The suffering and unsightly are taking up space without paying
The suffering and unsightly are taking up space without paying
They are diminishing value
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?
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.
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.
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.
Ladies and gentlemen, The Democrats.
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.
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.
And the insanely rich untouched libs with nothing at stake will continue to tell us to simply vote harder.
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.
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.
(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.)
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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