Housing
John and Justin delve into the already-thick snow drifts of political campaign season.
An observer doesn’t have to be cynical to wonder why the Huffington Post published its extensive article warning of the RI Political Co-Op’s division of Ocean State progressives yesterday. After all, the article was fueled in large part by “a left-wing Rhode Island activist who requested anonymity to protect professional relationships.” Anonymous sourcing in a case…
Right from the beginning, an op-ed in the Boston Globe by RI Political Co-Op progressive candidate Lenny Cioe gives off warning signals: In many neighborhoods near colleges like Providence College, Johnson and Wales, and Brown University, predatory real estate companies are jacking up rents and forcing out families in favor of high-paying students. And that’s…
With that question, I mean Woonsocket as representative of municipal governments generally. The city is in the midst of the process of figuring out how to spend the $36 million dollars the federal government will send its way as part of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). You’ll recall that the purpose of the act…
Even before it goes into effect, a new rent-control law in St. Paul, Minnesota, is backfiring: “Less than 24 hours after St. Paul voters approved one of the country’s most stringent rent control policies, Nicolle Goodman’s phone started to ring,” the Star-Tribune reports. “Developers were calling to tell the city’s director of planning and economic…
We’ve heard quite a bit about the terrors of eviction during the pandemic and the government-driven closure of our economy, and the talk tends to imply that people who own rental properties don’t need the money — as if the rentals merely contribute side cash to big piles in their basements. That perspective has informed…
One difficulty with assessing sympathetic stories associated with public policy debates (and the reason advocates actively seek and promote them) is that they short circuit rational discussion about tradeoffs. The position of seeming to lack sympathy is so uncomfortable that the public debate leaves important details unraised and, typically, the villain is assigned to be…
John and Justin talk about people and groups that are in and out of political races and trends.
In an all-too-familiar sequence of events, progressives made social media noise to shame a politician with whom they disagreed — in this case, Providence City Councilman Nicholas Narducci, who helped the city clean up a homeless encampment under a Rt. 146 overpass — and the news media jumped right in to tow their line, framing…
It’s very easy to demand that government “ban evictions” when, like the people Katie Mulvaney interviewed for the Providence Journal, you’re not the one trying to derive income from a rental property: “The governor and the General Assembly have the authority to protect the public’s health with a moratorium” as well as Congress, said Jennifer…