-income housing and public-private partnerships to create affordable housing as an alternative to public subsidized concentrated low-income housing."
Binyamin, what is the verdict on a larger level on whether or not purely public-based housing, low-income housing, is better or worse than these public-private partnerships?
Mr. APPELBAUM: I don't know that we know the answer to that finally. There have been very different experiences in different cities. I don't think there is any question that in Chicago, public housing managed by public entities was a catastrophic failure. Other cities have a much better success with it. And so, you know, some of it seems to have to do with the political structure, with the actual management of it.
It can work. It doesn't always. It's the same thing with these privately managed and publicly subsidized complexes. There doesn't seem to be a magic formula, nor does there seem to be an absolute Achilles heel. The funding issue is a bit of a red herring. Many of these complexes, the government is paying two times the market rent in those areas to subsidize the units in the affordable complex.
There is plenty of money, at least according to the people who manage some of these complexes successfully, if you manage it right. There's never enough if you don't manage it right. There doesn't seem to be either a magic bullet or an absolute clear flaw.
CHIDEYA: All right, Representative Hamos, very quickly, what's the most important thing to keep in mind to make sure that this housing is safe and secure?
Representative HAMOS: Well, I think that Mr. Appelbaum pointed to the fact that sometimes it works better than other times, but I think if we're focusing this on Barack Obama's accomplishments in the Illinois Senate, it's very telling that he passed significant legislation dealing with affordable housing. It did get the state to make more investments than we ever had before through the state donation tax - got a 26 million dollars a year, but it did involve these public-private partnerships.
It is a model that I believe in until today, and he was one of the early leaders and somebody that we applauded at the time with the kind of legislation that was brought to us by housing advocates and public officials as a way to increase availability of affordable housing and revitalize communities.
CHIDEYA: OK, well, Representative and Mr. Appelbaum, thanks so much.
Representative HAMOS: Thank you.
Mr. APPELBAUM: Thank you.
https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=92087053
July 1, 2008
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.
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.
Jarrett takes Grove Parc right into the toilet
Woodlawn Preservation hired a new property manager, Habitat Co. At the time, the company was headed by its founder, Daniel Levin, also a major contributor to Obama’s campaigns. Valerie Jarrett was executive vice president.
Residents say the complex deteriorated under Moorehead’s management and continued to decline after Habitat took over. A maintenance worker at the complex says money often wasn’t even available for steel wool to plug rat holes. But as late as 2003, a routine federal inspection still gave conditions at Grove Parc a score of 82 on a 100-point scale.
When inspectors returned in 2005, they found conditions were significantly worse. Inspectors gave the complex a score of 56 and warned that improvements were necessary.
They returned the following year and found things had reached a new low. Grove Parc got a score of 11 and a final warning.
Three months later, inspectors found there had been insufficient improvements and moved to seize the complex from Woodlawn Preservation.
Those living there expected Obama to give a damn but learned a lesson.
And look at what the guy who helped Obama get that fabulous real estate deal got for himself:
One of the largest recipients of the subsidies was Rezmar Corp., founded in 1989 by Tony Rezko, who ran a company that sold snacks at city beaches, and Daniel Mahru, who ran a company that sold ice to Rezko.
Neither man had development experience.
Over the next nine years, Rezmar used more than $87 million in government grants, loans, and tax credits to renovate about 1,000 apartments in 30 Chicago buildings. Companies run by the partners also managed many of the buildings, collecting government rent subsidies.
Under Rezko tenants suffered
People who lived in some of the Rezmar buildings say trash was not picked up and maintenance problems were ignored. Roofs leaked, windows whistled, insects moved in.
“In the winter I can feel the cold air coming through the walls and the sockets,” said Anthony Frizzell, 57, who has lived for almost two decades in a Rezmar building on South Greenwood Avenue. “They didn’t insulate it or nothing.”
Sharee Jones, who lives in another former Rezko building one block away, said her apartment was rat-infested for years.
“You could hear them under the floor and in the walls, and they didn’t do nothing about it,” Jones said.
Then Rezko simply walked away
Shortly thereafter, Rezmar switched from subsidized housing to high-end development, fueled by the money it had made in subsidized work. Rezko’s companies also stopped managing the subsidized complexes.
Obama claimed not to know what was going on with these properties but he sure knew where Rezko was
All the while, Tony Rezko was forging a close friendship with Barack Obama. When Obama opened his campaign for state Senate in 1995, Rezko’s companies gave Obama $2,000 on the first day of fund-raising. Save for a $500 contribution from another lawyer, Obama didn’t raise another penny for six weeks. Rezko had essentially seeded the start of Obama’s political career.
As Obama ascended, Rezko became one of his largest fund-raisers. And in 2005, Rezko and his wife helped the Obamas purchase the house where they now live.
Eleven of Rezmar’s buildings were located in the district represented by Obama, containing 258 apartments. The building without heat in January 1997, the month Obama entered the state Senate, was in his district. So was Jones’s building with rats in the walls and Frizzell’s building that lacked insulation. And a redistricting after the 2000 Census added another 350 Rezmar apartments to the area represented by Obama.
But Obama has contended that he knew nothing about any problems in Rezmar’s buildings.
Did Obama learn anything from this?
Even as Lawndale Restoration and Rezmar’s buildings were foreclosed upon, and Grove Parc and other subsidized developments fell deeper into disrepair, Obama has remained a steadfast supporter of subsidizing private development.
Sure, because that’s where the campaign money was coming from.
And here’s the metaphor for this election:
“I’m not against Barack Obama,” said Willie J.R. Fleming, an organizer with the Coalition to Protect Public Housing and a former public housing resident. “What I am against is some of the people around him.”
Obama met these people, he knows these people and unless he’s stupid he knows what they’re doing.
And he’s not stupid, but those who support Obama are.
And they’ll still like him despite his disastrous choices. It’s no different from today. Obama has made disastrous choices as President, all them for his own political and financial benefit and none for the benefit of the country or for those who actually pay the bills.
Just as he did with Grove Parc. We are all Grove Parc tenants now.
http://www.floppingaces.net/2012/06/29/we-are-all-grove-parc-tenants-now-reader-post/
From NPR News, this is News & Notes.
I'm Farai Chideya. The quality and safety of low-income housing can help make or break the life of a city. As an Illinois State Senator, Barack Obama supported subsidies for private companies to build and manage low-income housing. But instead of improving, many of the projects in his Chicago district fell into disrepair. A recent Boston Globe article dug into Obama's connections with the property owners. To tell us more, we've got the article's author, Binyamin Appelbaum, plus Illinois State Representative Julie Hamos. Welcome to both of you.
Representative JULIE HAMOS (Democrat, Illinois): Thank you.
Mr. BINYAMIN APPELBAUM (Staff Writer, Boston Globe): Thank you.
CHIDEYA: So, Binyamin, let me start with you. Your article focuses on Grove Parc Plaza. It's is a development located in the district that Obama represented for eight years when he was a state senator. So tell us why you zeroed in on this development.
Mr. APPELBAUM: We were interested in Obama's years as a state senator because it's sort of his largest body of work as a politician, and so we thought it would be instructive to look at how he did. And the issue of affordable housing was a signature issue for him. It was one of his major focuses, both before becoming an elected official and during his time as an elected official.
And what we found is that the policies he supported, in many cases, produced developments that have failed.
And furthermore, many of the major beneficiaries of those policies have been his friends and supporters, and many of the people who have suffered were his constituents, people who lived in his state senate district.
Grove Parc is one of the outstanding examples of this problem. It sits on the border of Obama's district. It is 504 apartments of subsidized housing, fully renovated in the early 1990s, that have fallen into such disrepair that the plan now is to demolish them and start all over again. It was built by a nonprofit led by a number of Obama's supporters. It was managed during the period of its greatest decline by a company called The Habitat Company, which is led by Valerie Jarrett, who is the senior advisor to Obama's presidential campaign, and it is, as I said, in his district, so it struck us as sort of emblematic of the issue that we wanted to write about.
CHIDEYA: You did reach out to Senator Obama. What did he tell you about his perception of the issues that you raised?
Mr. APPELBAUM: The Obama campaign affirmed Senator Obama's support for the policy of subsidizing private developers and managers of affordable housing. It did not respond to questions about whether the senator was aware of the problems in his district.
CHIDEYA: Now, Julie, let me go to you. From your perspective, as someone who is a state representative, what did you think of the article? And what do you think of the entire issue of privatizing public housing, whether or not it's worked, and whether or not there is a hint of perhaps too much leeway being given to developers linked to the senator?
Representative HAMOS: Well, first of all, I thought the article was unfair in the way that it focused on some projects, and in this particular case, Grove Parc is a great example. Grove Parc was built in 1970 under a very - really under a failed policy of the federal government. It was called the Project-Based Section 8, it was built as a Project-Based Section 8 program, and these projects typically did not have enough money put into them by the federal government to become a maintenance that we really need long term to make sure that they succeed.
This is exactly the kind of programs that we are not really building anymore, and Grove Parc is an example of that. Those have been replaced now by more innovative and successful policies, and those policies are, in fact, the private-public partnership that we should be really applauding. They are the partnerships using tax credits that have now created thousands of units of much smaller developments, a lot of mixed-income developments, and really revitalizing neighborhoods.
So I fully support, as a public policy maker, what we are trying to do now, which is to bring in private developers using market-based incentives to get them to build affordable housing. This is still a very big issue in most communities. It certainly is here in Illinois, but it is the model that is working. Grove Parc is an old model that didn't work, and we replaced it.
CHIDEYA: But it sounds, in a way, as if there was an old model which you and many others think didn't work, and then there was a kind of middle model, which was this hybrid, you know, older building, new private redevelopment, private-public partnerships. So are you saying that that model also doesn't work?
Representative HAMOS: No, I would say that what we are using, the model that we are still continuing to use now, which we started here with Harold Washington era, of really creating tax credits and then also doing that at state level is, in fact, the only model that seems to be creating affordable housing units. And now, in more mixed-income communities, it is what we are doing.
We are not going to go back to an era where we are going to expect the federal government and the state government to be the developers and managers and operators. We have to depend on private developers to really be our partners. And we have to subsidize them and assist them and support them to make these projects work long term.
CHIDEYA: Binyamin, let me bring this back into a larger framework, which is Democratic politics. The issue made headlines during the Democratic primary. Let's listen to Senator Clinton in South Carolina.
Senator HILLARY CLINTON (Democrat, New York): I was fighting against those ideas when you were practicing law and representing your contributor, Rezko, in his slum landlord business in inner-city Chicago.
CHIDEYA: That's Senator Clinton attacking Senator Barack Obama for his connection to Antonin Rezko, and Rezko was a major Obama fundraiser. Give us a little bit more of a context, Binyamin, on what exactly the connection is between Rezko and Obama.
Mr. APPELBAUM: Rezko is a really interesting example. Rezko is one of Obama's primary fundraisers, particularly for his earlier political campaigns. He was a friend of the senator. He was involved in Obama's purchase of a home in 2005. But what's really interesting about Tony Rezko is that he was the developer on the model that the representative was just describing, which is that he built mixed-income housing and mixed-income communities scattered across Chicago, small number of developments. The model that was supposed to replace Grove Parc, and that also failed spectacularly.
And it failed for the same reason, which is that the private managers and the private developers were inadequately supervised by the government. They all say that they didn't get enough money to manage these projects. Perhaps that's true, although some of them succeed and some of them fail. The ones that succeed say that they do have enough money. The ones that fail say they don't have enough money. But whether or not that's the issue, the fact of the matter is that this new, new model, this third generation of subsidized development, so far, does not have a noticeably better track record than the generation that included Grove Parc, which incidentally was most recently redone after the administration of Harold Washington.
And one broader note here, which is that, you know, as much as this is a story about what happened in Chicago, it is also a story about what did not happen. And specifically, we're not in any way finding that, you know, Barack Obama directed the money to these developers or that he was directly responsible for the suffering of his constituents. What's interesting here is that Obama did not stand up and point his finger at the problems, and he did not participate, as best we can tell, in an effort to correct the problems. That, to me, is as much the issue as what went wrong.
CHIDEYA: Representative Hamos.
Representative HAMOS: Well...
CHIDEYA: Yeah, please comment. Do you think that Senator Obama may have turned a blind eye to things that were going on on the ground?
Representative HAMOS: You know, I think there's a couple of different parts of Barack's career during that period. He was a lawyer, and he - as I understand it, that Hillary Clinton quote refers to a situation where he went into court, like once, to file an appearance in a long-standing case and was not actively involved and even representing that particular client. But he was a lawyer, and lawyers do represent clients. So although he wasn't as actively involved in that, as Hillary Clinton would have suggested, that's him as a lawyer.
As a policy maker, I can tell you, I am one of the champions of affordable housing here in Illinois. I worked very closely with Barack when he was the state senator, who I often went to, to spearhead these important initiatives in the Senate. And we do look to initiatives that will incentivize(ph) developers to get involved in building more affordable housing. We understand that these affordable housing developments don't have a lot of cash going through them. They're for very low-income people. And it's a challenge to manage these well, and it's a challenge to get enough money to have good on-site management operations.
So we understand this, that some developments do better than other developments. And yet, we don't stand up and accuse or blame the people that we are trying to bring into the process. It is one of the challenges of building housing for very low-income people. Continues until today. Not unique to Barack, it's not unique to anybody. It is the work that I'm in engaged in all the time, and we understand that some of these are going to be better developments than others.
CHIDEYA: A little bit later in the show we actually are going to talk to a resident who can give us another perspective on Grove Parc. But I do want to mention that we contacted the Obama campaign for comment and they sent us a statement that read, in part: "Throughout his career in public service, Barack Obama has advocated for the development of mixed-income housing and public-private partnerships to create affordable housing as an alternative to public subsidized concentrated low-income housing."
Binyamin, what is the verdict on a larger level on whether or not purely public-based housing, low-income housing, is better or worse than these public-private partnerships?
Mr. APPELBAUM: I don't know that we know the answer to that finally. There have been very different experiences in different cities. I don't think there is any question that in Chicago, public housing managed by public entities was a catastrophic failure. Other cities have a much better success with it. And so, you know, some of it seems to have to do with the political structure, with the actual management of it.
It can work. It doesn't always. It's the same thing with these privately managed and publicly subsidized complexes. There doesn't seem to be a magic formula, nor does there seem to be an absolute Achilles heel. The funding issue is a bit of a red herring. Many of these complexes, the government is paying two times the market rent in those areas to subsidize the units in the affordable complex.
There is plenty of money, at least according to the people who manage some of these complexes successfully, if you manage it right. There's never enough if you don't manage it right. There doesn't seem to be either a magic bullet or an absolute clear flaw.
CHIDEYA: All right, Representative Hamos, very quickly, what's the most important thing to keep in mind to make sure that this housing is safe and secure?
Representative HAMOS: Well, I think that Mr. Appelbaum pointed to the fact that sometimes it works better than other times, but I think if we're focusing this on Barack Obama's accomplishments in the Illinois Senate, it's very telling that he passed significant legislation dealing with affordable housing. It did get the state to make more investments than we ever had before through the state donation tax - got a 26 million dollars a year, but it did involve these public-private partnerships.
It is a model that I believe in until today, and he was one of the early leaders and somebody that we applauded at the time with the kind of legislation that was brought to us by housing advocates and public officials as a way to increase availability of affordable housing and revitalize communities.
CHIDEYA: OK, well, Representative and Mr. Appelbaum, thanks so much.
Representative HAMOS: Thank you.
Mr. APPELBAUM: Thank you.
https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=92087053
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