Obama Advisor Shapes Chicago Housing Policy

Valerie Jarrett, a close adviser to Barack Obama, stands at the center of Chicago's controversial efforts to redevelop public housing.

Jarrett has pushed to integrate new developments by limiting the number of residents, mostly poor and black, who can live in the new communities. From the beginning, that stance clashed with efforts by residents and housing advocates to ensure the number of units set aside for the poor was as large as possible.

For Jarrett, the effort to integrate public housing continues a struggle her grandfather, Robert Taylor, started decades ago. Taylor was the Chicago Housing Authority's first chairman.

"He believed in what we're doing today, which is why I do this," Jarrett said.Since 1995, Jarrett has been a high ranking executive at Habitat Co., a real estate firm tasked by a federal judge to ensure the CHA ends segregation in public housing.

The company decides how many public, affordable and market-rate units will be built at each site, approves the budgets and helps negotiate the contracts. In some cases, Jarrett, who became chief executive officer of Habitat last year, has personally signed off on the location of public housing units inside the new developments.

Habitat argues that to integrate public housing it must attract middle-class families, who will not buy into a development that includes too many poor people.

"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.

In 1987, U.S. District Judge Marvin Aspen appointed Habitat to oversee construction of all public housing in Chicago as part of the historic Gautreaux case, which found that the CHA had failed for decades to integrate housing.

At first, Habitat's job was to desegregate housing by building "scattered site" units in more affluent white neighborhoods across the city. But the effort had little impact. The company built about 1,800 units, mostly in lower-income Hispanic neighborhoods before the program ended.

Everything changed when Chicago landed the 1996 Democratic National Convention. The city sought to demolish parts of the Henry Horner Homes, across the street from the United Center, where the convention would be held.

A federal law that has since been repealed required that all the units be replaced with new ones. But Gautreaux barred the city from building public housing in segregated areas unless an equal number went up in white neighborhoods, a political and logistical impossibility at the time.

Aspen agreed to bend the Gautreaux ruling if the CHA and Habitat could show that the neighborhood would become "revitalized" through large public and private investments that would lead to racial integration.

That decision paved the way for the Plan for Transformation. Instead of attempting to build public housing in more affluent white neighborhoods, the city would try to attract wealthier people to old public housing sites and thereby integrate the communities.

Habitat quickly developed guidelines that limited the proportion of public housing to roughly a third of the total.

"If you had more than a third, the sky would fall. Heaven and earth would not move them from that position," said Richard Wheelock, an attorney for the Legal Assistance Foundation, which sued the CHA in 2004, winning a consent decree that guides the redevelopment of Cabrini-Green on the North Side.

The fight is far from over, however.

Battles lines are being redrawn over Lathrop Homes, a public housing development in Logan Square, where market-rate condos abound.

Habitat and the CHA want to create a new development at Lathrop that would follow the same model as other mixed-income sites such as Stateway Gardens and the Robert Taylor Homes.

But community organizers say that the neighborhood needs more affordable and public housing—not more upscale homes.

Comments

[Mike Volpe]

Don't forget that following this report WAPO did an expose about how Obama got a VIP loan from Northern Trust. How is that for corrupt? Frankly, if you look at it, Obama is like just about any Chicago politician. If you know anything about Chicago politics you want to keep those folks as far from the White House as possible. Here is how I summarized his corruption.

http://theeprovocateur.blogspot.com/2008/07/updated-summary-of-corruption-and.html