The BOS(ses)
Stanislaus County Board of Supervisors
Stanislaus County
Stanislaus County
City Council
City of Modesto
Paradise South
City of Modesto
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.
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Robert Neuwirth: Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World WeMo makes the L.A. Times