The BOS(ses)
Stanislaus County Board of Supervisors
Stanislaus County
Stanislaus County
City Council
City of Modesto
Paradise South
City of Modesto
Westmo is moving to southofparadise.com
Comment [1324]
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Three clips from the article, Poor Neighborhoods Left Behind By Lee Romney, Times Staff Writer
September 18, 2005
The four Modesto-area neighborhoods — home to about 14,000 people — are known by informal names: No Man’s Land, the Garden, Bret Harte, Robertson Road. All lie southwest of Highway 99, a diagonal line that has historically separated Modesto’s disenfranchised from decision-makers.
Meanwhile, in Robertson Road, failing septic tanks and flooding so plagued the area that county and city officials acknowledged “an incredibly serious health threat.” Modesto voters last fall approved a sewer trunk extension to the neighborhood (city law requires an advisory vote), and county officials say work will begin soon. The improvements will bring the number of Latino pockets with city sewer service to three, while no whiter unincorporated pocket has received it, officials say.
One councilman and former Robertson Road resident initially opposed the sewer proposal there, arguing that the county would waste taxpayer money by investing in an area with “substandard housing on a flood plain.” Another councilman provoked controversy when he said that building affordable housing in downtown Modesto would attract too many large Latino families.
Comment [1633]
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In an article published today at Salon.com titled: After the deluge, what next? Six urban policy experts; Angela Glover Blackwell, Xavier de Souza Briggs, Craig Colten, Edward Glaeser, Howard Husock and Bruce Katz, discuss the intricacies of housing policy, past and present economic stimulant initiatives and debate the merits of various federal backed anti-poverty efforts as they may or may not apply to rebuilding New Orleans.
One thing is clear to me. Party line answers aren’t working. It is past time for all of us to begin to recognize perfection as a motivating factor but rarely a reality. We must begin to come together and satisfy ourselves with making progress. The workable solutions will be amalgamations of extremes, they will be compromises which a Democratic society should work to refine rather than to dismantle when the guards change.
The good news is that our outmoded and outgrown labels aren’t really needed anymore as something like sythesis is emerging. The author, Joan Walsh, echoes this sentiment:
[New Orleans] . . . is not a place where terms like “liberal” and “conservative” always make particular sense. We had a range of opinions on the panel, but they didn’t always fit neatly into ideological categories. For instance, we started with the premise that the problem was “disinvestment,” the flight of jobs and capital from New Orleans, but at least two of our panelists—one a liberal, one a relative conservative—corrected the question, noting there had been all sorts of investment in New Orleans, especially in public housing, but much of it had made things worse, not better.
According to Walsh everyone agreed on the following points:
So go read the article, come back and let’s discuss how these same issues are effecting West Modesto.
Comment [2155]
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Recent order-of-magnitude estimates by UN-Habitat put the total population of slum dwellers in the developing world at about 900 million, accounting for 43 percent of the urban population of these countries (UN-Habitat 2003).
I read an interesting article (which you can’t find on their site) in the Modesto Bee the other day called, Squatter Communites Deserve a Chance that speaks to many of the issues poverty creates in any community.
His final words rang so true:
Check out the full articleForget structural adjustments, privatization and free markets. It’s time to invest in the basics: water, sewers and sanitation. And here’s another item that will resonate with people in every country of the developing world: Export a new component of freedom—the freedom to build.
Comment [988]
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Switch your browser to Firefox
Remember, I was an art major. If the site looks like crap it could be your browser. It might be my bad taste but if something is seriously wrong it’s probably Internet Explorer. Or a variant thereof as used by SBC/Yahoo, Juno or AOL. See the post about Sean for an example of what goes wrong with an old, outdated browser (which Microsoft always is—whenever you think about Microsoft, think large, bumbling, slow, easy to attack, not-too-smart beast that thousands are trying to exploit) and then switch to a better browser.
Something else to think about—old browsers, systems without firewalls or virus protection or operating systems not kept up to date are all vunerable to ATTACK, which can mean anything from a gazillion pop-ups making your surfing annoying and exhausting to stolen credit card numbers and password theft.
You wouldn’t drive the freeways without at least a Humvee, don’t cruise the internet without knowing your system and using a browser you can trust.
Comment [1293]
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