Housing
Rhode Island has real problems, and an unavoidable consequence of reality is that those who most need a healthy, vibrant society under their feet will face the greatest risk of tragedy in an unhealthy, sclerotic one. The wise approach, then, when one observes suffering in the community is to look for fundamental causes and solutions…
John DePetro and Justin Katz pull back the curtain on Rhode Island politics
A free people ought to reject some policies completely on principle, no matter what the practical arguments for them might be in the moment. The Chinese Communists’ social credit system is one such policy, whereby the government leverages its power to grant rewards or impose demerits in order to control the population. The American spirit…
More frequently than I liked, during my years reading the thousands of bills submitted in the Rhode Island General Assembly each year, I’d come across one that made me wonder how anybody could submit such a thing. Legislators couldn’t truly be representative of their constituents if they were expected to be the uber academics we…
A lack of housing is a problem, and racism is simply wrong, so we have powerful emotional incentive to join the two matters into the story we tell about our society. In a more-specific way, advocates and researchers have even more-powerful economic incentive to do so. In that space, as with “equity audits” in schools,…
Judy Schwalbach makes that connection explicit in a report on school choice policies and history in Washington, D.C.: During the 20th century, federally sanctioned housing “redlining” influenced the composition of neighborhoods in large cities across the country, including Washington, D.C. The term “redlining” came from the color-coded maps developed by the Home Owners Loan Corporation…
Having recently fallen into an argument about the overlaps between history, housing, and racism, I couldn’t do otherwise than take note of a GoLocalProv article headlined, “Black Homeownership in RI Is as Low as It Was in the 1960s.” In Rhode Island, just 6% of homes are owned by Black households. And, becoming a new…
Buzzwords flow through political and ideological debates — at the state level even more so than the federal — to the extent that one has to wonder whether the people using them really subscribe to the ideas that they represent. Consider Democrat Representative from Cranston Brandon Potter, tweeting about the city’s decision to permit construction…
To understand racial differences in wealth, blaming “systemic racism” is a simplistic way to ignore the harm of radical policies.
Progressive Senator Sam Bell’s housing report is impressive as a sophomore’s research project, but it’d be nice if professional journalists would give readers some sense of what the academic exercise would look like in the real world.