It's easy to understand the hype if you start with the Marxist assumption that public ownership is always better than private. Otherwise, it's just a different way of talking public housing and frankly Portland can't build that at a sane cost per unit.
Rejecting empirical thought isn't hypocritical. But it doesn't mean that those of us who still think there's a place of empiricism have to take you seriously if you do reject empiricism.
Folks don't understand that a rejection of empiricism is actually fundamental to much of modern Socialist thought. Read your Foucault, people! And then read about how he got kicked out of Tunisia for raping minors in a graveyard.
By contrast the argument for increasing the Medicaid income floor is easy: it's cheaper for taxpayers to insure folks through Medicaid than through the Obamacare exchanges for a significant fraction of those insureds. Because math.
And exactly the same folks who want to radically increase public housing spend will fight to maintain that added expense. The GOP is awful but Dems have to get better at math.
Still, the best argument for publicly owned or developed housing is lower costs. There is no measure--cost per unit, $PSF, etc., where publicly subsidized housing builds housing at a cost comparable to private market in the US. That's a problem.
Yeah we've repeatedly demonstrated that we cannot build affordable housing affordably in US. US Left desperately needs to get per unit public spending cost down.
Social housing is just a synonym for affordable housing. And we can't get the cost per unit on that down to anything close to privately built housing! The Hollywood Hub is $700K a unit and mostly studios and 1BRs!
It was literally the core of his campaign platform. If he has high ranking officials who oppose him on it and have the ability to hobble him, of course they have to go. That's democracy.
I don't care what the law says. Ethics say she shouldn't take the money. We pay her $133K a year so she does not have outside financial interests. That's more than most of us make!
I'm a Democrat because it's the only party for people who believe all humans are created equal. We also have some other people in the party and frankly we are better off when they are not our candidates.
A HUGE part of our particular local problem is our wacky new Council system. The DSA is in no danger of taking over the Mayor's office, if the ranked choice voting results from last election are an indicator.
I am so disappointed this doesn't clearly seem to be a line for Dems. Mills is not my ideal candidate but she can win. And doesn't have any Nazi tattoos.
Maybe our overreliance on ballot initiatives distorts our politics. I'd be curious to understand the proportion of various local budgets dictated by ballot initiatives from long ago, and we make it hard to redesign badly designed initiatives. (Collection of Arts Tax for instance?)
The 77 year old incumbent governor who can beat Collins is a better choice than a real progressive choice who cannot. Alternatives have to make the case that they can do better than Mills.
We've got to stop making "affordable" housing an enemy of building more housing, period. If you build enough new housing in a neighborhood, especially one where market rents are near "affordable," you end up with lower rents for everyone and a bunch of "free" (to public budgets) "affordable" housing
If you weight by population and know voting patterns, it's clear that the more Democratic your county is, the longer your county's residents live, with a handful of exceptions in the rural great plains.
