Say Anything Blog

By now we’re all well aware of Obama’s rather anemic resume.  Obama’s campaign is also aware of this, which is why they’ve been trying to make the best of what’s there by hyping things such as Barack’s time spent fixing housing issues as both a “community developer” and an Illinois state legislator.

Unfortunately for the Obama campaign it turns out that the policies Obama promoted to fix the housing issues, mostly consisting of subsidies given to private developers so that they’d build low-income housing, didn’t succeed at all.  Unless you call making big-money developers rich while the housing they built rots away a “success.”

Oh, and did I mention that the currently incarcerated Tony Rezko was one of the developers in question?

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.

This is the problem with the government trying to do things best left to the private sector.  Such initiatives rarely achieve the success they set out to attain, and usually they end in cronyism and corruption.

Subsidizing the building of housing for people who can’t afford that housing is a ludicrous notion.  The people who are to live in the housing couldn’t afford it on their own, didn’t pay for it to attain it (or, at least, didn’t pay full price), and thus have no incentive to treat the housing as though it were an investment.  Or in a manner suggesting that it belongs to them.

On the other side, the developers who built the housing did so only because of the subsidy they got for building it.  Once they got the subsidy, they had no incentive to manage or maintain the housing once it had been built (if one could say that such are the responsibilities of the developer instead of the occupant in the first place).

This was a stupid policy, plain and simple.  Giving someone a home they haven’t earned, and can’t afford on their own, doesn’t help them a bit.  As the proverb goes, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.  Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Liberals like Obama need to take to heart that you can’t simply buy people out of poverty with the taxpayer’s money.  People must lift themselves out of poverty.

That Obama doesn’t get this policy reality, and not only doesn’t get it but actively campaigns on failed policies that tried to do the opposite, tells us that he’s hardly fit to run the housing bureaucracy of an American city let alone be President of the entire country.