Recent discussion involving two residents of of a rich Massachusetts suburb….
From a woman who gets paid to help migrants from South Sudan settle in Massachusetts:
Good morning! I can tell you that the cost of housing is completely out of control. I work with many low income folks and housing is a huge issue.
A woman who works at Amazon making $17.75 an hour and has four kids does not qualify for Emergency Housing?. She makes too much money.
A man who had tb of the spine and is on disability and his wife works as a home health aid making $15 an hour four kids- can not find housing. Anywhere! The man in this family goes to Divinity School at Bu. They will likely have to move out of state. Great family.
I could go on and on?.
As a small nonprofit we have had to hire someone to help navigate the housing maze for clients.
I got an email yesterday for an affordable house in waylaid [Wayland, Maskachusetts] for over $300,000!! Affordable for whom????
We all need to raise our voices!!!
Lynn two bedrooms is going for $2200
Woburn two bedroom $2300
Salem three bedroom $2100 and is considered a steal!!
SSEF has many families that need housing and good schools.
Likely they will live in horrible housing in towns with terrible schools and the cycle goes on and on. Let’s blame them?..
We are increasing our funding for summer educational programs which is better than nothing but better that people lived in towns where the kids educational needs where being addressed.
On a happier note- several lincoln people helped a woman and her kids find housing- a wonderful volunteer from lincoln worked endlessly to find housing and financial resources; three incredible lincoln folks helped completely furnish an apartment. A lincoln man and others helped co-sign her lease. Gives me hope. Please help in any way
From a neighbor who is not paid to work with migrants:
let’s work on balancing protecting our beautiful little town with our moral obligation to help provide more affordable housing.
We can all agree that housing is a human right and that we are morally obligated to house anyone who shows up in the U.S., but achieving “balance” might require the next crop of 59 million migrants to live somewhere other than in our own neighborhood….
“We all need to raise our voices!!!”
Careful! If you do, The Party will label you racist, transphobic, white supremacist and probably insurrectionist. Look at the Canadian truckers. The scam of exploiting the middle class while importing the lower class has to continue.
Small log cabin in a forest here in rural area in “as is” condition, not furnished, monthly rent ask prices is $1,500, at least 40 miles away from any place with medium sized employers, 20 miles away from closest Amazon warehouse.
Amerikans: “Let’s devalue our cash to fund more economic stimulus packages.” “But not until after we move all our money out of cash & into houses.”
> I got an email yesterday for an affordable house in waylaid….
A little like that old Dylan song about being lost in the rain in Juarez….
During a recent hospital stay not too many clicks out of Wayland, I could not help but notice the race/ethnicity of one the nurses who cared for me during my stay. We had a couple of friendly conversations while she took my vital signs and brought my medicines and attended to my still-attached surgical apparatus. She was bright, attentive and spoke English very well, albeit with a thick accent.
On the second night, it was quiet and I said to her: “I hope you don’t mind my asking and if you prefer, you certainly do not have to answer, but may I ask where you are from?”
“I’m from Sudan. I came here [x] years ago.”
“That’s fascinating. That’s what I would have guessed based on your accent. So you are studying to be a Registered Nurse?”
“Yes. I am devoted to it and happy to work here but it is a lot of learning.” [She was one of a small group of Sudanese nursing assistants during my stay.]
A couple of questions later and it emerged that she was fuzzy on the fundamental differences between antiviral therapy, an antiretroviral therapy, antibiotics like Amox-Clav, chemotherapy, and immunotherapy (such as a monoclonal antibody).
“I sometimes get them confused.”
It was a relatively quiet time on the floor, and I was in a talkative mood, so I asked if she had a few minutes and said I could explain them.
“Oh, yes! I have a few minutes. That would be great!”
So I fired up the memory banks and explained them to her as I best recalled them from high school, my undergraduate years and accumulated knowledge since then. I also threw in the difference between an antibacterial/antiviral cleaner like hand sanitizer, a detergent, an acid, a base like bleach, and capped it off with an antimicrobial treatment like UV light.
I was glad to have asked for a pad of paper and a pen when I first woke up from surgery. I took a couple questions during the conversation we wrapped that up after about 10 minutes. I tried to stick to the irrefutable basics and not mislead her in any serious way. She was transfixed!
“Thank you so very much! That helps me a lot!”
“You’re welcome. You’re helping me, after all.”
“Where did you learn them?”
“Well, first really from my father, but then later in high school I took Advanced Placement Biology, and then later at the university I attended.”
“You learned a great deal!”
“They were very good teachers!”
Then she asked if I needed anything else, and I asked for diet ginger ale with a cup of ice. She brought it right away and I thanked her again and we said good night. I actually went back to watching something on Turner Classic Movies, IIRC (I was a little foggy) it was “Silk Stockings” starring Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, which I really enjoyed (at least with IV opioids on demand) but was apparently not a very popular or profitable film at the time, despite a couple of incredible dance numbers by Charisse and Astaire and a medley of bumbling Marxist Comrades who were seduced by the Decadent West.
If she’s going to be my NA in the hospital, I figured, why not help her out a little? I had pretty much nowhere to go, and thanks to COVID-19 there is apparently a nursing shortage.
Emerson or Newton-Wellesley ?
I used to be a member of the Wayland Gun Club until they went woke.
@Ivan: I’d prefer not to say in the open for privacy reasons as my treatment is ongoing and I don’t want anyone harassed, etc. I will say that it’s not more than a 35 minute drive on the highway!
I know people who know people from WR&GC and I’ll ask them the story! The website/club looks like it’s still on life support and they have some events scheduled this year. And wow! that’s a Web 1.0 site (not really, but close) with frames and tables for formatting! There is a script tag for JavaScript with nothing inside it! No CSS! No HTML5! NO JAVA, not even the Microsoft “polluted” JAVA!
Notepad++ says the home page in the “view_frame” frame is 8,228 bytes with no images. You could view it fast with a Hayes Smartmodem via dial-up!
I see that it does contain a couple of high-tech link to…PDFs for the COVID-19 rules document!
https://www.waylandgc.org/
We should probably try to meet up sometime.
Wow, my apologies and condolences – I thought you wrote “broke” not “woke” – lololol. But maybe they went both!
The housing crises is a government made one. Thanks to subsidizes for first time buyers, keeping rate so low for so long, thanks to offering rent assistance for low income renters, and thanks for strict house regulations of upkeeping apartments and the very costly and lengthy time it takes to evict delinquent or bad tenants.
All this adds to the cost of running a business (in this case, that is you if you are a landlord or a builder) and just like running any business, you will pass on your cost and maximize your profit.
I know the above first hand. In fact, during COVID, rent has gone up considerably from previouse years (except for apartments around colleges and universities because schools were closed, but that is rebounding now very fast). Partly because of government money handout to help renters (one of the programs is called RCAP). In fact, I know several tenants whose rent payment was made through RCAP for 10+ months in a raw! All they have to do is apply without solid evidence of being in need. Those same tenants, with the extra cash they have, end up buying larger and multiple TVs, fancier furniture, newer cars, et. el. — in a nutshell, they didn’t save and are still living pay-check-to-pay-check.
So if this Maskachusetts righteous wants to keep housing under control and help the poor, she should march to DC and protest in front of the White House, not from her $1M+ home behind a computer screen. But we know she won’t, because this housing crises will not impact her or her kids.
I’m just worried these people might have to make their own pizzas and mow their own lawns.
The horror, the horror.
Maybe something could be done with ‘lower’ people and buses to make sure these fancy towns still have luxury and ease.
Since the fancy people get to work from home maybe the evtol market will be getting service workers into the suburbs from the ghettos. Little bit different outcome than the prediction the evtol industry sells to investors.