US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9000

On October 16 2017 09:17 mierin wrote:
Capitalism seems to be a double edged sword. Without it, we wouldn't have gone to the moon, accomplished what we've accomplished etc. but all the people with the money make the rules, and all the rules are made to prop up people with all the money. Who's going to change that?

“[Trump] is literally setting the entire health care system on fire — just because the president is upset that the United States Congress won’t pass a repeal bill that is supported by 17 percent of the American public… The fact of the matter is the president is trying to sabotage the american health care system, trying to has put a gun to the head of our constituents by taking away their health care or raising their costs in order to force us to repeal a bill that the American public doesn’t want us to repeal.”

On October 16 2017 10:34 Biff The Understudy wrote:

The most tragic is that he probably doesn't even start to understand what it's about or what the ACA actually does, let alone have an idea of how to replace it. It's just pure spite because it bears the name of his predecessor.

Sad!!!

For most of his adult life, Michael Sweetin has bounced between homes – his mother’s, his brother’s, his sister’s. Once, he slept on the street for two nights. When things are particularly desperate, Sweetin, now 33 and living in Los Angeles, donates plasma twice a week for $75. “Your body changes, you feel sick and weak,” he said.

Like millions of other low-income Americans, Sweetin is eligible for a rental-subsidy voucher from the federal government. Sweetin applied for one, and was waitlisted until one of the limited number of vouchers becomes available.

And so he has waited. For over a decade.

Today, more Angelenos will have the chance to join the interminable waitlist, which is opening for the first time in a remarkable 13 years – but only for two weeks.

In that time, the city expects to receive 600,000 applications for vouchers. Yet there are just 20,000 spots on the new waitlist – the lucky 3.3% will be chosen by lottery, and will then have to start waiting themselves.

For people like Sweetin, whose mother put his name on the waitlist as soon as he turned 18, in the early 2000s, it’s obvious that the program isn’t working for the vast majority of people who need it. He still had not received a housing voucher after 15 years.

Rental-subsidy vouchers – known as Section 8 vouchers for the part of the law that authorized them – are the government’s primary way of helping low-income Americans pay rent, and are used by 2.2 million families. They generally cover any rental costs that exceed 30% of the renter’s income.

Yet studies have shown that only one in four Americans who need housing assistance actually receive it. And administrators acknowledge that the Section 8 system is not exactly working the way it should.

“Well, of course it’s frustrating,” said Douglas Guthrie, president of the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA). “Any way you look at this, we’re going to be extremely limited [in resources], with a growing affordable housing need.”

The problem isn’t unique to Los Angeles. Local housing agencies across the country have similar problems, with need far outstripping supply, said Nan Roman, president of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. Waitlists in New York have been closed since 2009 and in Chicago since 2014. When Baltimore opened its waitlist for the first time in a decade, in 2015, officials there warned that the list would expire after six years, meaning that some of the 25,000 signups might end up waiting years only to receive nothing.

Section 8 “addresses this kind of systemic gap between low incomes and high rents – it ends homelessness,” Roman said. “The major problem we see with the Section 8 program is that there’s not enough Section 8.”

The housing voucher program was created in 1974, and marked a shift away from building and managing public housing developments, which were unappealing to many, and towards helping tenants who were struggling with rent that was eating up almost all – if not all – of their paychecks. It was also seen as a way to help foster socioeconomic and racial integration, because voucher holders could choose where they lived.

But, almost since its inception, the housing voucher program has been woefully underfunded. And it is not a favorite of the Trump administration, which sought cuts that would have resulted in more than 250,000 fewer vouchers.

“Section 8 is the main tool we have for rental affordability,” said Jerry Jones, public policy director at the Inner City Law Center, a legal clinic and advocacy group in Skid Row. “So what’s the plan? There’s nothing coming out of Washington.”

In the Los Angeles region, one of the consequences of the rental-voucher shortage is clear: soaring homelessness. Around 55,000 people are homeless on any one night, a record for the city.

Bill Przylucki, executive director of a Santa Monica advocacy group called POWER, said that even once a person gets a voucher, the battle’s not over. Because then, they have to find a landlord who will agree to take the voucher. And many of them won’t, he said. A study of rental units in Austin, Texas, for instance, found that the vast majority were not accessible to voucher-holders.

On October 17 2017 00:03 brian wrote:
so i’m gonna put my ignorant opinion out there and maybe y’all can straighten me out again. i don’t have anything against communities that oppose section 8 housing. if people want to pay a premium to avoid having neighbors in poverty then i get it. poverty often brings crime, right?

this is, i think, hypocrisy given my feelings against gentrification. because i can’t possibly conceive of a solution that allows for both, but i’m also no genius.

i’m using ‘poverty’ pretty freely here, of that much at least i am aware. but i think when speaking so generally of section 8 housing it’s still a reality for a significant portion of it.

On October 17 2017 00:08 zlefin wrote:

how do you know they're paying a premium, rather than simply prohibiting it?
The problem is when there's no place for the poor to get housing at all. it's not like one community prohibits it but there's another nearby where they can easily get it (and still be in range to get to their jobs), it's more like there's nowhere to go.
{i'm rather sick right now, so hard to focus and thinking may be a bit off}

NIMBY-ism often leads to there being NO place at all.