June 2008

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    Let’s Talk About CDCs…

    ...that is if we could. Awareness of community development, both within the larger progressive movement and in the country as a whole, is tragically limited. This is due in part to the lack of a common language around which we…

  • New Orleans Voices

    During my recent reporting in New Orleans for a story for Amnesty International on the continuing homelessness and displacement crisis, we saw the stark irony of 42,000 vacant homes, many of them actually in decent shape, juxtaposed with tens of…

  • Bluegrass, Rodeos, and Other Signs of a Living Community

    This weekend the small community where I live had its annual heritage fair. This is when people get together to celebrate the traditional arts that have helped the community sustain itself over the generations. What I always find notable about…

  • Going Green

    The last week of June turned out to be Sustainable Development Week unofficially in Chicago as a convergence of events spread the word on opportunities to be found in Going Green—from submitting a federal grant application, to 500 attendees at…

  • Inclusive Growth, Identity, Poverty-Alleviation, and Freedom

    I am writing from India, where last week a small but significant convening took place. Some 250 experts (business leaders, academics, and other thinkers) from 25 countries came together for a two-day conference in Mumbai, India, titled The Responsibility to…

  • Another Disaster

    One of the stories that has been submerged in the Midwest flooding is the complete lack of an effective FEMA response, bad judgment, and limited capacity. A tragic example was that FEMA was not requiring flood insurance for a number…

  • What is a Housing “Crisis”?

    Do we face a housing crisis when home prices are spiraling upward or when they are tumbling downward? Or both? Between 2000 and 2006, the median price of a new single-family home (in 2007 dollars) increased from $215,075 to $254,423,…

  • Good News—New York State Style

    New York state has been described as having the most dysfunctional legislature in the country. Gerrymandering that keeps the houses continually in the hands of opposing parties, and rules that give far too much power to the “three men in…

  • No Sense of Decency?

    Kari Lydersen has been posting on Rooflines from New Orleans this week, offering first-person witness to the sorry plight of the city’s poor and the explosion in the homelessness rate just two months short of the third anniversary of Hurricane…

  • One Candidate Drops Out of Public Finance, Another Wishes He Could

    Barack Obama’s decision to opt out of the public financing system for this fall’s general presidential election has all the Sabbath Gasbags buzzing. The Obama campaign undoubtedly weighed the pros and the cons and certainly knew that, regardless of perception,…

  • Watching the Numbers

    When I was a kid, I loved watching presidential election returns. Every four years I’d get to rush home and sit in front of the TV and watch as the tote boards toted and the commentators commentated and eventually the…

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    Down and Out in the Big Easy

    “Homeless outreach!” calls out Mike Miller as he ducks through a busted wall to climb the steps of an abandoned house in New Orleans’ Mid-City neighborhood. Torn drywall hangs in scraps and old clothes, empty beer and food cans and…

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    Another Day in the Lower Ninth Ward

    Sweat pours down Reginald “Trigger” Smiths face as he cleans out a storage unit squeezed next to three FEMA trailers on his lot in the Lower Ninth Ward, one of the New Orleans neighborhoods most devastated by Hurricane Katrina. He…

  • Halting the Oil Slick’s Spread

    It was bound to happen: Oil goes up to $140-plus a barrel and the president calls for offshore drilling and opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, aka ANWR. Technology will prevent another Exxon Valdez disaster, he says, or a…

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    Think Globally, Act Regionally

    Several other Rooflines bloggers have speculated about the impact of a new emphasis on metropolitan areas coming from the federal level. This past Friday, civic leaders from Cleveland and Youngstown, Ohio and Pittsburgh, Pa. met in Youngstown (the mid-point between…

  • Obama Talks Up Metropolitanism

    Metropolitanism, or regionalism, was back in the news this morning as Barack Obama trumpeted the concept at the annual meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. There’s nothing especially sexy about the idea of cities and suburbs working together to…

  • The Grass-roots Factor

    This post started out Thursday thinking about an interesting factoid related to the Obama campaign. But since the big Obama news Friday has been about Obama’s rejection of public financing, this post can’t just blow by that, so a thing…

  • Sounding the Death Knell for Public Financing, Or a New Era of Grass-roots Fund-Raising?

    Sen. Barack Obama’s decision to forgo public financing for the 2008 general election appears to be steeped more in pragmatism than it is in putting an end to public financing—it’s about putting an end to this form of public financing.…

  • Instead of Blaming FEMA, We Need a National Safety Net

    As the water rose in his Cedar Rapids home, Frank refused to leave, even when a FEMA boat pulled up to his porch. FEMA wouldn’t take his two dogs, Romeo and Angie, and he wasn’t leaving without them. Finally a…

  • A Big Easy Comparison, But How Similar?

    “Katrina” is a loaded word, less associated with an actual hurricane than it is with catastrophic destruction from natural disaster, breathtaking flaws in effective federal emergency response (or lack thereof), ineptitude of the executive branch, and a sobering magnifier of…

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