If a “living wage” ordinance becomes the law in Oak Park, mandating $11.50 an hour for all employees, the Lake Theater on Lake Street will close, owner Willis Johnson told the Oak Park Community Relations Commission Wednesday night at a hearing in Village Hall.

Johnson pays many employees $8 an hour, and to raise it to the prescribed level would put the Lake out of competition with theaters in four neighboring communities, he said, delivering the night’s heaviest blow against the proposed ordinance after a series of employers had similarly spoken against it and others for it.

The commission has a document ready for delivering to the village board in which it recommends the $11.50 minimum.  It had been charged by the board with offering its recommendation in the wake of a November 2008 advisory referendum in which a “living wage” was supported by 60% of voters.

The Lake is an anchor of after-hours life in Downtown Oak Park and draws customers from Oak Park and other suburbs and the West Side of Chicago.  Classic Cinemas has had it since 1981.

.. On April 11, 1936, the Lake Theatre opened with a single screen, and a seating capacity of 1,420. Designed by world-renowned architect Thomas Lamb, the Lake is a prime example of art deco style. When Classic Cinemas took over the Lake in 1981, its distinctive decorative elements had long been painted over, and water damage from a leaky roof had destroyed much of its plasterwork. Classic Cinemas was finally able to purchase the theatre in December of 1984 and immediately embarked on an ambitious renovation project.

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?

Steve Sailer has nailed an important newspaper datum:

All those boring end-of-year / end-of-decade articles that journalists phone in so that they can take the last week of the year off are finally over.

Wed. Journal of OP&RF had a head for its year-ender that got my attention: it had me thinking its villager of the year was being investigated.

Publicity-shy Kelly caught in feds’ spotlight

Until I remembered this was an issue I didn’t have to read. Year-ending thumb-sucker, you know.

Chi Daily News’s Don Zochert used to call up clips and go to work isolating the important and the curious brilliantly. He’s a novelist and a stylist — and biographer of Laura Ingalls Wilder. His stuff I’d read, because it had surprises. Pleasant ones, not crash-bang accidents, horrifying but attention-getting.

Most not, however. Sailer, an expert on race relations, spots a decade-long trend that everyone missed, “a hidden key to understanding the two seminal events of the last decade—9/11 and the economic collapse.”

The factor linking the two big stories of the 2000s: George W. Bush’s sizable degree of culpability in both disasters:

Bush had Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta eradicate the airport security ethnic profiling system before 9/11. (Then he reappointed Mineta, a Democrat, for his second term!).

Bush repeatedly signaled the mortgage industry in 2002-2004 that zero down payment home purchases would be A-OK with his federal regulators.

Of course, those are by no means the only causes of the subsequent disasters. But shouldn’t we at least talk about them?

Sailer does, asking, “what links Bush’s two blunders” and answering, “George W. Bush’s Commitment to Diversity.

Here’s Governor Bush during his second debate with Al Gore on October 11, 2000:

“And secondly, there is other forms of racial profiling that goes on in America. Arab-Americans are racially profiled in what’s called secret evidence [sic]. People are stopped, and we got to do something about that. My friend, Senator Spencer Abraham of Michigan, is pushing a law to make sure that, you know, Arab-Americans are treated with respect.

Which is related closely to this:

Michael Tuohey, the U.S. Airways desk clerk who checked Atta in that morning later admitted that he said to himself: “If this guy doesn’t look like an Arab terrorist, then nothing does”. But, then “I gave myself a political correct slap”. And three thousand died. “[“I Was The One,” Interview with Oprah Winfrey, September 12, 2005]

Etc. Read the whole thing.

Speed traps in Oak Park:

Ridgeland Avenue near Between Filmore [sp] & Harvard Street

A police car will sit facing north in the Washington Irving school lot, well hidden from drivers coming north because they are shielded by the dumpsters – so they’re sitting far enough back from plain sight of drivers. I’ve seen patrol cars sitting there during rush hour traffic and on weekends. They are not visible to the driver but passengers can spot them readily.
May 14, 2008

Way out of date, plus nobody commented one way or other, with these options:

1. Yes! This is a speed trap.

2. No, this is definitely NOT a speed trap.

Others, equally discussed:

Harlem Avenue near North Avenue

North Avenue near Taylor Avenue

Potential speedsters are asked, “Need A Good Traffic Attorney?”  And a list of “NMA Traffic Attorney Referrals” is offered.  NMA is National Motorists Association, whose “main premise . . . is that if motorists will join together in one organization to represent their rights and interests as drivers, they will no longer be ignored and exploited by federal, state and local governments.”

Well, everybody deserves his day in court, but in general, as matters stand in OP, I must say I root for the traffic cops in these situations.

On the other hand, “Speed traps are often used by municipalities as a method of generating revenue,” says NMA in a companion piece, “7 Ways To Shut Down A Speed Trap.”

This 13–year-old fashion maven knows style.

The youngest of three sisters, Tavi has grown up on a quiet, tree-lined street in a community west of Chicago. (She asked that her suburb go unnamed so that she might remain low-profile in her hometown.)

But page one in Chi Trib is the wrong way to remain low-profile in her hometown. 

(Congratulations, Steve and Berit, on your admirable daughter!)

“The regulators need regulating,” says Wednesday Journal of OP & RF in this week’s “Inside Report”:

More details continue to emerge about opportunities missed and thwarted by federal regulators, leading to the demise of Park National Bank. A recent Crain’s Chicago Business profile  . . . of legendary Chicago banker Harrison Steans’ return [sic] to the banking scene, notes that Cole Taylor Bank, of which he is a leading stockholder, held merger talks with Park National but federal regulators nixed the deal because they had concerns about Cole Taylor.

Steans started a foundation 20 years ago, which has made millions in loans to improve conditions in the North Lawndale neighborhood on the city’s West Side. In other words, if Park National were to be swallowed by another bank, better one led by someone like Steans than U.S. Bank, the eventual acquirer, which has no track record of local community reinvestment.

Nor of being saddled with more bad loans than it can handle.

In any case, regulators always need regulating, I commented, having in mind congressional overseers such as Rep. Barney Frank (D.-Mass.), who encouraged Fannie Mae to multiply loans to marginal borrowers and refused to call a spade a spade when its situation was getting ugly — when the Bush White House was calling for more regulation, by the way.

Park National’s Mike Kelly counted on Frank et al. to do their job and invested millions in Fannie, and this was his mistake. 

Cherchez le governmentally backed agency and its congressional guardians, especially left-wingers who know where the votes are and cater to those who cast them.