Obama advisor at center of Chicago housing mess

From Sunday's Chicago Tribune, free registration may be required:

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.

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.

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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.

This is not change Ms. Hart believes in.

Here's what the Chicago Sun-Times' Lynn Sweet wrote about Jarrett last year:

"She's always been the other side of Barack's brain." That's how an Obama
insider described Valerie Jarrett as an Obama campaign aide announced Thursday
night the former CTA chief and current Habitat Co. CEO is taking on a larger
role to help her close friend win his White House bid.

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