public housing is a major contributing factor to the housing crisis for low-income people and the accompanying rise in homelessness.

Efforts by cities, community based non-profits, and enlightened property owners to preserve existing private affordable housing stock are praiseworthy, but insufficient and unfortunately defensive against the "market" forces of the speculative real estate landlording industry.

Creative attempts to preserve and increase low-income housing are needed. In several eastern cities, tenants have the right of first refusal when properties are being converted from rental to ownership (condo, or TIC.) In some instances, this gives tenants the opportunity to set up limited-equity cooperatives (sometimes subsidized), or work with non-profit community housing groups to acquire the properties, take them off the speculative market, and preserve affordability permanently.

In this era of decreasing resources for social housing, the widening of the gap between the haves and the have nots, the disappearance of pensions in the private sector (often replaced by the desire for an unrealistic appreciation of one's home value as the primary retirement nest egg,) solutions to the nation's affordable housing crisis are becoming more difficult.

The free marketers are going to point out areas with cheap housing like Detroit, but throughout the country there is a mismatch between affordable housing and adequate employment opportunities.

Tim, Marcos, Greg, and others are brainstorming potential ideas to deal with this issue here where there is a community infrastructure, but also an out-of-control real estate market fueled by an inflated stock market and speculative tech industry bubble.

Why is the vacancy rate in public housing so high and maintenance so poor? We can't afford any unnecessarily vacant units.

Sorry for the ramble. I worked as a low-income tenant advocate from the mid-80's through the early 90's here and in Boston. I couldn't do it anymore. I have the utmost respect for those that struggle around this issue--residents and their helpers in the community.

Troll

He's tilting at windmills.

See, here's the problem... you have all these trolls on this site posting comments that don't add anything to the debate, but just seek to dumb down the debate.

I used to think you were a troll, but these people make you sound like a paragon of reasoned and thoughful discourse. They'll post the same tired dogma, the same sophomoric assinine remarks... sometimes it's just a little soundbite of a turd that sounds good when taken out of context, but is really nonsense. But it requires more time and effort to refute.

I actually resolved to spend less time fighting right wing trolls, but I do like to have a reasoned debate. I just don't want to get caught up in the muck with people who are only interested in polluting the site. It just turns the comments into a bunch of tangential mush, and it takes up too much of my time. And it brings out my worse side as well, because sometimes I inadvertently find myself going down to that level, and talking about irrelevant things and inadvertently contributing to the debasement of the whole site.

Well that's where marcos comes in... what he's doing is a public service. I can now scan the comments quickly for anything interesting, and I pretty much know that anything marcos has labeled "troll" is something that I can just ignore.