Tim Fernholz explores what a liberal housing policy would look like:
Affordable housing programs have fallen lower and lower on Congress' priorities list over the last decade. But the sub-prime mortgage crisis offers a silver lining: the potential for the less well-known problem of affordable housing to piggy-back on the attention given to its more glamorous cousin. For example, a measure of the recent housing bill allows local housing authorities to purchase foreclosed homes to provide affordable housing. It's a start, but real improvement will require broader efforts. What is needed for more affordable housing -- attention and funding -- will come only when its challenges are linked with policy challenges like climate change, crime, education and economic development.
Greg Anrig and Harold Pollack debunk Hannah Rosin's recent article in The Atlantic claiming that closing down housing projects and replacing them with vouchers increases:
Rosin places far too much responsibility on housing policy for the increase in crime. Other factors related to the local economy were almost certainly more significant. Even within the realm of housing policy, the problem is not Section 8, but an outgrowth of conservative indifference to supporting low-income renters rather than a liberal desire to give poor families a better chance.Section 8 housing vouchers were first created back in the Nixon administration with the goal of reducing rental costs for poor people without building more public housing projects. Scholars have studied their impact extensively over the years, and have generally viewed these vouchers as successful in that limited mission, and unconnected to any changes in crime levels.
And Sarah Posner has the latest on the religious right:
The AFA reaches a rural audience through its radio stations -- it owns over a hundred of them, making it the sixth-largest radio-station owner in the country -- and its daily AFA Report show presents a "Christian worldview" on the news of the day. On Friday, the day after Obama's Berlin speech, the AFA Report's host, Fred Jackson, made note of the "messianic tone" of the speech, then quickly denied that he believes Obama is messianic. Ed Vitagliano, one of the program's roundtable guests, chimed in, "I don't think he's the Antichrist, but there is a spirit of Antichrist at work in the West in a very strong and open way that is leading people to want to solve their problems and have a desire to have their lives improved without Christ. That's what the spirit of Antichrist does, it denies Christ." In other words, Obama's not the Antichrist. He's just like the Antichrist.
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