Blogs For Victory

You’d think that with Obama’s success at obtaining a low-cost mansion for himself that he’d have been more effective on housing for the poor:

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.

When we first started building public housing it became a complete disaster – the government ponied up the money to have them built and then managed the housing with a maze of bureaucratic rules which made it impossible to get rid of bad elements and dead certain that the housing would become blighted in short order. The phrase “public housing” by the early 1980’s immediately brought to mind images of crime and filth. And so reforms were proposed – the crowning effort to actually fix the problem was initiated by “bleeding heart” conservative Jack Kemp who initiated the Homeownership and Opportunity for People Everywhere (HOPE) program while he was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development during the Elder Bush Administration…unfortunately, budget battles in cabinet and unwillingness of the Democratic Congress to spend money on a GOP-inspired anti-poverty scheme which would disempower Democratic-donating bureaucrats essentially killed the very promising program – it does linger on to this day, but it never was able to accomplish its primary purpose of making poor people into home owners so that they would be empowered and have the incentive to keep their neighborhoods up to snuff.

What has happened since then has mostly been a boondoggle, as we can see from the quoted article – favored contractors getting government swag to build low-cost housing and as these contractors are protected by their bought-and-paid-for political patrons, there isn’t much incentive for the contractors to actually build something useful. The problem isn’t just in Chicago, to be completely fair to Obama here – we have a low cost housing development here in Las Vegas which was built on toxic soil and was useless from the get-go. But the problem for Obama is that with a rather thin resume’, he can’t afford to have any of this corrupt business-as-usual political backscratching going on – and it appears that he was very happy to be hip deep in it. Now the connections to the corrupt Rezko and his shady mansion deal become more stark…coupled with the revelations that Obama’s supporters profited off Obama-backed slum construction, it shows that Obama is deeply involved – indeed, owes his rise to – the hopelessly corrupt Chicago-area Democratic politics.

So, good people, if you want a President who will ensure that well-connected contractors make money by building unlivable slums for the poor, Obama is your man…if you want something different that warmed-over liberal politics of the past, then McCain would have to by your choice.