Perhaps it is because my own personal history weighs so heavily upon me at times, that I often go to history to put the present in context. As we know full well positions change drastically in an election year. It is never openly stated for instance "I now believe it is important to turn our attention to the issue of affordable housing", but more like our Mayor's statement in The State of the City speech and in campaign pronouncements, "There is much more work to do." The cynic might read that as saying "I know I have not done a damn thing over the years but now I'm really ready to tackle this problem now that it seems higher on people's priority lists and because it's even showing up in front page articles in the Strib." I am not mollified by the latest affordable housing resolution by the city council. At least a year and a half prior to Friday seven members of the council gutted a resolution by Niland et al and replaced it with a much less stringent resolution. Call me cynical if you will. Hey I don't even trust those who voted with Niland. Aside from that, let's look at the city's committment to housing throughout the past eight years of the Mayor's reign. Weren't the nineties a period of incredible wealth creation and culminating in large government surpluses near the end of the decade. Why wasn't the city and the Met council even crawling the halls of the statehouse pressing for tax relief for builders of multi-unit housing? It seems Republicans and Dems could have found something to applaud in such a measure; i.e., Dems the social justice angle and Reps a tax cut, any tax cut. Instead in the year 2001 we are using the catch phrase "crisis in affordable housing". We are way beyond crisis mode here. We're into catastrophe mode. I was not among those applauding yesterday at the Council meeting. I'm sick of hearing people like joan Campbell talking about how all the other levels of government have broken down on this issue and must pitch in. Yes that is true. What is also true is that those levels of government below have not prodded those above. Presumably all of us believe in some way by our very participation in this forum that concerted actions from below can push the agenda. The city could have done the same at the legislature and in Washington. look at the money Martin Sabo has wrung out of Congress for a dubious measure to address transit issues in the area. I for one will not be surprised if no other LRT project follows on the heels of the Hiawatha line. The fact is that Minneapolis and our entire region has not had very creative leadership for a long time. Look at how long we dithered over LRT which might have made greater sense 20 years ago but now is mostly a finger in the dike. Look at an airport that will consume billions of dollars over the next decade and then will only be a short time away from extinction even if it weren't already by then and which in the meantime had degraded the quality of life for the greater part of the city. Gettin back to Affordable Housing I want to paraphrase a few comments of Barret Lane. Perhaps Rochelle Olson has already done this in today's paper. If so I apologize for being redundant. He voted with everyone else but he spoke of the social justice side of the equation that Brian Herron had spoken about. He pointed out that our city's services were funded by the most regressive form of taxes; i.e., property taxes, user fees, and additional sales taxes, and that there is just so much we can ask our wealthier citizens to bear especially when basic services such as snowplowing are not being performed adequately, bridges are not being rebuilt, etc. Herron spoke of how we always have found a way to buyout (some might say bailout) Target Center, find a way to fund Block E, move The Schubert etc and that we need to bring that same energy to solving the housing problems are city faces. We've had the means in our grasp and now the means are less within our reach. It remains to be seen what the city can do at this point. I am encouraged that Opus Corp. is starting a new division that will concentrate solely on building multi-unit housing. The marketplace may take over and bail out the politicians who have fiddled around for years. Proposed property tax incentives in the legislature will be the starting gun. Lobby your state reps. You can make a difference. Don't look to the city except to loosen zoning and building regulations that only helped to retard growth in the housing market. Sorry for the lecture and its length. Tim Connolly Ward 7 __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail - only $35 a year! http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ _______________________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - Minnesota E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
