perhaps a little sad.
I find that as I get older, I’m becoming less tolerant, more curmudgeonly. I am fed up with hearing about inequality, fairness and what people deserve. All of which seems to assume past generations lived on easy street and those that did hadn’t worked for it.
Across from my 55+ condo community the state required that a mountain be destroyed to squeeze in affordable, subsidized housing so the town could meet its quota.
I’m not against everyone having a decent place to live, but I wonder if the occupants know how good they have it.
A low income person can rent a subsidized 3-bedroom apartment for $1,180/mo. Up the road a similar size apartment rents for $4,500 a month.
Each unit has its own central AC plus:
Now for the sad part … trying to equate what people have today, and often complain about, compared with the past.
I grew up in a one bedroom apartment with my parents and two sisters. A converted dining room was my parents bedroom. No garage (actually we didn’t own a car during most of my growing up), no AC and one bath. There was a washing machine that could be rolled to the sink, but no dryer.
My father worked as a car salesman on commission most of my youth, no sales, no pay, just a loan until a car was sold. We weren’t poor, at least by 1940s and 50s standards. We never were short of food, but we lived modestly with minimum extras. My mother made some of our clothes.
I’m really sad we are now a nation of envy and apparently entitlement, with little understanding of the past. We are more worried about the other guy paying his fair share, just like a group of spoiled children.
And nothing much has changed. Look at what I wrote eight years ago.
QUINNSCOMMENTARY 
The subsidized housing made me think about the government housing project in “The Fountainhead”
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WOW! $4,500 a month for an apartment ?!
I own a four bedroom 2222 sq ft house in a nice urban tree-lined neighborhood in a Dallas suburb that cost $135,000 total [paid off long ago.]
I was born in the early 1950s. My father was a carpenter and my mother a homemaker. We lived comfortably. We always had a car and lived in a nice house with AC [“swamp cooler” in West Texas where I was born.] There weren’t many [if any] apartments here in flyover country at that time.
.
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Good luck, you will probably need it as your crime rate is about to quadruple.
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Too bad that the people that make decisions don’t read things like this. I’m concerned that we have an aristocracy running this country–the judges, lawyers, and elected ‘leaders’–who can’t relate to concepts like growing up while having to share a bedroom with a sibling. We had 5 boys in one bedroom–my mother used to call it the monkey house.
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But, but, but, according to the fairness, equity, and equality warriors and the politicians that they lobby its not fair that you have more than someone else. Just because someone neglected education, finding a job, saving and investing, living below their means and generally using common sense in financial matters doesn’t matter- fairness demands that you owe them. All of this takes resources away from the people who actually need them.
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I am 64 years old and remember my father telling me that one Christmas he got a piece of fruit….an orange,…. and that was all he received. I asked if he was mad about that and he told me that no….that he was actually very grateful for it!!
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Oh Quinn, you are so right and you forgot to mention history and common sense is no longer around. Thank you.
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Yes it is sad that government has stepped in mandating “fancy” affordable housing due to their own bad policies and regulations. I am very familiar with NJ Mount Laurel decision. Oversimplified, towns want large ratables with low impact to city services and not high density apartments which could be affordable to people. NJ courts believe that you must put the working poor housing these towns with McMansion. I agree with the concept, but has not worked out too well in the past 45 years.
What makes me mad is that the courts have decided that housing is a right to be provided for by the government. Last month in Los Angeles, a federal court told LA to offer housing for all 66,000+ homeless people and to put up $1B in a bond. The courts have declared that vagrancy is not a crime so people can’t be force to get out of the public spaces. The California weather is such most will never freeze to death and some people just prefer to be outside than living in shelters. Many have mental health or drug issues so they do not care to work or to provide a home for themselves.
I am all for helping those who are willing to help themselves, but why should society have to take care of people and provide them with things that the working poor don’t have when homeless have decided to withdraw from society? Reopen psychiatric hospitals again. Don’t mandate housing that they will will destroy. It neither helps those who have withdrawn nor the people who really need and want temporary housing help.
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Touché !!!!!
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