“the demise of public housing was not an inevitable outcome. As my colleague Rachel Cohen has pointed out, other countries have successfully pulled it off. Governments around the world have shown that they can operate mixed-income housing developments that have reliable maintenance and upkeep and that public housing doesn’t have to segregate poor people away from the middle class.
So why did public housing in the United States age so poorly?”
…
“efforts to undermine public housing are about as old as the efforts to build it. From the outset, opposition was fierce. Many Americans didn’t like the idea of the government using their tax dollars to subsidize poor people’s housing, and real estate developers were concerned about having to compete with the government.
The Housing Act of 1949, which had a goal of providing “a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family,” bolstered America’s public housing plans by heavily investing in the construction of new housing units. But by then, the federal government had already undermined its own stated plans by capping construction costs (which encouraged using cheap materials and discouraged modern appliances) and allowing racial segregation. Congress had also doomed public housing authorities’ ability to raise revenue through rents in 1936 when it passed the George-Healey Act, which established income limits for who can qualify for public housing — making mixed-income public housing models impossible for federally funded projects.
As housing projects started to draw more Black residents, white people who lived in public housing started leaving, especially after the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s banned racial discrimination in housing. This was partly because the Federal Housing Authority pushed for more people to own homes and expanded its loans mostly to white people, helping white families move out of the projects. Black families didn’t receive the same opportunity.
“You saw a change in the racial composition, which simply added to the stigma and the pattern of administrative neglect that characterized many housing authorities,” the historian Ed Goetz told The Atlantic in 2015.
Starting with President Richard Nixon — who declared that the US government had turned into “the biggest slumlord in history” and suspended federal spending on subsidized housing — public housing started facing serious austerity measures and never recovered. Federal investments shifted away from building new public housing units and toward housing vouchers and public-private partnerships.
In the decades that followed, public housing started declining in quality, and Congress funded a program to demolish dilapidated public housing units and replace them with newly constructed or renovated mixed-income developments. But according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, those demolitions were an “overcorrection”; public housing simply needed more funding and better management.”
“States’ efforts to create and then tightly regulate legal markets for pot have, ironically, made the black market for weed bigger than it’s ever been.”
“US philanthropy is still much, much, much more about rich guys like David Geffen slapping their names on concert halls than it is about donating to help people dying from malaria, or animals being tortured in factory farms, or preventing deaths from pandemics and out-of-control AI, to name a few EA-associated causes.
Pretending otherwise, though, lets more complacent philanthropists off the hook for refusing to think through the consequences of their actions.”
Lindsey Graham, along with many Republicans, have turned over all integrity and honesty for Trump. Trump’s power over the Republican Party, and over Republican Senators who used to have strong independent opinions, is amazing.
“The first death has been reported in the ongoing measles outbreak in West Texas, according to a press release sent out by the Texas Department of State Health Services Wednesday.
The victim was an unvaccinated child who was hospitalized in Lubbock last week.
The outbreak, starting in late January, has 124 confirmed cases, the majority of which are either children, unvaccinated people, or both. Eighteen people have been hospitalized, the state health department said.”
…
“According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the last measles death in the United States was reported a decade ago in 2015. Measles was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, which the CDC attributes to its vaccination program.
Vaccination rates for the MMR vaccine in Texas have dropped slightly in recent years following the Covid-19 pandemic.”
“President Donald Trump said Wednesday the United States will end the Biden administration’s concessions aimed at promoting free elections in Venezuela, canceling a license that allowed U.S. oil company Chevron to produce and export oil in the country.”
…
“Chevron’s oil exports out of Venezuela reached 294,000 barrels a day in January, the highest level since it resume shipments from its operations there in early 2023, Reuters reported earlier this month citing data from Venezuela’s state-owned company PdVSA. That crude oil went to refineries in the United States, according to the data.
Venezuela produced just over 1 million barrels a day of oil in January, according to data it reported to OPEC.”
“The Department of Veterans Affairs has temporarily suspended billions of dollars in planned contract cuts following concerns that the move would hurt critical veterans’ health services, lawmakers and veterans service organizations said Wednesday.
The pause affects hundreds of VA contracts that Secretary Doug Collins a day earlier described as simply consulting deals, whose cancellation would save $2 billion as the Trump administration works to slash costs across the federal government.”
“A group with ties to Elon Musk is pouring more than $1 million into Wisconsin’s upcoming Supreme Court race — a sign that even as Musk races to overhaul Washington, his influence extends beyond it.
Musk has directly boosted the Republican-backed candidate in the Wisconsin race on his powerful X platform. And a Republican-aligned group, Building America’s Future, is spending at least $1.5 million in the state, with ads set to start running later this week. Musk has donated to the group in the past, and it has backed some of President Donald Trump’s controversial Cabinet picks.”