Well Mark, thank you for the apology. Goes to show why a person should wait a few minutes before posting a heated reply. I wasted about two pages of typing before noticing your second message. I had been out of town for a week and returned to find several hundred e-mails
My support for the "Affordable Homeownership" initiative is very consistent. I have harped on it on this list off and on for a year. I have pushed it in City, County, and State forums for several years. I very much remember the only way I could afford a house. It was the GI Bill. After growing up on a sharecropper farm the first thing owned by my family since before 1931 was that house. The very one I live in now. That duplex gave me the stability to go to college and helped me pay my way through Graduate School. When Ronny Raygun left me over-educated and underemployed in 1981 that duplex kept my family feed and housed for nine months. A time when my family could have ended up on welfare and homeless, if I had been renting. So perhaps you can see why I have a little passion about such a program. I have pushed affordable homeownership and duplexes for thirty years. As for impugning the motives of those I disagree with, I completely disagree with you, (Though I don't question your motives). The people I disagree with most in the world are many of my best friends; we argue incessantly. (Yes this includes you brother Paul). If I ask questions of someone's motives, it is because there is an obvious logical disconnect when what someone taking on a particular identity is expected to do, and then does something so contrary as to completely invalidate that identity. People who wear their social sensitivity on their chest like a badge of honor and yet are against programs to allow the poor and minorities, (very often the same), to have an opportunity to own their own home are to be questioned. Especially when owning such a house can be done for about the same amount as rent, (or even possibly less). It has nothing to do with disagreeing with me, heck almost anyone who knows me will tell you I enjoy that. It has to do with speaking with two tongues. Middle Class Whites advocating for poor people to live in rental apartments, that have been exorbitantly subsidized, instead of in their own homes reminds me of the Reservation Agents. Those good Christian white folks who looked after the interest of poor Native Americans until they had stolen all their possessions considered worth "helping" them out of. To paraphrase that great philosopher Heinlen, "If you hear the sound of hoof beats expect horses instead of zebras". I expect to see a person representing themselves as doing business as an affordable housing advocate to actually advocate for affordable housing. When someone heads an organization that has "For Neighborhoods" in its name I expect them to support neighborhood initiatives and neighborhood organizations. If I see the Affordable Housing advocate fighting against poor people being empowered to buy a home, or if I see a purported "Neighborhood" empowerment organization fighting neighborhoods at every turn, I begin to question the hoof beats and perhaps start to expect zebras. This is not impugning the horsiness of the Zebras; it is just that some things start to have different stripes. So this is not impugning anything, it is however calling a zebra a zebra when they trot them out. I may be just an old country boy, but don't tell me it is a saddle-bred when you are trotting out a mule. If you get my drift? So Mark and others, please do look thoroughly at the affordable home ownership option, and give input about how to make it better. Check its teeth, lift its tail, look at its stride and gait, and I think you will find a thoroughbred instead of the donkey some non-profits are turning out to be. Jim Graham, Ventura Village >Trends, like horses, are easier to ride in the direction they are going. - Anonymous >"We can only be what we give ourselves the power to be" - A Cherokee Feast of Days TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Send all posts in plain-text format. 2. Cut as much of the post you're responding to as possible. ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
