Economically illiterate activists are laying the groundwork to make housing harder to find, and make life worse, in Rhode Island:
This is how economics works. The rent goes up to reflect the real value of the property. Other property owners see the value of their space and reconsider their usage.
For example, instead of renovating or building to add a new storage unit (which progressives hate), the property owner renovates or builds apartments. When the supply increases, the value and the rent will stop climbing or go down. Cap rent, and you’ll get the reverse effect: less housing and higher prices.
Unfortunately, the same activists have been training each other for decades to dismiss such arguments as mumbo-jumbo from evil, greedy people. That’s a shame, and they’ll probably never question whether they, themselves, are contributing to the suffering as it increases. They’ll get angrier and angrier that others didn’t react as they’d expected them to, taking it as greater proof of evil.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- A (strategic?) delay informing the governor
- A (deliberate?) controversy over charging journalists for email
- East Providence small businesses over the edge
- The strange coincidences of Ella McKay
- Fungs in a row
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3 and Photoshop AI.
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This is how appeals to the Ethics Commission often end, these days:
From personal experience, I can testify that the Ethics Commission combines the gradual accretion of ethical allowances with the possibility that the commission will completely disregard its precedence to suit its preferences of the moment. Thus, it tends toward increasing permissiveness with a constant danger of being embarrassed, as a complainant, when the commission decides to change its mind on a whim.
The entire exercise has become one of giving approval to manifestly unethical conduct. We should get rid of it and let voters decide what’s ethical without giving politicians recourse to a board of insiders who are happy to give them seals of approval.
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Following our first inquiry of Education Commissioner Angelica Infante-Green and the Council on Elementary and Secondary Education about Rhode Island transgender policy in K-12 schools and their non-response, Anchor Rising reached out a second time, this time asking,
… current RIDE policy permits schools to discuss transgender procedures with students. RIDE policy also permits schools to refrain from notifying the parents of students at the secondary level who may be considering or are undergoing gender transition.
However, thousands of transgender individuals have detransitioned: the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey alone references 2,242 individuals who have done so. The stories of an increasing number of detransitioners have been in the news recently.
In light of this, is RIDE considering changes to its transgender policies given that the effects of transitioning – sterility and non-functional organs – are permanent while a child’s impulses are changeable and ephemeral?
Both Education Commissioner Angelica Infante-Green and the Council on Elementary and Secondary Education also refused to respond to this second question.
Why?
A couple of common sense, foundational items.
1.) The vast majority of Rhode Island children in K-12 schools are minor and, therefore, legally and developmentally incapable of making a major decision about life-changing, permanent surgery and hormonal procedures.
2.) With the vast, overwhelming majority of families, parents care far more than anyone about their children. Therefore, it is obvious and crucial that they be informed if their child is considering something as monumental as transgender procedures. Add to this fundamental parental rights that include the pretty obvious right to be informed about everything to do with their children.
The Introduction to Rhode Island’s transgender policy for K-12 schools states that
All students need a safe and supportive school environment to progress academically and developmentally.
The purview to implement, perpetuate or lead change to the state’s K-12 transgender policy is vested in Rhode Island’s Education Commissioner and the Council on Elementary and Secondary Education via the authority of the governor. As currently written, this policy allows school officials to discuss transgender procedures with children and, in the case of students at the secondary level, to refrain from notifying their parents that they may be considering or are undergoing gender transition procedures.
If the policy does, indeed, foster a “safe” school environment and is what is best for Rhode Island’s children and families, why are the Education Commissioner and the Council studiously declining to answer questions about it?
Featured Image by Kristina Flour via Unsplash
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Look, I generally disagree with Attorney General Peter Neronha’s politics, but I could put that aside if I thought he were coming to conclusions reasonably. Unfortunately:
I’m certainly not going to defend predatory investment firms, but read the article. Steward Health Care was already dying. The story is of an equity firm finding a way to make money off it nonetheless.
Trying to make this a government vs. private sector issue is a terrible framing that distracts from the reality causing healthcare problems, while also making it ripe for private sector predation. Whether Neronha does so deliberately or not, it’s difficult to conclude otherwise than that the distraction is intended to be away from government’s role in the mess.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Trusting McKee to run the state
- Alviti talks around the problem
- A request to declare RI government a disaster… officially
- SOS on easing voting restrictions in the constitution
- RIPTA bus driver red flag
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3 and Photoshop AI.
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I warned, when John DePetro and I discussed it some weeks ago, that we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that the Brown University student shot in Vermont was the victim of anti-Palestinian sentiment. Now, fully aware how polarized we are, I wouldn’t assert that everybody should take Daniel Greenfield’s FrontPageMag article as proof to the contrary, but I do wonder how many people outside of those who seek news from conservative media even know this:
The three Muslim men were returning home from a party on Saturday night when James J. Eaton, a local resident with a history of mental instability, stumbled out of a white clapboard house on the residential street and without a word fired four shots at the three men.
Eaton had been described as “that hippie guy” and “progressive”, an organic farmer who had posted a meme with a definition of “Amerika” that called it “the worst sense of the United States, ie imperialism, corruption and the global exportation of American culture.”
He appeared to be a Biden supporter …
In reality, Eaton supported Hamas.
For progressives, it seems, this isn’t how evidence works. If Arab students are shot, it must be because of anti-Arab bigotry, the details are just coloring.
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Arguably the best investigative reporting currently on offer in Rhode Island is coming from the Johnston Sunrise’s Rory Schuler, and this article about the circuitous route Mayor Joseph M. Polisena Jr. took to secure emergency access to a flooded neighborhood in the city is a great example:
Several sources confirm Polisena had been trying to get help from Gov. Dan McKee’s office throughout the weekend, but the governor’s office was slow to offer solutions. The mayor had 30 constituents who were unreachable by emergency vehicles and minutes mattered.
He contacted the state’s federal delegation — they were on it, but once again, it was a holiday weekend, and an inaccessible neighborhood was unacceptable. The town needed vehicle-access to Belfield Drive, and the water was now too deep for the town’s Humvees to cross (the water had not fully receded following the Dec. 18 storm).
After striking out with the governor’s office, sources reveal Polisena worked back channels to reach Washington D.C., starting with Helena Foulkes, McKee’s Democratic rival (he beat Foulkes to the nomination in 2022).
Foulkes, who serves on Johnston’s School Building Committee, connected town officials with former Rhode Island Gov. Gina M. Raimondo, who now serves as the U.S. Secretary of Commerce. Raimondo connected Polisena’s office to U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.
On Wednesday morning, Polisena provided an emergency agreement he signed with the Rhode Island Department of Transportation (RIDOT), seeking Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) approval for a “temporary emergency locked gate access to Interstate 295 from Belfield Avenue in Johnston,” which ultimately permitted the town to start construction at 6 a.m. Wednesday morning.
Step 1 in any analysis is to evaluate the situation, and I see three relevant problem points, here.
First, the state of Rhode Island has poor infrastructure. This manifests, first, in the fact that roadways, generally, can’t process enough water. This is a full-system shortcoming, spreading blame at the state and local levels. Activists attempt to relieve that blame by claiming we’re facing unprecedented problems related to global climate change, but that’s no excuse. Even if you believe that’s the reality, priority #1 of elected officials is to ensure that our infrastructure can accommodate the change. It manifests, second, in the layout and development of roadways that leads a single point of egress for this neighborhood. That, frankly, is mostly a local problem.
Second, current regulation is a problem. Understandably, the governments overseeing highway construction, whether federal or state, have an interest in preventing major throughways from becoming subject to cross-traffic. Route 95, for instance, can’t become Route 1. They serve different purposes. Nonetheless, provision must be made for emergencies, and it shouldn’t take extreme circumstances to lay the foundation for local governments to build access to highways for emergency purposes.
Third, the combined effect of all of the above is to put a huge amount of discretionary power in the hands of a few connected people. This is perhaps the greatest of the downstream consequences of our current system. Some speculate that McKee is not friendly with Polisena, so he wouldn’t help. That can only be the case if we’ve created a situation in which special help is needed and it has to filter through the governor’s office. The fact that the Foulkes->Raimondo->Buttigieg route appears to have worked does not change the problem; it only makes it a national problem. It’s not good that these people have discretionary authority over something so predictable and so local.
It helps to imagine a specific situation when testing these systemic questions. Imagine the mayor of Johnston were a Republican, and imagine further that he (or she) had been spotted as somebody primed for the national stage — perhaps a Presidential contender, one day. Would Buttigieg have granted him (or her) the political coup of proving to be somebody who could get things done for constituents? One needn’t be very cynical to respond, “no,” which means that the direct and specific emergency needs of people in that neighborhood are vulnerable to entirely unrelated and prospective political calculations of partisans.
That’s really not healthy, and Rhode Islanders across the political spectrum should be asking how we can move our system to something that isn’t so obviously insane.
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3 and Photoshop AI.
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Amidst all the other happenings in Rhode Islanders’ lives, it’s worth a moment to consider that we’ve reached the point that the General Assembly is delving into such levels of micromanagement as housing setbacks and in-law apartments in local zoning. That’s a sign that we’re doing things wrong.
In the mania of the day (or simply because Borg-like progressives increasingly dominate conversations), I’m seeing people mention it less frequently, but one of Rhode Island’s most-endearing qualities is the heterogeneity of neighborhoods across the state. The genuine diversity of living possibilities in the Ocean State is incredibly attractive, intrinsically characteristic, and worthy of preservation. These are propositions that should enjoy agreement across the political spectrum… unless it is unthinkingly swamped by moral sloganeering and simplistic economic thinking.
Here’s a straightforward point that only seems counterintuitive because our society has gone utterly insane: You don’t get diversity from the top down. You get diversity when people are free to pursue their unique preferences. Genuine diversity is unavoidably organic. It’s a balance of completely atomized individualism with natural group formation. Complete diffusion is salvaged by the human need for community so that unique communities form.
Think of it in terms of neighborhoods. If every resident pursues the extreme of individualism, the block looks like an incoherent mess. If people with compatibly unique personalities congregate, the neighborhood gets character. Every time the top of the Rhode Island power structure decides We the People cannot be trusted to make community decisions, it is implicitly demanding greater conformity.
The practical politics and incentives are easy to understand. Because it’s difficult to win over majorities across dozens of communities, special interests move up the ladder (backed by a relatively small group of noisy do-gooders) and make it in the interest of state-level politicians to tell Rhode Islanders how they ought to live. You can buy a Speaker of the House or a few dozen legislators more cheaply than you can buy majorities of local councils and boards across the state.
In this reality, we see the importance of maintaining a baseline shared truism among the broader population that such matters are not the business of those fungible officials. No law of the universe says housing has to increase in a particular area. I don’t like protectionism or tight local zoning, either, but the value of freedom and self-determination is so immense that we should insist that advocates do the work of persuading the people, rather than buying off a handful of powerful politicians to impose tyranny with the hope that it might do some good for some people in the short term.
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- McKee’s State of the State
- Forcing Johnston to use a back door to keep residents safe
- Amore invites voter fraud with same-day, immediate-residency proposal
- The cost of the soccer stadium
- “Rumors” about a new Washington Bridge
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3.
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