Proof of Obama failure abundant before election: mice, sewage

• 6/27/08, The Boston Globe: By Binyamin Appelbaum Globe Staff / June 27, 2008

CHICAGO - "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."...

"Grim Proving Ground for Obama's Housing Policy," via Lucianne.com