Boston Globe Exposé, Part I: Introducing Cecil Butler, Obama’s West Side Slumlord Patron
By Un coup de des on June 27, 2008 at 3:57 PM in Barack Obama, Chicago, Chicago politics, Tony Rezko
This is the first of a series of articles to be written on a lengthy exposé published in the Boston Globe entitled “Grim Proving Ground for Obama’s Housing Policy.” The 27 JUN 2008 investigative report is required reading for all No Quarter users. The editorial board of No Quarter finds the evidence cited in Binyamin Appelbaum’s article very compelling, and we will attempt to unpack it in a series of short essays to be published this weekend.
If Antoin “Tony” Rezko is Barack Obama’s slumlord patron from Chicago’s South Side, Cecil Butler is Rezko’s West Side counterpart. I quote:
Campaign finance records show that six prominent developers – including Jarrett, Davis, and Rezko – collectively contributed more than $175,000 to Obama’s campaigns over the last decade and raised hundreds of thousands more from other donors. Rezko alone raised at least $200,000, by Obama’s own accounting.
One of those contributors, Cecil Butler, controlled Lawndale Restoration, the largest subsidized complex in Chicago, which was seized by the government in 2006 after city inspectors found more than 1,800 code violations.
Similar to Rezko, Cecil Butler is a developer who profited from the privatization of low income, public housing in Chicago during the 1990s. Butler is also not coincidentally a major supporter of Barack Obama whose low income tenements were ultimately seized by the government for multiple building code violations.
The Boston Globe provides a description and a brief history of Butler’s Lawndale Restoration.
Chicago’s struggles with the deterioration of its subsidized private developments seemed to reach a new height in 2006, when the federal government foreclosed on Lawndale Restoration, the city’s largest subsidized-housing complex. City inspectors found more than 1,800 code violations, including roof leaks, exposed wiring, and pools of sewage.
Lawndale Restoration was a collection of more than 1,200 apartments in 97 buildings spread across 300 blocks of west Chicago. It was owned by a company controlled by Cecil Butler, a former civil rights activist who came to be reviled as a slumlord by a younger generation of activists.
Lawndale Restoration was created in the early 1980s, when the federal government helped Butler take control of a group of old buildings, including lending $22 million to his company to redevelop the buildings and agreeing to subsidize tenant rents. In 1995, Butler’s company got a $51 million loan from the state to fund additional renovations at Lawndale Restoration. In 2000 Butler’s company brought in Habitat Co. to help manage the complex.
Nonetheless, the buildings deteriorated badly. The problems came to public attention in a dramatic way in 2004, after a sport utility vehicle driven by a suburban woman trying to buy drugs struck one of the buildings, causing it to collapse. City inspectors arrived in the ensuing glare, finding a long list of code violations, leading city officials to urge the federal government to seize the complex.
Who helped Cecil Butler secure government funds for Woodlawn Restoration? Barack Obama, of course: the same Barack Obama who wrote letters on behalf of Rezko’s slum properties the same year residents of Rezko’s tenements were complaining of lack of heat and sanitation services. For the Executive Vice President of Habitat Co., the company who helped Butler manage his deteriorating warren of slums, was Valerie Jarrett, another Obama contributor who develops low income housing and serves as a top advisor to the Obama for President campaign. The Boston Globe explains how Obama exploited his position as state Senator to assist Jarrett and Cecil Butler. I quote:
Obama translated that belief into legislative action as a state senator. In 2001, Obama and a Republican colleague, William Peterson, sponsored a successful bill that increased state subsidies for private developers. The law let developers designated by the state raise up to $26 million a year by selling tax credits to Illinois residents. For each $1 in credits purchased, the buyer was allowed to decrease his taxable income by 50 cents.
Obama also cosponsored the original version of a bill creating an annual fund to subsidize rents for extremely low-income tenants, although it did not pass until 2005, after he had left the state Senate.
“He was very passionate about the issues,” said Julie Dworkin of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, who worked with Obama on affordable housing issues. “He was someone we could go to and count on him to be there.”
The developers gave Obama their financial support. Jarrett, Davis, and Rezko all served on Obama’s campaign finance committee when he won a seat in the US Senate in 2004.
Obama has continued to support increased subsidies as a presidential candidate, calling for the creation of an Affordable Housing Trust Fund, which could distribute an estimated $500 million a year to developers. The money would be siphoned from the profits of two mortgage companies created and supervised by the federal government,
Fannie Mae andFreddie Mac .
Obama, in other words, authored and passed bills to the financial benefit of his slumlord contributors, and he will continue to do so as Senator and perhaps as President.
I mention Cecil Butler, as Butler was the subject of much controversy during Barack Obama’s 2004 bid for the US Senate. According to the Boston Globe, Obama’s deep ties to Butler and to Jarrett compelled many activists in Lawndale to support Obama’s opponent Republican Alan Keyes. The political alliance was so strange even the Chicago Reader penned an article on the protest activists in Lawndale were staging. I quote the Boston Globe:
In the midst of the uproar, a small group of Lawndale residents gathered to rally against the Democratic candidate for the US Senate, Barack Obama.
Obama’s Republican opponent, Alan Keyes, trailed badly in the polls and was not seen as a serious challenger. But the organizers had a simple message: Cecil Butler had donated $3,000 to Obama’s campaign. Habitat had close ties to Obama. And Obama had remained silent about Lawndale’s plight.
Paul Johnson, who helped to organize the protest, said Obama must have known about the problems.
“How didn’t he know?” said Johnson. “Of course he knew. He just didn’t care.”
“He just didn’t care:” just as Obama did not care about the residents who lacked heat and sanitation services in a Rezko tenement during the late 1990s when he represented them in the state Senate.
A disturbing pattern emerges, and it can be summarized as follows:
- Obama secured funds for developers who desired to earn profits off of low income housing during the privitization scheme of the Chicago Housing Authority that occurred during Barack Obama’s tenure as a state Senator. Those developers include Tony Rezko, Valerie Jarrett and Cecil Butler.
- These public-private partnerships failed, leaving many in squalor.
- Barack Obama remained silent, but he accepted contributions from Rezko, Jarrett, Butler and others.
- Rezko is not an isolated case. Obama also colluded with the likes of Cecil Butler, whose negligence inspired African-American residents of the Lawndale neighborhood on the West Side to organize support for radical Republican Alan Keyes during Obama’s 2004 Senate bid.
- Obama’s desire to privatize public housing has resulted in a series of failed projects that have left the indigent in squalor.
- But Obama accepted the political contributions of these unscrupulous developers nonetheless.
Flineo created a video entitled “Obama’s Forgotten People,” and I publish it again, as there is a new group of low income housing residents on the West Side of Chicago Obama we can add to the group on the South Side Obama abandoned in order to climb the political and social ladder.
Nothing, in my opinion, is more deplorable than a career politician who exploited African-Americans in low income housing for political and personal gain. And Obama did it again and again in inner city Chicago. Now he has manipulated African-Americans across the country to view his candidacy as the empowerment of the very people Obama ignored in order to line the pockets of his slumlord friends and contributors. Progressives and ostensible Democrats may forget, but those of us who are concerned with social justice will continue to serve as the true muckrakers this election cycle.
The edifices reproduced in this essay are buildings managed by Cecil Butler. The restoration project that followed in the wake of Cecil Butler’s mismanagement of Lawndale Restoration is described in this document.
by Ronald Scott
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