Why progressive/socialist projects always crater
Grove Parc Plaza is a slum housing project in the district that state senator Obama represented for eight years. According to the Boston Globe’s Binyamin Appelbaum on June 27, 2008, Grove Parc is 20 percent uninhabitable because of “unfixed problems, such as collapsed roofs and fire damage. ... 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. . . . "
A company called Habitat Co. managed Grove Parc Plaza from 2001 until 2007, and co-managed an even larger subsidized complex in Chicago that was seized by the federal government in 2006, after city inspectors found widespread problems.
And the chief executive of Habitat Co was...top Obama advisor and Chicago power maven Valerie Jarrett.
Okay, not exactly a shock, right? I mean, you can tell by the way they open their mouths that the whole Chicago/Obama crowd is a bunch of crooks and scammers. My point in posting this is that it shows why the "community activist" and powerful political hangers-on will never succeed in actually making a project work--in other than a narrow, I-got-the-money-so-I-succeeded sense.
Let me explain. Anyone who's managed a housing or apartment complex knows that you're always gonna have a constant stream of maintenance problems, right? This should be obvious to even the dumbest Dem. So the way you handle this is by allocating a big chunk of your gubmint "management fees" (in this case, since Jarret's firm was being paid by the gubmint) to maintenance.
Then after a couple of months you increase that number by, oh, at least 30%. Because people who live in apartments are astonishingly careless/destructive, meaning you'll have more mx problems than you anticipated. So your first maintenance estimate will always be too low.
That's the experienced, hard-working, in-it-for-the-long-term folks do it.
By contrast, political scam artists will always skimp on maintenance, since that lets them maximize their apparent (illusory) profit, and thus their salaries.
In effect, scammers steal from the project's future in order to maximize their take while they control the project's checkbook.
The inevitable, unavoidable [redundant, but it's so obvious I want to emphasize the point!] result is exactly what we see in Grove Parc Plaza and almost every other public-housing project: Everything falls apart fairly quickly, and soon a large chunk of the units are unfit for occupancy.
A canny (if also tormented) writer described a "looter" mentality: Take what you can steal now, whether by kickbacks, bribes or, as in this case, by hollowing out the future. It's exactly the inverse of how honest, ethical, moral people would do things.
Virtually every project that the Jarretts of the world try to run must end in decay and disaster--because they are too greedy, selfish and power-hungry to change the way they think...and thus the way they operate.
A company called Habitat Co. managed Grove Parc Plaza from 2001 until 2007, and co-managed an even larger subsidized complex in Chicago that was seized by the federal government in 2006, after city inspectors found widespread problems.
And the chief executive of Habitat Co was...top Obama advisor and Chicago power maven Valerie Jarrett.
Okay, not exactly a shock, right? I mean, you can tell by the way they open their mouths that the whole Chicago/Obama crowd is a bunch of crooks and scammers. My point in posting this is that it shows why the "community activist" and powerful political hangers-on will never succeed in actually making a project work--in other than a narrow, I-got-the-money-so-I-succeeded sense.
Let me explain. Anyone who's managed a housing or apartment complex knows that you're always gonna have a constant stream of maintenance problems, right? This should be obvious to even the dumbest Dem. So the way you handle this is by allocating a big chunk of your gubmint "management fees" (in this case, since Jarret's firm was being paid by the gubmint) to maintenance.
Then after a couple of months you increase that number by, oh, at least 30%. Because people who live in apartments are astonishingly careless/destructive, meaning you'll have more mx problems than you anticipated. So your first maintenance estimate will always be too low.
That's the experienced, hard-working, in-it-for-the-long-term folks do it.
By contrast, political scam artists will always skimp on maintenance, since that lets them maximize their apparent (illusory) profit, and thus their salaries.
In effect, scammers steal from the project's future in order to maximize their take while they control the project's checkbook.
The inevitable, unavoidable [redundant, but it's so obvious I want to emphasize the point!] result is exactly what we see in Grove Parc Plaza and almost every other public-housing project: Everything falls apart fairly quickly, and soon a large chunk of the units are unfit for occupancy.
A canny (if also tormented) writer described a "looter" mentality: Take what you can steal now, whether by kickbacks, bribes or, as in this case, by hollowing out the future. It's exactly the inverse of how honest, ethical, moral people would do things.
Virtually every project that the Jarretts of the world try to run must end in decay and disaster--because they are too greedy, selfish and power-hungry to change the way they think...and thus the way they operate.
posted by SF at
11:30 AM
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