Columbia cares. We really do. Whether it’s efforts toward good job creation, utility payment assistance, free activities at public schools, or ever more homeless shelters, CoMo puts (a lot of) its money where its mouth is.
But at the same time, it never seems to be enough. What if many of these caring policies are actually holding back disadvantaged residents?
The rent’s too (darn) high!
First, housing is a basic need that too many Columbians can simply no longer afford. Sure, it’s a national problem, but as our local population has perpetually grown, the supply of housing has simply not kept up — hence, shockingly higher prices.
Low-income residents — “poor people” — feel the growing despair of rising rents. If “housing first” is really the goal, we should be doing everything we can to allow housing providers to put up mobile home parks, tiny homes, prefabricated structures, etc. on any empty or underused lot they can find.
Oh, but that risks devolving the character of established neighborhoods. Or concerns that simple dwellings might be deemed not “good enough” for poor folks. Or bring howls about those “greedy developers!”
Add it all up and the sub-$100,000 bungalow in CoMo has gone the way of the dodo bird, and that hurts poor people.
Keep the lights on
Poor people need reliable and affordable utilities. In all the talk of our electric grid going 100 percent renewable in a few short years, will poor people (and everybody else) have to pay more for such life necessities, which they can barely afford already?
Poor people need smooth streets.
In a case of musical cars lately, I was temporarily running around in my son’s 13-year-old Mazda. I was chatting with a buddy that his new romper stomper SUV could run over rough ground — or even dead bodies — and keep on truckin’, but for a poor person in a jalopy hitting chuck holes around this, town could mean blowing out a half-tread tire or suffering suspension damage. Expensive repairs they can’t afford. Neglecting our streets hurts poor people.
“One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”
— Milton Friedman, Economist
Poor people need public safety. It’s not to say that poor folks tend to be criminals, but instead it sure seems like criminals gravitate to low-income neighborhoods.
Law enforcement gets overly scrutinized in this town. We allowed a darn good police chief to be driven into early retirement.
Finding something to protest
Our newest police chief’s carefully revised proposal for strategic cameras to look out for bad guys did pass in October, but in the face of the typical opposition. Do we really distrust Chief Schlude more than we trust carjackers?!
If we cared about protecting poor people, we’d go headlong into community policing yesterday, trust city staff to use reasonable tools to keep us safe from these mushrooming big city problems, and maintain a balanced Citizens Police Review Board to address complaints.
Even in this era of school shootings and knock-down drag-out fights among students in the hall, there were protests against reapproval of school resource officers in our high schools. The stated intentions might be to care about the disadvantaged, but poor kids especially need a safe learning environment to climb the economic ladder.
We all need the fundamental services that municipal government provides; residents on the margins of society arguably more so than the well off.
By splurging endless political capital on pet projects, side issues and extraordinary amenities, City Hall loses sight of the basics. By doing so, the results are as if this town outright “hates” poor people.
