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The suffering and unsightly are taking up space without paying

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The suffering and unsightly are taking up space without paying

They are diminishing value

Luke O'Neil
Oct 28, 2021
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The suffering and unsightly are taking up space without paying

luke.substack.com
Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

You’ll have to subscribe to read the entirety of this piece. Subscriptions are $5.23 a month/$61.07 a year at the moment. Earlier in the week I also sent out to paid subscribers an interview with a dentist about the pressures to churn and burn patients at corporate dental chains, coming out of school with $500k in debt, unethical colleagues, and the struggle to maintain your ethics in a money-driven field. You can find the full piece here.


What is even left in the bill? That’s a serious question. [Brad Pitt voice] what’s in the fucking bill? Is this finally and fully it? Is this proposal this morning the one that’s going to stick?

Twitter avatar for @sahilkapur
Sahil Kapur @sahilkapur
Major Build Back Better policies that have gotten the knife as Democrats push to reach a deal —2 years free community college —Clean Energy Performance Program —Guaranteed paid leave —Tax rate hikes on rich/corporations
9:24 PM ∙ Oct 27, 2021
2,145Likes902Retweets

This bill is a tray of hors d'oeuvres at a catered party and we’re all the waiter hoping there’s one single lukewarm scallop wrapped in bacon leftover we can scarf down in the back after we make a round of the room.

Twitter avatar for @meggophone
Megan Thielking @meggophone
News: The White House is abandoning every policy idea aimed at lowering prescription drug prices in President Biden’s domestic spending package from @rachelcohrs
statnews.comBiden abandons his push to lower drug prices - STATThe White House is abandoning every single policy idea aimed at lowering prescription drug prices in Biden’s domestic spending package.
1:06 PM ∙ Oct 28, 2021
2Likes1Retweet

This bill a baggie you handed off to your buddy and even though you asked him to take it easy he vacuumed up a gagger then passed it to someone else in the bathroom and by the time you get it back it’s absolutely cached. This bill is a joint passed around the room that comes back to you so wet from six other mouths you don’t even want to smoke it anymore. This bill is a fourth funnier thing.

Twitter avatar for @lukeoneil47
luke @lukeoneil47
The U.S. has the dubious distinction of being one of the few countries in the world that does not have any sort of paid parental leave law at the federal level.
luke.substack.comWhat paternity leave is really like in AmericaI typically try not to let the culture war sniping of the week serve as my assignment editor, but the utterly dumb fuck “debate” about paternity leave stretching into its second week now — Fellas, is it gay to take care of and bond with your newborn? — is a somewhat rare example of such an issue tha…
2:51 PM ∙ Oct 16, 2021
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Watching the whittling down of the paid family leave from twelve weeks to four weeks to zero weeks in real time has been particularly depressing but it’s just the way everything has been downsized from the early promise whatever days of the supposed post-Trump dawn. The idea of student loan forgiveness followed a similar path.

Oh hold on a minute never mind maybe we’re saved here.

Twitter avatar for @alexanderbolton
Alex Bolton @alexanderbolton
Murray, the chair of the HELP Committee, and Sen. Debbie Stabenow say laid leave program will be modified so workers would have to pay into it. It would not be a pure social spending program.
10:09 PM ∙ Oct 27, 2021
347Likes73Retweets

Ladies and gentlemen, The Democrats.

Twitter avatar for @elivalley
Eli Valley @elivalley
"The Democrats" ft. @JoeBiden, @Sen_JoeManchin, and @kyrstensinema.
Image
9:55 PM ∙ Oct 27, 2021
9,052Likes1,514Retweets

Jesus, Eli come on man.

By the time this bill is finished being scavenged over like a horse carcass in the desert it’s going to amount to a postcard qualifying registered voters get in the mail (takes 19 weeks to arrive) that says Mental Health Is So Important Right Now.

And when it all fully and finally falls apart make no mistake about what type of Democrat is going to be blamed for Biden eating shit and the party getting smoked in the midterms.

Twitter avatar for @tribelaw
Laurence Tribe @tribelaw
Progressive Caucus leader PRAMILA JAYAPAL (D-Wash.)’s demand for legislative text and not just a framework on the big reconciliation package before she’ll allow a BIF vote threatens to wreck Biden’s presidency and any hope of Dems holding onto the House in 2022. She must retreat.
1:08 PM ∙ Oct 27, 2021
4,582Likes1,149Retweets

Retreat to where? These radical lefties are holding strong for…Joe Biden’s literal agenda.

And the centrist media will continue to maintain their one immovable stance which is that everything fucking sucks sure but it could also be worse so take what you can get.

Twitter avatar for @imillhiser
Ian Millhiser @imillhiser
I’m angry the Build Back Better Act is getting pared back. But, in the alternative universe where a Republican holds Manchin’s seat, we’re in week 3 of a government shutdown and Ted Cruz vows to filibuster the bill reopening the government until Biden agrees to slash Medicaid.
7:34 PM ∙ Oct 27, 2021
11,986Likes2,385Retweets

And the insanely rich untouched libs with nothing at stake will continue to tell us to simply vote harder.

Twitter avatar for @KenTremendous
Ken Tremendous @KenTremendous
We all want to yell at Manchin for watering down the bill, but he's a centrist Dem from the reddest state in the union. He's not suddenly gonna turn into @RepJayapal when legislation is written. The answer is to elect more Senate Ds in other states so his vote is less important.
10:28 PM ∙ Oct 27, 2021
1,753Likes170Retweets

I got so fucking sick and angry about all this last night I actually turned on CNN for a while. I’m sorry I don’t know what came over me.

Today’s main thing is Miles Howard writing about the ongoing predicament with the unhoused population in Boston a problem that everyone involved seems intent on making worse before it gets better. Previously he wrote for Hell World on the end of the eviction moratorium.

Twitter avatar for @MilesPerHoward
Miles Howard @MilesPerHoward
I wrote about the end of the eviction moratorium, under the Democratic Party’s watch, and the way renters in this country are neglected and treated as less than human.
luke.substack.comThe Democrats treated renters like a forgotten class project that’s suddenly dueWe needed direct, red tape-free interventions that the Democrats consistently refuse to fight for
5:12 PM ∙ Aug 2, 2021
34Likes20Retweets

I wrote about one of the groups trying to help connect people with family members they’ve lost to addiction on the Ave. in Boston recently as well.

Twitter avatar for @lukeoneil47
luke @lukeoneil47
Scrolling through the Facebook page of the recovery and addiction group Mass Ave. Project it’s hard not to feel something like emotional whiplash. It’s a cascade of both heartbreak and hopefulness.
luke.substack.comThey’re losing their minds to drug psychosis and dying left and rightNobody’s trying to help them
3:41 PM ∙ Jul 15, 2021
76Likes19Retweets

(Disclosure that Shirley Leung the writer that Howard criticizes below was my editor at the Globe at the time of Pissghazi but I don’t really have any hard feelings about that anymore at this point so whatever.)

Jim Davis/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

They are diminishing value

by Miles Howard

Boston is a paradox. Much of America sees us as the liberal city that sends people like Elizabeth Warren to Congress. During the Trump years, those “Hate Has No Home Here” signs sprouted from front lawns everywhere. In fact, we’re so liberal that next week, it looks like we’re going to elect a new mayor who wants to create a Green New Deal for Boston. But Boston is also an extremely expensive city. And the commodity for which most of us pay through the nose—the big problem chipping away at Boston’s toasty and self-congratulatory identity as a liberal city—is housing.

The problem with housing in Boston is twofold: we haven’t built enough of it over the last ten years, even as the demand for housing has ballooned by 53%, and most of the housing we have built is market rate property that most people can’t afford (but hey, at least oligarchs and investors can use this type of housing to guard their wealth from tax collectors.) Boston is bound and gagged with exclusionary zoning laws that make it extremely difficult to build dense, multi-unit housing in neighborhoods that mostly consist of single family homes. But these zoning laws are a symptom of something deeper and more primordial. A lot of people who own homes in Boston don’t want more housing in their neighborhoods, and they’ll go to great lengths to stop it from being built. Scarcity persists, real estate prices surge, and poor people run out of options.

Nowhere is the logical outcome of Boston’s current housing policies more brutally stark than at the encampments of unhoused people along Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard: a crossroads that’s referred to as “Mass and Cass” by Bostonians, usually with a sigh or a snicker. Located on the edge of the South End, a tony Boston neighborhood where you’ll find plenty of Victorian row houses and more modern studio apartments that rent for upwards of $2,500/month, Mass and Cass is the last refuge for many of Boston’s poor people.

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