June 2008
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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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…
Another Day in the Lower Ninth Ward
Sweat pours down Reginald “Trigger” Smith’s 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 is living in one of the trailers, a cramped space filled to the brim with the paraphernalia of his career in movie and music production. One of the trailers is still brand new and unlived in. Since FEMA announced earlier this year that high levels of formaldehyde in the trailers poses a serious health risk, he doesn’t even want to open it. “It makes your eyes burn,” he said. A video with music by Aaron Neville shows Trigger chest-high in water, pulling a boat through the street to his mother’s nearly submerged house down the block. Now the house is gutted; he is trying to rehab it but is still waiting on promised Road Home money. The Lower Ninth Ward is slowly coming back to life, with rehabbed and newly constructed houses mixed in with overgrown skeletons of flood-ravaged homes and vacant weedy lots where houses were totally washed away by floodwaters or demolished in the aftermath. more
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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 slick-bathed California shoreline. Doesn’t that just sum up the Bush “energy policy” for two administrations — oh, hey, this should make my family, buddies, along with Uncle Dick, even richer. Bush, of course, proposed it as relief for the national “pain at the pump” — and can we retire that played-out phrase? Geez, people, alliteration’s great, but please. The Dems slapped him down right quick this time around — well, not SLAPPED, exactly, but gave him an indignant shove, anyway, and said forget it. more
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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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 fire department boat plucked Frank and the dogs out as the water continued to rise. A fireman even lunged into the water to grab Angie, a German Shepherd puppy, after she jumped overboard. Now Frank, 59 and in a wheelchair, is living in a Red Cross shelter set up at a high school. He has applied for FEMA aid, but as a renter he doubts he will get much. He is looking for an apartment where he can move and be reunited with his dogs, who are staying at an animal shelter. But coming up with the first and last month’s rent and security deposit is hard on his disability income. Meanwhile Ken, 58, has gotten his FEMA aid — all of $481. He thinks his home in working-class southwest Cedar Rapids was destroyed; he figures he’ll end up in bankruptcy soon. For the past week he hasn’t even been able to do his work cleaning gutters because he’s been spending all day in lines to fill out forms. Now he and his wife figure their only option may be moving in with her family in Tennessee. “But my friends are here, my kids are here, my church is here,” said Ken, who spent Father’s Day waiting in the hot sun to retrieve belongings from his house, only to be told he couldn’t enter. Thus begins the long slow recovery process, which will consume people’s lives for months or even years to come, long after all the TV cameras and national politicians have stopped visiting. more
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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…
National Housing Institute
