Category: Local issues

Lord Wellington’s lament: Part 4, ‘those people in our midst’

24 July, 2008 (09:23) | Local issues, Policy, Public housing, Slums, Subsidy, US News, Vouchers | No comments

[Continued from the previous Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.]
 
Correlation, as we have drummed into our heads in logic class, is not causation, though it definitely has meaning.  Hanna Rosin’s lengthy Atlantic article about the correlation between increased inner-ring suburban crime and the dispersal of formerly public housing residents via vouchers after demolition assembles […]

Lord Wellington’s lament: Part 3, ‘day-release prison

23 July, 2008 (09:46) | Local issues, Policy, Public housing, Slums, Subsidy, US News, Vouchers | No comments

[Continued from the previous Part 1 and Part 2.]
 
So far, in deconstructing the lengthy Atlantic article about deconcentrating poverty by demolishing public housing and giving residents economic mobility, an article whose premises I find somewhere between flawed and offensive, although they are unstated, indirect, and hard-to-pin-down. 
 

Cough up that theory now, there’s a good […]

Lord Wellington’s lament: Part 2, ‘warehousing the poor’

22 July, 2008 (10:30) | Local issues, Policy, Public housing, Slums, Subsidy, US News, Vouchers | No comments

 [Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
 
Yesterday we started digging into an 8,500 word Atlantic article that never quite has the courage of its convictions.  Echoing the Duke of Wellington’s lament about the railways –
 
“[Railroads will] only encourage the common people to move about needlessly.”
The Duke of Wellington, 1835
 

Imagine having to sit among them
 
– it wants […]

Lord Wellington’s lament: Part 1, ‘needlessly moving about’

21 July, 2008 (09:59) | Local issues, Policy, Public housing, Slums, Subsidy, US News, Vouchers | No comments

 
“[Railroads will] only encourage the common people to move about needlessly.”
The Duke of Wellington, 1835
 

 
There is much to admire in the Iron Duke, but when it came to the Iron Horse, no matter how dismissive, he was imperiously, dismissively, magisterially wrong.  Railways created mobility and opportunity, and the common people took advantage of it to […]

When money moves in

8 July, 2008 (08:07) | Cities, Demographics, Inclusionary zoning, Local issues, US News, Workforce housing | No comments

Not only is the world urbanizing, so too is America, and as we do, The value of urban land will continue to rise, with consequences that are both logically predictable – Every silver lining has a cloud – and utterly astonishing to those experiencing them, as detailed in this article from The San Francisco Chronicle:
 
It’s […]