Chicago Daily Observer

Strolling the quiet streets on a morning in May you’ll admire the lilacs spilling over the low stone fences, the mansions with the squares of lawn marching to the edge of the boulevards, the funky, vine-covered apartment buildings shaded by overarching oak and poplar. Only after a day or so do you notice what’s not here. There are no movie theaters, for example, and not much commerce generally. There’s nowhere to buy a pair of pants or shoes. There aren’t many restaurants, and only a single overpriced restaurant catering to the culinary affectations of the yuppie trade—strange for a neighborhood with so many wealthy residents. Only in the last few months did the neighborhood get a reliable, clean, and well-stocked grocery store.

Barack Obama was not only speaking to ‘small-town’ America, but the small towns that exist in Big Cities as well – we call them neighborhoods: Obama was talking to Dorchester, Queens, Staten Island, Pilsen, Canaryville, Brighton Park, Edison Park, Norwood Park, Evergreen Park, Morgan Park – hell every Park. Well, maybe not Hyde Park.

This was no Political Gotcha. This is Pure undiluted doctrine – Progressive doctrine. Obama lives this doctrine and it is from the heart – Words do matter. Barack Obama was speaking to his core constituency – Progressives. They are Gown elites – like his Hyde Park Neighbors in Chicago. Like Army brats, University Demographics – that’s what smart types call people – tend to be transient – move around alot.

By spending most of his adult life on the South Side of Chicago, and launching his careers as activist and politician there, Barack Obama has benefited from an unusual political and social base that is perhaps hard for the rest of the country to fully understand or relate to.

The area is both patchwork and blend of hardscrabble inner-city Black neighborhoods, well-to-do enclaves of the city’s Black elite, and the racially-mixed Hyde Park-Kenwood neighborhood with its strong Jewish presence where Obama and his family make their home. (The Obamas much-discussed house and lot are just across the street from my synagogue.) But it is much less a cauldron of conflict than an exceptional place of political cooperation where certain pacts and understandings were reached long ago that make for bedfellows that might seem strange to other parts of the country or the East Coast commentariat.

Auchi: Riverside Park project to create 10,000 new construction, retail and commercial jobs; it is a win-win for Chicago.

CHICAGO – One of Britain’s most successful businessmen says he remains bullish on investing in the American economy and wants to complete a proposed $2-billion real estate development near downtown Chicago.

Nadhmi Auchi, ranked by Forbes as one of the world’s wealthiest men with a reported net worth of $3.1 billion, looks forward to developing a 62-acre parcel just west of Chicago’s “Loop” near downtown as part of a signature project, Riverside Park, that would include residential, retail, and commercial space.