No peace in Chicago’s Altgeld Gardens: What Obama and Jarrett left behind
Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama cut his teeth in community organizing at Chicago public housing project Altgeld Gardens.
Obama exaggerated his role as an activist at Altgeld Gardens, according to a 2007 LATimes report quoting other community organizers, and left behind more failure than success, according to this 2008 Boston Globe report:
Twenty miles from the glittering center of Chicago, at the farthest edge of the South Side, dozens of two-story brick buildings stretch for block after weary block. It was here where America provided public housing for African-American veterans of World War II and it was here, in the 1980s, that Barack Obama became a community organizer. Working with a band of outspoken mothers, Obama first auditioned his oratory and gained public notice. The despair evidenced by the many dilapidated buildings, and the seeming mockery of the project’s flowery name, Altgeld Gardens, prompted Obama to recount years later how an elementary school principal believed the children here no longer laughed like children. “Their throats can still make the sound, but if you look at their eyes, you can see they’ve shut off something inside,” Obama quoted the principal as saying.
…or all its impact on Obama, Altgeld Gardens today seems far from the kind of success story politicians like to tout. Dozens of buildings are boarded up, with fences surrounding much of the property. The roads are a potholed mess. Blinking lights illuminate a series of towers where police have mounted cameras.
Last fall, Obama returned here for a television interview, walking past the boarded-up buildings, waving at children, and promising not to forget the residents as he runs for president. “It was, it is, a tough, tough place,” he said.
Yes, it is. Altgeld Gardens is the home of several of the suspects charged in the beating death of teen Derrion Albert.
Last week, while Obama’s AG Eric Holder and Education Secretary Arne Duncan were visiting to discuss teen violence, more students from Altgeld Gardens got into a fight with students who live in the area surrounding the high school, an area known as “The Ville,” as WCBS2 reported:
Students and other Far South Side residents were protesting Wednesday outside the mayor’s office on the fifth floor of City Hall and at Altgeld gardens.
They were trying to add their voices to what Holder and Duncan called a national conversation on student violence.
Altgeld Gardens resident Tommie McCoy said Holder and Duncan should have visited Fenger and Altgeld Gardens, not just met with Mayor Richard M. Daley and other local officials in downtown Chicago.
“I think they should have come out this way instead of downtown because this is where it’s happening at out here,” McCoy said.
If Holder, Duncan and Daley had been outside Fenger on Wednesday when school let out, students said they would have gotten an eyeful.
“They was fighting,” one girl said.
Another student said, “Some boys they got off the bus fighting and that. Then the police came over there breaking up the fight.”
As soon as the punching stopped at Fenger, the students and the simmering tension moved south to Altgeld Gardens a few miles south.
The Daley machine, with help from Team Obama, will persist in throwing more money at the problem. Cook County blogger Kelli Kobor at the Examiner throws up her hands — as are many local parents and activists sick of the same old, same old at the expense of Chicago schoolkids’ safety:
Today, Daley’s handpicked schools chief, Huberman does not believe in the expulsion of disruptive students.
In an interview with [The Sun Times] schools CEO Ron Huberman rejected Stewart’s idea, saying research done this year by CPS on troubled high schools points him in a different direction. Schools that successfully create what he calls a “culture of calm” do so by dealing with difficult students in-house, he said. Schools that are quick to suspend and expel — effectively moving kids out — have not fared as well, his data indicate.
Now, it was the newly appointed Huberman who carried through on the “turnaround” process for Fenger last winter, a process that removed practically all of the teachers and administrators from the school but left every student in place. This makes Fenger’s restructuring different from earlier turnarounds in Chicago, and it may have been the critical factor in the afterschool violence that plagued the school from the first week of the new year.
But Huberman remains fully committed to the course he has set and his vision for curbing violence in Chicago Schools. He is a data junkie who has just overseen a 6 month study of the pattern of violence in Chicago schools.
Armed with that data, Huberman recently laid out a $30 million plan to help 38 of the city’s most unruly high schools by adding social workers, counselors, new discipline policies and more training for security guards, among other efforts. His staff, using a probability model, also has identified the 1,200 kids most likely to be shot over the next two years — mostly low-performing, disruptive and chronically truant kids. They will be assigned 16-hour-a-week mentors.
The New York Times characterizes Huberman’s plan as an effort to identify the most “vulnerable” students and “saturate[] them with adult attention. But local critics have labeled it a make-work scheme for community organizers, ministers and other neighborhood men who will be hired as the mentors. And as for giving jobs to the “at-risk” students themselves, one long-time CPS critic has called this program “Jobs for Jerks” because it rewards some of the worst students in the school system with incredibly rare employment opportunities while leaving good students to fend for themselves.
“Jobs for Jerks.” Useful phrase.
For decades, the public housing boondoggle has provided lucrative jobs and windfalls for Daley cronies and developers.
The failure to make the communities safe for families and kids touches not only Obama, but his closest advisers — including real estate mogul/Daley operative/consigliere/city planning commissioner/Habitat Company chief Valerie Jarrett.
Daley/Jarrett’s “Plan for Transformation” for Chicago public housing was like Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize “achievement”– far more aspirational than concrete:
Chicago’s grand experiment to transform public housing is lagging nearly a decade after Mayor Richard Daley’s administration turned to private developers to shape the future of housing for the city’s poor.
Conceived amid a rising housing market, the city’s Plan for Transformation used hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars and virtual giveaways of public land to reverse decades of neglect that confined the city’s poorest residents to racially segregated ghettos.
Demolition of Chicago’s reviled high-rises became a national symbol of change and hope, but little attention has been focused on what happened next as rhetoric collided with realities.
A Tribune investigation found that almost nine years into what was billed as a 10-year program, the city has completed only 30 percent of the plan’s most ambitious element tearing down entire housing projects and replacing them with new neighborhoods where poor, working-class and wealthier families would live side by side.
More from the Chicago Tribune’s investigation last fall:
Mayor Richard Daley declared eight years ago that Chicago would end “the failed policies of the past.” Yet a Tribune investigation found that the city has pumped hundreds of millions of federal tax dollars into housing complexes that preserve the very policies the plan was meant to reverse.
The largest is the Altgeld-Murray Homes, a sprawling 190-acre development built on the Far South Side for black factory workers during World War II. At that development alone, the CHA plans to spend $451 million rehabbing 1,998 barracks-style apartments, with politically connected Walsh Construction doing much of the work.
Altgeld sits in one of the city’s most isolated areas. The nearest supermarket is miles away. Only one bus route serves the development. And it backs up to the Little Calumet River in an area once known as “The Toxic Doughnut” because of a long history of environmental problems.
Crime is another challenge. Open drug markets thrive at Altgeld, and shootings occur frequently enough to keep residents on edge.
“You guys are an island out here, cut off from everyone else,” John Ball, the local police commander, noted during a recent community meeting with residents.
For generations, public housing in Chicago was a highly visible failure. In the mid-1990s, the agency began demolishing more than 13,000 public housing units on prime real estate to make way for new developments where poor residents are supposed to live alongside wealthier families.
Those mixed-income developments are now more than a decade behind schedule. The same problem plagues the CHA’s efforts to rehab the public housing that wasn’t demolished, with fewer than half of those units finished.
At Altgeld, about two-thirds of the units lie empty, despite a severe shortage of affordable housing across the region. Some of the apartments are awaiting rehab, and others remain vacant because the CHA has had trouble persuading residents displaced by demolition to relocate to Altgeld.
Legacy.
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Categories: Barack Obama,Corruption,Valerie Jarrett
Nice Deb
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Of course it has failed. It was doomed to fail! Middle income and above will not willingly live in a housing project. Idiots.
Here is some irony. Altgeld translates to old money. From German. For WWII veterans.
Those “mixed income” apartment complexes have been a complete failure too. People pay good money for a nice apartment, then find they have the scum of the earth as neighbors paying little or nothing, bringing all the crime, dope, guns, and violence from their previous housing project. People with money do NOT want to live next to this idiocy, which is why “mixed income” housing is a complete failure.
BTW-On the Brown Line “L” train to Oak Park a few years ago, I saw nice, virtually new two-story public housing apartments (in rows, like brownstones) with boarded-up burned-out windows. These place hadn’t been open six months and they’d already been destroyed.
You CANNOT give people something for nothing and expect them to give a damn about it. Trillions of dollars later, we’re still doing the same thing with the same results. That usually is called insanity.
Was that written using a half word?
Slogan for 2012 election:
President Barack Obama
Community Organizing America
My Social Studies teacher at Lindblom – On Southside of Chicago, called these buildings – human filing cabinets.
He also said that the world was run by the mediocre and any attempt to excel would be put down by the mediocre.
40 years later I still have to say he was right.
The Chicago Democratic Machine created the poverty, the racism and the segregation, yet continues to get the votes from both white and black.
Because if you don’t play ball with them, you don’t play.
Mike Royko, former Suntimes columnist and true journalist, wrote about how Daley 1, organized block busting. First he would have realtors make low ball offers in white neighborhoods. Then the insurance companies would drop the insurance of these white homeowners. Then they burn down one of the houses. The white homeowners would panic and sell cheap. Then the realtors jacked up the price, and sold to black people looking to move in. All this ONE BLOCK AT A TIME.
The Chicago Democratic Machine IS THE MAFIA, and they just incorporate gangs into its ranks. They have NO INTEREST in solving the problems of the city, such as run down schools and gang violence. They create problems, not solve problems.
And Obama is ONE OF THEM!
As long as we keep these people on the entitlement (slavery) system they will continue to live this way. This is exactly the democrat plan of War on Perverty was to keep them quite. Democrats don’t like dissent so to stop dissent pay them to shut up and go away and live like animals! Entitlements aren’t a good thing as we see 40 yrs later. Cloward Piven strategy as Margaret Sanger wasn’t for the down troddens best interest it was to destroy them as a race and the capitalistic system. How do you destroy the US ruin the poor and middle class as to gain complete control!
Sorry Poverty not Pervety! But, then again democrats protect them too!
Yep.
Yep.
Idiots.
Ah, yes.
Social “research”.
Idiots.
Ya think?
Idiots.
Intent on pouring more gasoline on the fire that idiots, no doubt of like mind to him, started in the first place.
Idiots.
Oh, did I already say idiots?
No surprise.
In the great, noble socialist tradition of destroying what is good, and making everything equally crappy for everybody (except for the elite nomenklatura, of course).
Dangerous, evil idiots.
Chigago’s “promise” to tear down the projects and create “affordable” housing for mixed-income families also resulted in “exporting” the residents to surrounding suburban areas and downstate cities/towns. And, wouldn’t you know it? The crime rates in the areas these people were relocated to have risen dramatically. I used to live in a couple of the towns that received an influx of these new residents, and neither town is now recognizable from what they used to be. In essence, all Chicago did was outsource some of it’s crime.
When residents of Hyde Park start to move in next-door to the poor and downtrodden they claim to champion, then I might pay attention.
I still won’t join them, of course. For what it costs to be poor in Chicago, one could probably be solidly middle-class elsewhere.
Show me where liberal policies work and I’ll pay attention. From my perspecitve, Chicago and California are big fails. Too bad that these are now the models for the rest of the country.
And when the Nation of Islam gives up its guns, I will think about giving up mine.
Profiling maybe? What about the thousands of immigrant children who live in the shadows?
The future of America according to the vision of the messiah.
It sounds to me that they need to demolish these buildings, at taxpayers expense. Re-build these buildings, at taxpayers expense. See to it all the elected get their fair share of the money for said demolishing and re-building, at taxpayers expense.
After a year, we can do all of the above, at taxpayers expense again because the tenants crater their taxpayers funded home.
L
Could this be why the IOC folks in Copenhagen didn’t buy into Dear Leader’s wistful description of Chicago as a beautiful patchwork of cultural diversity, often coming together in blissful unity singing “We Are the World”?
Perhaps Chicago’s long history of sprawling ghettos, gang violence and one of the most corrupt governments in the world had something to do with it.
Ya think?
His presidency won’t be much different. Except the scope of the failures he leaves behind will take decades to clean up.
Typical Utopian fantasy. No doubt “wealthy” people are lining up around the block for the opportunity to plop down their hard earned money to experience the glories of life of the ghetto.
Now, if Chicago had only gotten the Olympics, these low income housing projects would have been razed to make room for the Olympic Village. See, problem solved! Just get rid of the thugs who kill each other and have them become a problem elsewhere.
Am I the only one that looks at 50%+ unemployment among the youth and crime at the same time?
I guess so many have been tought how horrible Reagan was, they never heard about the drop in crime as job creation boomed.
Sure this complex has, well, a complex. But with this kind of unemployment it really does not matter if that had been the Taj Mahal. It was gonna get trashed by to many ‘kids’ with too much time on their hands and nothing else to do with that time.
And as a prediction, the majority in the media will never point out the crime wave under Obama’s job suppressing economy!
Can you say Atlanta? I live in the southern crescent, where most the inner city folks got booted to to make way for the glorious Olympic Village. Property values destroyed – crime rate through the roof!
Olympics as a long term boon to Atlanta? Not so much. I suspect Chicago would have been worse.
James, Florida, JJ, Thelma, Michael…are you there? “Good Times”, baby, good times!
In a slightly related topic, just ask Houston how they fared with the refugees from Katrina.
Good Point! Also, speaking of Katrina it was a perfect example of how entitlements have mad them so reliant on the government they couldn’t get out of the rain by themselves! They sat there waiting for the government to help them because they didn;t know any better. The government has striped them of self reliance, dignity and the most basic survival skills!
Yep, that’s what we called them when we lived in Cicero.
You’ll likely have to wait until pigs fly and hell freezes over.
In 1981, Chicago Mayor Byrne, in a B.S. publicity stunt, “moved her residence” to the Cabrini Green project for a lousy 3 weeks…I’m sure with her security detail close by.
http://www.chicagonow.com/blogs/photos/2009/10/mayor-byrne-moves-into-cabrini-green—1981.html#
What phony, B.S.-ing hypocrites these dangerous, socialist elitists are.
Can I get an Amen?!?…
Probably to reduce the commute time to her crack dealer…
We need more outspoken mothers – speaking to their kids…”Study hard, work hard.”
AMEN! I may be called a bigot for my view but, unfortunately it is a TRUE FACT that has been avoided for far too long!
and aloha, those same mothers need to convict the thugs that they sit on juries for, or those same thugs will be robbing them next. if you have to have bars on your windows and doors, YOU ARE LIVING IN A PRISON.
*THAT* is utter brilliance. The conservatives with balls in the Rebulican party needs to run that line with footage of the Altgeld area, in fact they need to show footage of every freaking housing project in the Chicago area, so folks can get a full scope of barry hussein’s “community organizing” talent.
TEEEEJ
So long as you think that giving the lower class higher-class housing (like homes and lawned townhouses in place of apartment projects) without the ethic and civic appreciation of earning them, all under the banner of “compassion,” this situation will always continue. Also, the black community itself has to stand up on its hind legs and look in the mirror and stop excusing/passing off obvious bad behavior/morals/demeanor as “culture”. Doesn’t help with sterling examples as Rangel.
James Greenidge
Queens NY
You forgot Detroit!
You think public housing is bad, wait until you see public healthcare.
Viable Solution:
The reintroduction of vocational schools for people who do not generally fare so well with more traditional education. A return to actual education in the schools. An expulsion of the bloated administrative staffs and a reduction of tenure and getting rid of the union thugs?
Would that really be so much to ask barring the complete riddance of the federal
educationalindoctrination system?Maybe if they actually learned real world skills in school instead of faux morality they would find something better to do than gang up on the streets … but then again, that is a pre-requisite to the successful takeover of our nation.
Nevermind
Maybe making the poor, un-poor by providing them with economic opportunity from the private sector is the optimal solution.
GASP!
***
The Altgeld projects look like the bombed out areas in some of the Charles Bronson DEATH WISH movies.
***
Since The Messiah’s community organizing doesn’t seem to have provided any long lasting benefits to the area–DIG UP BRONSON AND HAVE HIM RE-ORGANIZE THIS SLUM–Death Wish style. Or hire Dirty Harry to help “clean it up” a little. Just “trim it up” a little along the edges.
***
John Bibb
***
I thought “Jobs for Jerks” referred to Obama’s czars.
My sister works for an offshoot of Habitat for Humanity, building low-cost houses for the poor. One day she got a long-distance phone call from New Orleans, where they had recently had a “build”, and the (black) woman they built the house for was on the line yelling that her toilet was stopped up and to send a plumber. My sister said “YOU own the house, I recommend you call your own plumber.” The woman was adamant that free plumbing services come with the house. She asked my sister what SHE did when SHE needed a plumber in her house, she said she called her landlord. She didn’t own a house. Entitled? Noooo. Gimme, gimme, gimme forever.
Amazing but not incredibly unexpected.
Obama’s War PBS Frontline Oct 13th Video
With all that going for it, I can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want to call Altgeld “home.”
But who are these “wealthy people” that are going to be willing to live next door to ghetto trash?
How about you, Mayor Daley?
Michelle has linked this before but since I don’t know Chicago I don’t know if its in the same area.
Obamas community organizing
We jus’ needs some of that Obama Money! /s
This is not a surprise to thinking people. Mr. Obama is a rank amateur and has no record of accomplishment. That is why we are not permitted any access to his personal history. He is, however, a committed Marxist, anti-Christian, anti-semite, and anti-American bent on the destruction of American society. He does not vett his appointees because he does not need to: he “won” the election and the news media protect his decisions and actions at all costs. He is halfway to his beloved Marxist Nirvana and he need not pay the least attention to his critics except to attack and suppress them. What a laugh that the White House has the gall to criticize and mock FOX as biased given that all other news outlets are firmly in the Leftist camp.
These personal failures in Chicago (and anything else he has put his hand to) are indicative of his dangerous incompetence. He is grossly unqualified to lead anything, much less our nation.
Left to himself he would be ineffective, unfortunately he has an assembled cadre of hard-core Marxists able and actively in the process of breaking America apart.
I will say that he is a brilliant salesman with a huge Chiclet smile and great charisma. But remember, Lenin, Mao, and Jim Jones had the same drawing power.
The bit about children not laughing the way children should is stolen from the opening pages of James Baldwin’s great short story, “Sonny’s Blues.” Typically.
You see this over and over again in schools across the country…. small towns as well as cities. They want to coddle the kids who are violent and disruptive at the expense of those children who want to go to school and act decently. It is not limited to high school, but occurs in grade school and particularly in middle school. No one is suspended anymore… we have police stationed at all schools and bullying is no longer a simple matter, but a matter of extreme threats and violence with no accountability.
Until we address the real problem, which is where these kids are coming from and what their parents are teaching them or NOT teaching them, it will never be solved. Building community centers, setting up mentoring programs and special recreation will do nothing as long as these kids have to go home to parents who don’t care about society.
The problem with these kids is that they ALREADY had a lot of adult attention during their lives. They had parents who did not teach them the word “no” and saturated them with attention.
Same thing with family, friends, and other people through their lives. They never learned not to be anti-social.