Midwest Musings, #6

State legislatures allowing property owners to discriminate against federal housing voucher holders, and the opening of the National Public Housing Museum, in the same story.

Source: wbez.org

Good day everyone. Still trying to get back into the regular writing groove with many changes happening on the personal and professional front. At any rate, here’s your monthly update on Midwest metros, big metro edition.

Kansas City: The State of Missouri is taking action against local governments that seek to prevent landlords from discriminating against people with rental housing vouchers. Several Missouri communities, including Kansas City, have passed ordinances that prevent housing discrimination based on a renter's source of income. The Missouri State Legislature says that's an infringement on property rights:

“(Missouri state senator Nick) Schroer on Tuesday called the bill “a common sense piece of legislation that prioritizes property rights over radical government overreach.” (Missouri state representative Chris) Brown in a March Senate committee hearing called it a “property rights bill.” “Basically what has happened is [cities] are forcing people to take Section 8 housing,” Brown said.

“…I would submit this kind of amounts to an illegal appropriation of private property. But there’s a very practical reason why a landlord may not want to do Section 8 housing.””

Another case of people saying the quiet part out loud. Housing voucher users have been discriminated against since the program started more than 50 years ago. However codifying it into state law is disturbing to me.

Columbus: The Central Ohio Transit Authority, the name of Columbus' transit system, is looking into the idea of eliminating fares on its buses:

“Local advocacy group Transit Columbus has long pushed COTA to seriously consider free fares, pointing to what they see as successful test cases in cities like Albuquerque, Kansas City and Boston (where only certain key routes were made fare-free). Philadelphia also has a pilot program that has sent out over 24,000 free transit passes to low-income residents.“Making public transit free for riders is not a new or radical idea,” said Stevie Pasamonte, Board Chair of Transit Columbus. “It reduces barriers to ridership, benefits those who could not otherwise afford public transit, and speeds the system up because the bus won’t have to sit and wait for folks to pay their fares while boarding.””

Indianapolis: A group of neighbors in Indianapolis led an effort to create a temporary multi-use path on the Calvary Street Bridge to illustrate the potential of bike- and pedestrian-oriented safety improvements:

““The two neighborhoods partnered this weekend to place more than 60 traffic barriers along the southernmost lane of the Calvary Street bridge, where the new path runs. They also painted the road and set up several new curb extensions to calm traffic along nearby McCarty Street.” The same community members have been monitoring traffic speeds on their local streets, which led to the addition of temporary curb bump-outs on some streets to slow traffic.”

An aside here: significant and relevant urbanism news seems to be very difficult to find in Columbus and Indianapolis. Could it possibly be that as the two most suburban-oriented large cities in the Midwest, the trends that impact them are very different from the ones that impact those on the Great Lakes? That, and also their overall compatibility with Upper South cities like Nashville or Raleigh? Food for thought.