The American Spectator

Special Report

Justice Daleyed

By RiShawn Biddle on 8.18.08 @ 12:07AM

(Page 2 of 2)

LATELY, HOWEVER, THIS revival appears to be incomplete and sputtering. Many of Daley's achievements are proving temporary or hollow.

Even as test scores and attendance has improved in the public schools, students are no more likely to be successfully prepared to move on to college, trade schools and ultimately, into the working world. Just eight out of every 100 students will move on to college, according to the Chicago Consortium.

Replacing the city's infamous gang fostering housing projects -- a legacy of the elder Daley's efforts to segregate the city's then-growing black population from the rest of the city -- hasn't gone as planned either. Eight years after moving to replace Cabrini Green and other projects with mixed-income housing, just 30 percent of the plan has been completed, according to the Chicago Tribune. Families are moving in and out of even more substandard housing.

Meanwhile the corruption remains a way of life. The deal-making that the Daley pere engaged in during the last years of his reign, when he siphoned off legal and insurance business to Daley fils and his brother Bill, is being repeated in the current generation.

A firm controlled by Daley the Younger's nephew, Robert Vanecko, has garnered $68 million in investments from five city-controlled pension funds. Last year, the mayor appointed another nephew to a seat on the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority, which oversees U.S. Cellular Field.

For the average owner of a Humboldt Park home, all of this is more worrisome than the ridiculous loss of liberty inflicted on residents by the city council when they passed a smoking ban. It also won't lure Des Plaines homeowners back into the city. Just over half of the kids born in the city enter its schools five years later. Parents are still opting for suburbia over The Chi's broad shoulders.

Nanny state behavior on the urban level is often tolerated if the streets are clean, neighborhoods are safe, and government is efficient and free of widespread corruption. And if not? Well, then many of Chicago's residents might walk with their feet to nicer surroundings before Daley's seeming lifetime appointment as mayor is over.

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