Big Crowd, Affordable Housing Crisis

Ideas and Issues
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Laramie Afraid to push my luck any further on this hard journey, so pulled over in the Laramie to wait overnight to fix a wheel bearing. Nice town, cool nights and mornings already; I tell people I was born here and they are friendly about it.

I read an amazing story in the Wall Street Journal on 30,000 people waiting in line in East Point, Georgia outside of Atlanta for less than 450 vouchers when the waiting list opened up the other day. The officials had planned for a line of 10,000! Chicago recently opened up its list online and 100,000 applied the first day and more than a quarter million over the week. All of this is for section 8 vouchers to get rent subsidies. The story also mentioned that we have now lost 9% of our vouchers and public housing units in the 1st decade of the 21st century. The average time to wait on the list is 8 to 9 years, if you can live that long.

When I hear my wheel whining and make it 500 miles before it catches on fire and rolls off, eventually I say, hey, it’s Friday the 13th, pull over, man, enough is enough. What does it take for Washington, a lot of state capitals, and city officials to see that they have been running on this road too long, there is an affordable housing crisis, and it needs to be fixed now?

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