Whitcomb: Lost Housing; Beware Germs at the World Cup; Croft School Scandal
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Lost Housing; Beware Germs at the World Cup; Croft School Scandal
“If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness,
A vermilioned nothingness, any stick of the mass….’’
-- From “Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit,’’ by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), American poet and insurance executive.
“All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.’’
-- Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), English physician and writer most famous for his studies of sexuality
“You can steal a lot more with a computer than with a gun.’’
– Gina Smith (she hides her age) (American entrepreneur, technology-sector author and journalist)
“O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.’’
-- Horace (65-8 B.C.), Roman poet
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Around here, crocuses are finally blooming in sunny spots, chipmunks are coming out of their quasi-hibernation, some of us are subtracting a layer of clothing and going hatless, the desperate are starting to focus on summer vacation, and rich folks are looking forward to using their season tickets at Fenway.
Meanwhile, things are burning up Out West, with mid-summer heat and drought. That wacky jet stream. Climate change, or whatever.
Wasted Housing Opportunity
As the battle over rent control continues in Providence, I think of what might have been. Back in the early ‘70’s, a federal program called “Operation Breakthrough’’ sought to build 26 million homes for low-and-moderate-income people using prefab housing elements.
As an article in Bloomberg City Lab says:
“The goal was to deploy modular and pre-fabrication industrialized construction methods with a progressive social mandate in order to produce tens of millions of new homes. Introduced in 1969 by HUD director George Romney and Harold Finger, a former top-level NASA administrator who joined HUD as its first assistant secretary of research and technology, the program is regarded as the most ambitious federal housing program in U.S. history. It remains largely unknown.’’
(George Romney, father of Mitt, was one of those now extinct creatures called “Liberal Republicans.’’)
Such other countries as Sweden and Japan copied some of Operation Breakthrough’s elements, but in the U.S., local and national political opposition to the visionary plan, and local zoning rules (some with racist origins) that discourage density, doomed the program. Too bad, since it would have created a great deal of new housing, which would have made housing more affordable to millions of Americans by boosting the supply.
The housing challenge in Providence, etc., is not to scare away landlords, thus reducing supply and discouraging property maintenance, with such schemes as rent control, but to increase supply enough so that the market brings down the price or at least moderates the rent rises. This will include zoning and some other regulatory changes as well as advanced and more economical building practices and materials.
I hope that officials now debating how to alleviate America’s housing affordability crisis look to Operation Breakthrough.
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You may have noticed that this is an election year! The program below would help some low-income people, what with rents still surging and maybe a recession coming on:
Providence Mayor Brett Smiley proposes to use money from the city selling a closed school and a fire station to set up a $1 million temporary program to help renters who say they face such hardships as job loss, medical emergencies, or surprise rent increases with $3,000 grants. But would it be difficult to police the program for fraud?
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A distinguished physician friend of mine raises a point I wish I had made in last week’s column: The danger of epidemic/pandemic spread of measles and other highly contagious diseases in the World (soccer) Cup competition games to be played June 13 to July 9 at Gillette Stadium. Tens of thousands of people from all over the place will be visiting, bringing the risk of disease in a country whose corrupt (and often ignorant) regime has been discouraging vaccination.
The low level of education, especially about science, and susceptibility to demagogic lies, provide a fertile field for unvaccinated people to spread disease. It will muffle some of the cheering, but maybe wear a face mask to the stadium?
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I think we should be leery of for-profit schools, at least below the post-high-school trades-training institutions. See what’s going on at the elementary-and-early-middle-school Croft Schools, two of which are in Boston and one at Providence’s Wayland Square. They’re swamped in a financial scandal centered on education entrepreneur and founder Scott Given, who has, or had, a passion for expanding them. Now he’s spending quality time with lawyers.
And I don’t think that the asset-strippers known as private equity should own such essential facilities as hospitals and nursing homes. More of that soon.
Data-Center Deliriums
There’s generally more open land available for industrial development in Red States than in Blue States. So you’ll probably be reading more about disputes in Red States between builders of those data centers and local residents than about such disputes in, say, southern New England. In any event, people in localities around America worry about how these gigantic, electricity-gobbling warehouse-like structures jack up utility rates, consume water in vast quantities, and otherwise pose challenges.
And yet, they offer the promise of well-paying jobs (albeit rarely as many as promised) and, in some cases, hefty tax revenue. That these data centers will increasingly be used for artificial-intelligence operations, with their scary Orwellian overtones of tyranny and corruption, is another matter.
There’s also the paradox in that, whatever the local construction and other promised jobs at these centers, the artificial intelligence operations they expand will help kill millions of jobs and wipe out entire economic sectors.
My friend Llewellyn King, columnist and international energy-sector consultant, recently warned:
“Several studies, including by the United Nations and McKinsey & Co., conclude that women are to take the brunt of the first American AI-induced layoffs. This will be felt between now and 2030, and as many as 6 million women may have to find new jobs or quit the job market altogether.
“In the years ahead, it is going to be harder for women than men as the first waves of what I call the ‘AI adjustment’ hit the workplace.’’
See Mr. King’s White House Chronicle:
A regional sign of the growing concerns about data centers is that Lowell, Mass., has paused a plan by the state’s largest data center, run by the Markley Group, to expand its now 352,000-square-foot operation and has ordered a moratorium on new data centers.
And in Westfield, Mass., plans for a gigantic data center have been stalled by local concerns about its effects on local utility costs and noise. The project, which may well be dead or dying, would consume four to five times more power than all of Westfield.
Whatever the promises by rapacious billionaire tech bros about the potential of data centers to help improve some things, such as medicine, via AI, much of the public, and not just Luddites wary of technological change, are increasingly anxious about data centers. Each project is different, of course, but we should do our homework when data-center developers come advertising.
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Some fierce foes of offshore wind around here might start softening their tone now that Revolution Wind has started sending electricity into the New England grid as oil and natural-gas prices surge because of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.
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There’s been talk of regionalizing Aquidneck Island’s public schools (at least merging those of Newport and Middletown) at least since 1973! It still makes sense, at least on financial grounds, what with shrinking enrollment. Portsmouth, whose residents are generally richer than people in the island’s two other communities, has generally eschewed the idea. A class issue?
On Principle of All Things!
How rare – resigning on principle! That’s what U.S. counter-intelligence chief Joe Kent did to protest Trump’s war on Iran. He said:
“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
What makes this more interesting is that Kent, a military and CIA veteran, and a white supremacist, has been a ferocious MAGA man, promoting all sorts of despicable Trumpian lies. But Trump’s war was too much even for people like him.
The Trump circle has been notable for the sycophancy of his people. The crooked careerists, bigots and ignoramuses he has put around himself pull out all the stops to suck up to this traitor, thief, sexual abuser and 24/7 liar. But if they see him politically weakening, some may start to bail out on him. We’ll see – they’re afraid of him, as well as they should be. After all, he is a gangster.
China to Cuba’s Rescue?
Cuba, which Trump has cut off from fossil fuel, is in dire straits – blackouts, etc. The oil it got from Venezuela is now no more, at least for a while.
But at the same time, the island can look forward to becoming far less dependent on oil and gas because of a massive increase in solar power. Last year, thanks mostly to Chinese investment, the share of solar power in the country's total energy generation jumped to 20 percent from 5.8 percent, and the solar expansion is continuing this year. (Spain, by the way, has been bragging about how its embrace of renewable energy has made it less vulnerable to Trump’s new energy crisis than most nations.)
Speaking of Cuba, Trump has again made it clear that his direct military attacks (as against Iran and Venezuela) or economic-strangulation attacks, as with Cuba, is not about transforming these long-entrenched dictatorships into democracies. He’s more than happy to keep these corrupt and tyrannical regimes in power, just as long as he approves of new top leaders whom he can order around when he wants, sometimes even for U.S. security purposes, and, as a bonus, enable the Trump Organization to do profitable business in their nations. Think of casinos, brothels, etc., in Cuba, as in the ‘50’s, when the U.S. Mafia ran much of the island.
Meanwhile, Trump’s Russian allies are boosting their sharing with Iran of satellite imagery and drone technology to help it in the war.
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I’m surprised that so many Americans continue to fly, considering the news videos of seemingly endless lines and something approaching chaos at airports, as more and more TSA workers, now not being paid because of the partial government shutdown, don’t come to work. And when the shutdown finally ends, how many people will want to work for a government run by an anti-federal-employee regime.
Of course, flying was becoming increasingly unpleasant (if still safe) before the Orange Oligarch showed up to ravage America.
The regime has been creating a very serious recruitment challenge.
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Some might say that New England cuisine is an oxymoron, but we do miss such once-common regional favorites as Indian pudding, brown bread (from a can!), codfish cakes, and finnan haddie.