Good Intentions Often Falter When It's Time to Build

[Southpaw Bookworm]

Good column in the Washington Post about the lack of affordable housing in the DC area, which will be this metropolis's downfall. What happens when all the teachers, police, hotel workers, day care employees, waitresses, get tired of driving 50 miles or more to get to work because they can't afford to live here?


"If you don't already own a house in Montgomery County, you never will," says the Rev. Jeff MacKnight, pastor of St. Dunstan's Episcopal Church in Bethesda. "I live in a church-owned house. When I leave there, and I'm not the least bit poor, I'll have to leave the county."

"College professors, nurses, teachers -- people who make a pretty decent living -- cannot afford to live here," says Rebecca Brillhart, associate pastor at Sligo Church of Seventh-day Adventists in Takoma Park. Brillhart, like many in her church, drives in from Howard County because she can't afford to live near her job.

Through the coalition of congregations called Action in Montgomery, MacKnight, Brillhart and dozens of other clergy have pushed affordable housing onto the county's political agenda.

But even with County Council member Steve Silverman and school Superintendent Jerry Weast riding the issue hard -- after all, public employees increasingly must live outside Montgomery -- affordable housing remains something nearly everyone supports in the abstract but few fight for in the specific.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64089-2005Jan10.html

[primavera]

1. It's likely to take a long time for that other shoe to drop

I know people in New York who spend three hours on the trains twice a day commuting in to work. There seems to be virtually no limit on how far people will be willing to commute when they perceive they have no other alternative.