Good Luck

Kevin passes on an article pointing out that there is already a high apartment vacancy rate in the south central region and that the government should just issue section 8 vouchers for people to use to house themselves in already vacant dwellings. He says this seems like something that could be passed right away on a bipartisan basis.

The only problem with this is that you would also have to pass a law that required landlords to accept them. And that, I’m afraid, is a non-starter. A large number of property owners are not going to stand for being forced to accept New Orleans evacuees as tenents and those who would be their neighbors will not accept it either.

I wish it were not true. And I wish that someone could propose something like this on the floor of congress so we could see where people stand — it would be very illustrative of how far we’ve come since the discrimination in housing wars of the 1960’s. That single issue almost succeeded in getting the civil rights act repealed. Sadly, I suspect we haven’t come as far as we might have hoped.

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