Hundreds of government-subsidized apartments in Sen. Barack Obama’s former Illinois state Senate district that were built or rehabilitated by a half dozen of his close political friends and donors are now in such bad condition they will have to be demolished, The Boston Globe reports. This raises a big question for the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee: Is this the kind of change he plans to bring to the White House?

Obama co-authored an Illinois law that created $26 million in tax credits for local developers to join local authorities in public-private partnerships designed to rescue Chicago’s famously bad public housing. As a U.S. senator, Obama has also called for massively increased federal housing subsidies.