Politics Archive for April, 2011
Breaking News! The Rent is Too High!
The Washington Post has this story today about the crunch in the rental housing market, which apparently is migrating up from lower income families to pinch the middle class even more.
Here in Seattle, where foreclosed houses are saturating the market and former homeowners are looking for rentals, rent prices are worse than they were when I first moved out here 16 years ago. We just renewed our lease, and had to negotiate like hell to keep the rent increase down to JUST $110 a month.
One of the things the Post piece addresses is the lack of new low-income housing. What it doesn’t get into, so much, is the problem addressed by the doc The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: that because there are incentives to build low-income housing, but not so much to maintain them, part of what happens is that even when lower-income housing is built, it quickly deteriorates once they build it and fill it.
We’ve seen that first-hand over the past two years at the apartment complex my oldest daughter lives in in Seattle. She moved in (with my mom) when the place was so brand-new, they were the first tenants in there besides the maintenance guy. She stayed another year, with her fiance, after my mom moved out. And when I say “lower income,” btw, what that means is that they are “just” paying $1100 a month for a very tiny two-bedroom (technically, it’s a 1 1/2 BR, but we’ll be generous).
In just 24 months, this complex has gone from being a nice place for lower-income families to a crime-ridden ghetto. The police are out there several times a night. Little kids are running wild around the grounds at 2AM. It’s Lord of the Flies over there. They are moving out this weekend, into a bigger, cheaper apartment in a small quad in Shoreline.
It’s certainly not news to any of my friends in NY and LA that the cost of rent is ridiculous. But as my friend Hank Stuever (who also writes for the post) pointed out: Since when is the “norm” for rent and utilities 30 percent of pre-tax income?
1 Comment »Arianna Update: Class Act(ion)
Journalist and union organizer Jonathan Tasini, who was also a HuffPo blogger for five years, has filed a class action lawsuit against Arianna Huffington and Huffington post for $105 million — a third of the value of the sale of HuffPo to AOL. Jeff Bercovici, writing for Forbes, has a couple of great pieces up on the lawsuit here and here.
Also, here’s a copy of the filed complaint if you like to read things written in legalese.
The interesting angle in this lawsuit, which may just give them a legal leg to stand on, is that the filing is based on common law, not contract law — which makes the fact that the bloggers agreed to write for free irrelevant to the case (at least, according to the attorneys for the plaintiff — we’ll see what a judge thinks once all the arguments have been heard).
What it boils down to is that the case alleges that Huffington Post built something of value on the backs of unpaid labor, and that the labor that contributed to that has a fair expectation of compensation now that it’s been sold for a ton of money.
In other words, basically what a lot of HuffPo bloggers have been arguing since the sale, but now a class-action suit’s been filed making exactly that allegation.
Tasini, by the way, was previously the lead plaintiff in the landmark 2001 case New York Times Co. vs Tasini, which dealt with newspapers re-using the work of freelancers for inclusion in electronic databases without additional compensation.
The plaintiffs won that case. We’ll see how things go with this one. It’s good to see the HuffPo bloggers have Tasini in their corner, though, and I expect it’s at least a bit of a relief for those who have been frustrated by Arianna’s refusal to offer any compensation to her corps of unpaid labor to at least have the suit filed so they’ll get their day in court.
1 Comment »