Letters to the Editor: January 26 – February 1, 2017
Kudos for Commentary on Fair Housing in D.C. Area
Editor,
Kudos to Jeff Dubro for his commentary last week, “The Homes We Borrow from Our Children,” about the challenge of fair housing in the metro Washington area.
Catholic social teaching reminds us that human life should flourish, not just make money. Money is a means to human flourishing, not its end. Some things – like houses – are not just assets, to be bought, sold, traded, and flipped to the highest bidder. They should be, as Dubro notes, Homes.
Northern Virginia communities have a penchant for fostering the McMansions Dubro decries; in their mutual competition to drive up tax ratables and gentrify, too many McMansions and too little affordable family housing is being built. Try to find a three bedroom/two bath apartment in the Little City.
A more humane housing policy represents a pox on the Left and the Right: the Left, which by its plethora of lifestyles libertinism, has devalued the traditional family so that affordable housing for multi-child families is increasingly rarer; the Right, which by its neglect of infrastructure has contributed to the artificially cramped regional market by having too little reliable public transportation going all the way to…Vienna. The utilitarians (and that includes local governments) of course, are in the middle, reaping financial windfalls from the artificially overpriced housing market and with little incentive to fix it.
John M. Grondelski
Falls Church
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