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The Lost Dream of Obam-a-Lago
The American Prospect ^ | October 21, 2025 | Maureen Tkacik and Emma Janssen

Posted on 10/21/2025 12:09:56 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum

Long before the dramatic September 30 ICE invasion, the beautiful South Shore of Chicago was afflicted by an epidemic of absentee slumlords and government apathy.

A few weeks before the 2016 election, Chicago Tribune sportswriter Teddy Greenstein—now a DraftKings executive, naturally—broke some tantalizing news: Tiger Woods was this close to signing a deal to design a luxury lakefront golf course right next to the site President Barack Obama had chosen for his new presidential library. The $30 million project would convert two existing public golf courses into one ritzier and more challenging PGA-caliber one, which would woo away bankers and Boeing executives from the suburban courses with the irresistible buzz of the Obama “brand,” which at the time boosters were counting on to revolutionize the presidential library genre into a full-blown Destination, a temple to the lame-duck president’s achievements, real and imagined.

Nearly a decade later, the Tiger Woods golf course is almost certainly not happening, the Obama Presidential Center (the Obama Foundation decided to skip the library altogether and store the presidential archives in a suburban office park ten miles away, for some reason) is five years late, and the area on the South Shore of Lake Michigan is in the news again for having been the site of a traumatic ICE invasion, featuring a reported 300 federal agents descending upon a residential apartment building from Black Hawk helicopters and unmarked vans, smashing in windows, jimmying doors off the hinges, and zip-tying everyone in sight, immigration status be damned.

But long before ICE blew in, the South Shore neighborhood had been ravaged by a series of sprawling apartment building pump-and-dump schemes, aided and abetted by industrial-scale mortgage fraud, old-fashioned government inaction, and, in recent years, a smattering of Venezuelan gangsters the law enforcement establishment seems as ill-equipped to prosecute as....

(Excerpt) Read more at prospect.org ...


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society
KEYWORDS: spammingfr

1 posted on 10/21/2025 12:09:56 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

Obama bin Laden.


2 posted on 10/21/2025 12:14:48 PM PDT by Jim W N (MAGA by restoring the Gospel of the Grace of Christ (Jude 3) and our Free Constitutional Republic!)
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

I read the lengthy article and majority of the grift occurs when Treason Joe son of the kenyan muzzie had venezualans here ILLEGALLY to be housed in what was already a pump n dump operation that had been repeated many many times and these properties milked state and federal vouchers but did nothing to maintain said property. The people in the area are so beaten down by crime/drugs/welfare scum/illegals and did I forget brutal CRIME that they just utilize this raid from ICE as an act just out of the blue . The people of Chiraq better clean house in the political arena or they are simply living in a dead zone. This area may possibly be to far gone to ever bring back to a sane lifestyle.


3 posted on 10/21/2025 12:43:08 PM PDT by mythenjoseph (Islam is not compatible within a free society.)
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

The U of Chicago has had that area zoned “dry” for restaurants from before the ‘80s. If it is still that way, the execs would not be interested. Not a lot of fine dining in the area, either. Parking was a pain then, and it is much worse now.


4 posted on 10/21/2025 1:08:16 PM PDT by Dr. Sivana ("Whatsoever he shall say to you, do ye." (John 2:5))
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

From search assist -

The Obama Presidential Center project has faced issues related to rebar spacing, with allegations that the engineering firm Thornton Tomasetti imposed new standards that differed from established guidelines, leading to excessive costs and delays for the subcontractor II in One Construction. This situation has resulted in a lawsuit claiming racial discrimination and financial losses for the subcontractor.


5 posted on 10/21/2025 4:36:26 PM PDT by Libloather (Why do climate change hoax deniers live in mansions on the beach?)
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To: mythenjoseph

And to think this goes on in one of the most geographically desirable lakefront areas, if conditions were normally decent. There seems to be no bottom to human greed.


6 posted on 10/22/2025 7:47:40 AM PDT by Albion Wilde (To live free is the greatest gift; to die free is the greatest victory. —Erica Kirk)
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