This is a sample guest message. Register a free account today to become a member! Once signed in, you'll be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!
There's very little affordable housing. Affordable housing is defined by the USHUD as paying less than 30% of one's household income to housing expenses. There are many people who are in low-wage jobs, for one reason or another, either underemployed or unemployed and cannot find affordable housing in regions across the country, including up here in the northeast.
Seems intractable. Those wealthy enough will exercise their economic options and move away from poor families moving into their neighborhood. Doesn't seem like Section 8 funding is best used "chasing" wealthy folks around.
1% poor kids in a school is going to destroy it? This isn't busing that's over-whelming a good school.
As a single, unchanging factor (IOW, staying at 1% for many years)? No, that won't destroy the school.
The 'fish out of water' issue is related to busing where kids get bused into good schools in wealthier areas and then go back to their bad area at night. That prevents them from developing close relationships with their classmates and emulating their academic achievement. This is the reason why I've been against mass scale busing. However, by living in the area where they go to school they don't feel like outcasts even if their family makes less money.
Well, they did live in the same area when Clinton did it and according to the article, the experiment "bombed".
There is a ton of affordable housing. It's in lousy places. Lousy places that have become more difficult to properly police because of actions by members of the community.
This is why we need to scrap income-based welfare systems and go straight to a BIG. Then people will have an incentive to do better instead of being afraid of losing benefits.
I'll agree to disagree on the affordability housing stock issue, but I very much agree with your last statement - it's what people working in social services call the "cliff effect," and it isn't just isolated to housing vouchers. When one increases their household income, even marginally, a drop in benefits occurs, which on the face makes perfect sense. But when that drop in benefits occurs simultaneously among various benefit sources, it usually results in a net decrease in household income, disinscentivizing receivers of benefits from trying to increase their income through gainful employment.
As long as you are a 'firm believer' in the bolded, you make it very difficult to even open a conversation. There's really no debate to be had about the minimum wage (and I apologize in advance if you take offense to this) with anyone with a basic understanding of economics. Minimum wage is the entry level pay rate for unskilled labor. It's designed to allow an employer (in most cases a small business owner) to 'take a gamble' on hiring someone with no job skills, without exposing them to very much risk if the hire doesn't work out. It's designed to give those employees the incentive to exhibit a proficiency with basic job skills such as showing up for work on time, and show enough promise to their employer to earn the privilege of advanced training, gain greater responsibilities, and with those merits, an increase in pay, should the employer have that career path available. Some businesses, by nature, do not. Which means employees have a choice, and in this country, the freedom of choice, to either work that job with no opportunity for advancement, or find a minimum wage job with an employer who offers a career path.
All that table shows is racial make-up of the town. I understand terms like "white" and "black" are shorthand for a whole lot of other things ... but let's at least recognize that economic status is the real driver here, not skin color. A bunch of lily-white meth-heads moving in next door on a Section 8 voucher aren't going to do much for your property values.
Very interesting read. When I originally posted, I was thinking from the Section 8 property owner point of view....that they can be penalized for not accepting tenants with criminal backgrounds.
I work 50 hours a week and it is getting to where even what used to be ghetto is getting expensive for me. Houses in areas with boarded up abandoned houses are renting for nearly 1000 a month. No there is not enough affordable housing.
Just watched it - seems the problem was the sudden mass influx of poor residents rather than Section 8 itself.
The loophole for landlords is that they can refuse to rent to someone if they do not trust the stability of their income.
There is not enough affordable housing for you, in the area in which you currently choose to live. That is a circumstance you have control over, because in our great nation whose culture espouses inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, along with a federally mandated minimum wage which can, and in most cases, is exceeded by the individual states, you have the freedom to move to another part of your town, city, county, state or nation to an area wher the cost of living is lower, and your income will go further. I don't mean to come off as harsh, but there are choices - fair, good choices, which may come with a their own set of challenges, but there are both government-sponsered and privately-funded charitable organizations to assist folks with those. Unfortunately, we are increasingly becoming a society of people unwilling to make those more challenging choices, and sadly, sometimes because folks are either unaware or uninformed that plenty of support networks exist that are designed to make them less tough and challenging.
That sounds great in theory but the problem is affordable housing gets pushed farther and farther from the city center. And most US cities do not have reliable public transportation. As a result, poor people are pushed farther from the city with no reliable way to get where the jobs are. Thus, the cycle of poverty continues.
I'd assume the line item in the budget for this is set. What the administration is doing here is making the deliberate choice to help less people gain affordable housing to put a few in nice neighborhoods. I'm not sure if that's an effective use of monies.
Oh brilliant. I guss you can be your own maid at the hotel, I guess you can make your own burger next time you hit a drive through, I guess you can cut your own hair, in fact I guess you can provide all the services people who can't afford to live in the city provide now for yourself. Good luck with that.
Around here, most of the subsidized housing is in the city and the rest of us have to commute.
Very few people live right next to their job. Do we plan on mandating and subsidizing a proximity limit? That might actually work out well for me.
I have to think your view is a bit slanted. Many people do live near their jobs. Especially the kind I mentioned or at least near public transport.Commuting is also expensive. I live a mile from.my current job. I may have to move quite a way out of the city to get the housing costs down. Saving will be eaten up in time costs and increased transportation expenses. Lose, lose.
Slanted how? I can't afford to live in the city. A mile from my job? I would love to have the government help me with that.
Well that sucks for your city that people don't want to live downtown. But you understand, I assume, that there are many cities where people do like the downtown and want to live there. This is becoming more and more prevalent as cities around the country are renovated and more people want to be downtown.
You misunderstand. Most people would love to live downtown. They just can't afford it.
Clearly I opened up some conversation, regardless of my "firm believer" stance on minimum wage
.
That means vastly different things to different people. There are cities around me where $500K would buy you a 1 bedroom condo in a high crime area with crappy schools. What do we do? Subsidize a family making six figures so they can have a decent commute?Clearly I opened up some conversation, regardless of my "firm believer" stance on minimum wage
I am not an economics person by any means, other than whatever I took in college, so I'm not going to attempt to discuss the finer points - or even the larger points - on the economic fallacies of using the minimum wage as a mechanism for correcting, what I believe to be, a social and economic issue, as I really just don't know much about it. I simply believe that there is a significant discrepancy between what a low-skilled/no-skilled worker can earn and what it costs to earn the most affordable types of housing (and there certainly is here in NH, if no where else). IMO, philosophically, everyone deserves a safe and respectable home. Right now, that's not possible.
