Valerie Jarrett pre-Obama Presidency Dig
VJ appears to have been involved in a gentrification land grab as executive VP of Habitat Co.
''They are determined to transform Cabrini-Green into a "mixed-income" community, HUD and its advocates now insist. More accurately, they have no choice but to take land away from Cabrini-Green's current tenants, and redistribute it to private developers at steep discounts to its current market value. Otherwise, it wouldn't be possible for the profit-driven private sector to build the upscale housing on the post-Cabrini-Green landscape that is needed to attract a sufficient number of rich people to the area-the only people's whose interests are driving the Redevelopment Initiative, it should be perfectly clear-to make construction of the new housing financially worthwhile for developers in the first place. This, too, is one of the open secrets behind "reinventing" Cabrini-Green: open in that everyone openly acknowledges it; but secret in that almost no one (beyond the residents themselves, of course) seems capable of understanding its true implications, particularly in moral terms. Thus one can read on the pages of the Chicago Tribune<Dthat, "Without these buildings torn down, the developers reason they couldn't attract market-rate home buyers to sit on an island in the middle of a bunch of high-rises that most people consider scary." And one can find Habitat Co. executive vice-president and former commissioner of the city's Department of Planning and Development Valerie Jarrett explaining that "There are two goals here. The first is to come up with 493 replacement units [called for by former CHA chair Vince Lane's 1993 plan]. The other is to maximize the market potential of the area in creating a mixed-income community."''
http://www.thefrictioninstitute.org/landgrab.htm