Asked about the South Side’s struggles amid the stimulus program, the White House referred to modest economic gains in the community and nationally.
“When President Obama took office, the economy was losing almost a million private sector jobs per month,” said Matt Lehrich, a White House spokesman. “. . . While much work remains, we now have 29 straight months of private-sector job creation.” The Recovery Act, Lehrich added, was “designed to have maximum economic impact and benefit those who needed it most, even if that meant folks didn’t always realize the help they were getting was from the Recovery Act.”
Allen views the South Side’s jobless and its struggling entrepreneurs as having been overlooked. “The president tells people, ‘We’re trying to ease the barriers,’ ” Allen says. “But I’d say to Barack: People around places like this elected you on one promise, to bring hope and change to a community like this. Look around. . . . What’s really changed?”
Allen recalls that he had gone around the nearby community of Roseland with Obama during their community organizing days, when Allen worked for Operation PUSH, a Chicago-based group led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson. The two young activists lobbied for more community input at local meetings, recounts Allen, a recollection that prompted a White House spokesperson to say that it is likely the two were at some meetings together. “He was smart, and he was impatient with red tape,” Allen recalls of the young Obama. “I liked the community organizer Obama better than President Obama. . . . Democrats say Barack has got 90 percent or whatever of the black vote wrapped up. What they don’t tell you is it’s 90 percent of those who actually come out and vote. . . . What if it’s 90 percent of just 30 or 40 percent who vote?”
With no great hope that Washington will provide additional help anytime soon, Allen’s organization is principally focused on aiding small-business owners struggling to get ventures off the ground. His organization makes available office space, in the form of cubicles, for budding entrepreneurs who are looking for capital, workers and affordable places to house businesses. He assists the dreamers in the sometimes confounding process of applying for commercial loans and government grants, and he must occasionally guide them through the frustrations of credit repair. Always, he says, he is looking to pair them with local potential investors who have already made it, but the ranks of the winners are small. In the meantime, he tries to find any part-time jobs for the desperate. It is a grind.
“We need loosened credit from Barack’s people; we need strings untied. Not easy,” he says.
He hasn’t completely given up on lobbying the administration for help. He has expressed his frustrations in an e-mail to Jarrett, who, he says, politely answered that the administration thinks that it has been appropriately responsive to the community (the White House says it has no reason to doubt that the two were in contact with each other). He says he has not heard back from Obama strategist David Plouffe, to whom he also sent a note. And he says he has met with Ken Bennett, a Chicago-based Department of Labor official, to see what can be done to get more residents working on South Side projects supported by stimulus dollars. “I’m trying to be a bridge here,” he says.
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