Dig on VJ pre-Obama presidency.
One of Jarrett’s grandfathers was Robert Taylor, once the head of the Chicago Housing Authority.
She started as the deputy corporation counsel for finance and development and then, two years after Washington died and Richard M. Daley won a special election for mayor, she was named deputy chief of staff. Finally, she ran the Department of Planning and Development for four years.
In addition to her position at Habitat, Jarrett is the chairman of the board of the Chicago Transit Authority—a part-time job and a full-time challenge for which she is paid $50,000 a year. The CTA has 11,000 employees and an annual operating budget of $850 million, and Jarrett has made it a point of pride to respond to every letter she receives about the CTA. “Just this morning I was reading a letter from someone who was furious about a bus driver. I mean, this person was almost too irate to write.”
public housing - family business
Not that her current job is a piece of cake. “We face some very tough issues here,” she says. Certainly one of them involves public housing. In 1987, The Habitat Company was appointed by a federal judge to step in where the Chicago Housing Authority had failed—in developing family public housing units. Along with luxury high-rises, Habitat now builds all those units. That is one of the strange twists in Jarrett’s life. Her maternal grandfather was Robert Taylor, the former head of the Chicago Housing Authority and the person for whom the South Side public housing towers were named. “It’s funny because he was into housing,” she says, “and now, many years later, here I am. Another irony is that he resigned from the CHA in frustration because he was unable to get elected officials to go along with integrating public housing into the urban landscape, and that is exactly what Habitat is doing right now. So I feel I’m continuing his legacy.”
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/August-2000/Valerie-Jarrett-Desiree-Rogers/