Scott,

I have not given up. I support IZ wholeheartedly.

However, the underlying land cost, the utility infrastructure cost and the housimng materials and labor costs add up to make housing unaffordable for the 30-50% AMI.  I know people have the right to own homes, but people dont have money to afford homes. Even the funds for down payment is a big hurdle. This is the flaw in the economic structure. Wages and cost of living are not in sink. Taxing our way through this problem will never work. Our tax structure takes away from slightly well-off people to help to slightly poor people or absolutely poor peoeple. Not sustainable!

Also for rental housings, the developers / capital investors would like to maximise the ROI. There are so many competeing opprtunties to achieve that than to build low rental homes. 

You may remeber the “Projects” in large cities like Chicago were the goverment solution to provide housing to poor. It needed continuous funding for manitenace and upkeep. The whole experiment  failed miserably after 2 decades. I support more low income housing. But it has to be done with ownership model / or vested interest by the residents.

Dear Jon,

You are drowned in your own nonsense. Best wishes!

Dear Scott,

While you make good points about housing inventory, but “inclusionery zoning” in not the silver bullet. Yes, it can help but it has its own drawbacks too. All investors seek to maximum ROI at any cost and our national priorities support this. Helping one income bracket will hurt another income bracket. Our economy offer opportunties only to the people with existing capital to multiply it.

The real underlying reason, we all unwittingly ignore, is that the “reality of income disparities” has caught up with us in real terms. It is not an academic theory any more. 

The large middle class has been a fallacy from 70s America. Now, we are fast becoming a rich country with poor people. Same as rest of the world. The pain of adjustment is unbearable at this time. 

I can understand that each city / county should have their own Broadband just like Sewer, water etc. However, this being a relatively new public utility (though this is not officially designated as Public Utility by WA Utilities Commission), the federal policies have been to let it grow as private owned businesses. The plum fruits of dense population centers have already been taken by the fewer than 10 large internet / broadband providers. Just imagine this newly evolving industry, which brings in new technological advances every year, will require substantial continuous investments for upgrades by paying annual fees to private tech companies. Now the rural areas are really lagging because it is still up to private businesses to pick and choose jurisdictions to get grant funds. An internet speed of 150 mb download and 25 mb upload can perform over 90% of tasks of any household or business.  This demand for each City to reinvent the wheel and compete with established (and rich!) for-profit companies with GIG Speed using tax dollars is NOT PRACTICAL. Just the initial investment to get something like this off the ground will be in tens of millions. Instead of bashing the City Administration, let us find out how many residents in Bellingham are ready to pay EXTRA TAX to build a competing GIG Speed broadband network, which will need upgrade every year. Ask yourself:  Shall a new broadband compete for tax dollars against the Sewer Tratment Plant? Public Safety Budget (Police, Fire and EMS) budget? Mental Health Crisis and Treatment Priorities? 

Our nation has not been able to create a Public Healthcare network and the public pays over a trillion dollars annually in premiums. Shall we create a competing healthcare network locally with TAX DOLLARS? I would like all readers to give it a thought!

John, you have outlined the major reasons very well. One more I would like to point that immigrant bashing gave false narrative to average person that their economic decline is solely becasue of asylum seekers. Flaming the rhetoric of crime on this population also tuned people off from democrats leaders. US agriculture, meat industry hospitality services, housing contruction (few I can mention) are run becasue of this cheap labor. The very republican businesses do not favor closing the borders as being portrayed in the political slogans.

Many American are drawn to the dream of white christian dominated America, and this scares almost the other half of Americans, who are inching towards the majotiry count in few years. Lets hope better brains prevail over next four years and some good is done for common citizen’s living conditions.

The article by Mr. Swanson is correct in showcasing that internet access makes a huge difference in the life quality, economic opportunity, educational opportunity and impacts people many other ways for all age groups and socio-economic groups.  However, Jon has been writing about “How” to provide the internet, while its benefits are undisputed.