deathmtn

Hi. I'm a homeowner in North Cambridge.

In light of signs appearing in our neighborhood implying the "danger" of affordable housing coming to our neighborhood, we want to say that we welcome everyone in our neighborhood, including people who qualify for affordable housing.

Further, I am in favor of the affordable apartment building being proposed to be built in the Walden Square parking lot. I urge you to do everything you can to make it happen.

We desperately need housing for people that aren't rich here. We don't want to live in a monoculture, and it is an injustice to make a city exclusive to people that can make a $3K rent.

For National Poetry Generation Month, I've made a tribute to Inspectah Deck (Rebel INS). Using some incredibly inefficient code, I used a slant-rhyme finder I wrote years ago to replace words in his legendary verse from Triumph with slant rhymes and create several strange derivations.

"I was wrong about what people were willing to endure, or accept, or even embrace," said Droqen. "I have a more 'positive' view of what people are capable of enduring now, but I don't know if that's a good thing! [...] People can get used to—and even find joy, beauty, and solace—in just about anything. On one hand, this is admirable and quite beautiful. But maybe it means as the end of the world draws nearer, instead of fighting to stop it, maybe everyone will just endure it."

TDC officials never imagined this scenario when they tapped into the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program back in 2003, to renovate their buildings. Under these deals, a nonprofit forms a partnership with an investor (often a large bank) that provides funding in exchange for tax breaks. At the end of 15 years, the nonprofit generally gets to buy out the investor’s stake, taking ownership of the property for well below market value.

At least that was Congress’s intent, housing specialists say — keeping properties affordable for the long-term and in community hands. But the game has changed in recent years, as some project funders began selling off their partnership interests to investment firms with more aggressive profit motives. And those firms are demanding bigger payouts to exit the deals.

Sobrinho-Wheeler reacted Tuesday. “During discussion of the policy order on adding a legal research budget item for the City Council last night, the head of Cambridge’s Law department threatened city councillors with jail time if they voted for it. I don’t think this kind of intimidation is supposed to happen in a democracy,” he said.

In addition, he found “the section of the city’s 1940 charter that was indirectly referenced” as underlying the potential for fines or jail time “was designed to stop councillors from trying to covertly fire city employees, not prevent budget consideration requests. It was disturbing to see it invoked here, moments before a vote,” Sobrinho-Wheeler said.