Chi Trib reports big bucks paid to a non-profit affordable-housing exec — $685,000 in 2008, “at least three times higher” than comparables and judged “clearly absurd” by a specialist.

She and two fellow board members decide how much she gets, one of whom is a long-time Oak Parker and onetime exec director of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, Rev. Stanley Davis.

Davis heads his own non-profit operation, Interfaith Connections, aimed at promoting “interfaith understanding,” but his day job is with the Council of Religious Leaders of Metropolitan Chicago, where he is co-executive director.

The affordable-housing exec is Christine M.J. Oliver, president of the Chicago Dwellings Association, which has no web site (!), but has a history going back to 1948, when it was created by the Chicago (public) Housing Authority as a private corporation to build housing “for moderate-income families.”

It built Midway Gardens, at 60th and Cottage Grove, with 318 units, and several smaller developments.  It has four buildings now, says Chi Trib.  These “also have become a lucrative income source” for Oliver.

She “also has taken out personal loans of nearly half a million dollars for her own housing purchases.”  This is a very iffy proposition.  Non-profits lend mortgage cash for employees whom they relocate.  Help them get started in a new city.  But Oliver has headed CDA since 1991, coming over from the CHA after two years, before which she was in DC with HUD since 1983. 

So she has had dwelling places in the Chi area for a long time — currently three of them, in fact — in an unnamed northern suburb, in Lincoln Park, and, oops, not even in Illinois but on Gasparilla Island on the Gulf of Mexico.  Chi Trib could not find out which dwelling the half million was for — maybe the one on the Gulf, where she probably relocates occasionally.

Look.  She works hard and does a good job, her office says, having saved CDA from bankruptcy.  One of her buildings, the one at 60th and Cottage, had things wrong with it, the city hauled CDA into court.  But they fixed the code violations, and all was forgiven.

But look again.  This lady is getting rich on this non-profit gig.  Please.

As for Oak Park’s Stan Davis . . . we don’t know.  He and the A.M.E. elder — making two of the cloth in this together — gave the O.K. to her salary, which combined with her O.K. made it official: $685G for ‘08, after $725G (!) in ‘05, plus $689G to fund her retirement in all.

Davis and the A.M.E. man, the other director, could at least explain, couldn’t they?  But they are as quiet about this apparent debacle — involving millions in public money, by the way, from HUD — as she is.  And she ain’t sayin’ nothing.

Back in the novitiate, novices would take long walks in the countryside, now and then meeting a knight of the road — I didn’t, but the novice master told us about it — who hit them up for a few nickles.  In the early ‘50s it was.  We have no money, novices said, “We have a vow of poverty.”  To which the hobo, seeing they were well enough dressed and fed: “Oh? Say, where can I get one o’ them vows of poverty?”

Where can I get one o’ them non-profit jobs?