Durham Event Calendar

This week, the American Dance Festival is in full swing as it celebrates its 75th anniversary. There are also several events for Father's Day, including an interesting looking luau at The Melting Pot.

See all of this week's events

Use the searchable event calendar

Letters From Vermont and America

I just ran across this while surfing the 'net. Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont sent out an email to his constituents asking them what was going on in their lives economically. He had read all of the media reports about the unemployment rate, about how many people have lost health insurance, about how incomes have declined. But as many of us know, you can't always count on the media to get the story right. So he decided to go to the people and ask them. He says he expected a few responses; he got over 600.

He compiled some of the letters into a booklet and distributed a copy to every member of Congress. You can download the booklet by clicking the link:
The Collapse of the Middle Class: Letters from Vermont and America

Senator Sanders pulled a line from each letter as a title:
"We have at times had to choose between baby food and heating fuel."
"By February we ran out of wood and I burned my mother's dining room furniture."
"Not spending those ten hours at home with my husband and son makes a big difference."
"I want to drop everything I am doing and go visit him."
"We also only eat two meals a day to conserve."
"My husband and I are very nervous about what will happen to us when we are old."
"The pennies have all but dried up....Today I am sad, broken, and very discouraged."
"I don't go to church many Sundays, because the gasoline is too expensive to drive there."
"At the rate we are going we will be destitute in just a few years."
"I am just tired....I work 12 to 14 hours daily and it just doesn't help."
"Now we find that instead of a feeling of comfort, we have a feeling of dread."
"Some nights we eat cereal and toast for dinner because that's all I have."
"Insurance costs continue to rise causing some to forgo insurance to pay for groceries."
"Dentistry is expensive and people are opting not to come to the dentist."
"How devastating it has been for folks who travel great distances to get to their cancer treatment."
"I feel as though I am between a rock and a hard place no matter how hard I try."
"I have been forced to go back to work."
"We would like to not have to worry about where our next meal will come from."
"My husband and I followed all the rules.... Slowly, though, we have sunk back to the 'poor' days."
"It costs me so much money in gas that my wife and I live on $6 per day to eat."
"How much more of a hit can people take? The future looks extremely bleak to me."
"I am now living out of my car."
"Our life style has drastically changed in the past 12 months."
"My mortgage is behind, we are at risk for foreclosure, and I can't keep up with my car payments."
"We are barely staying afloat."
"I wonder some times if we should try to follow our dreams - decide to have children?"
"People say, ‘Cut back.' "
"Does anybody have a solution? Does anybody in Washington care?"

Reading these letters reminds me how fortunate I truly am. While we are more conscientious about gas consumption, and might eat out a little less than we used to, we do not have to make the decisions people talk about in these letters.
Here's hoping that our economy gets back to basics: jobs that pay a living wage, tight knit and supportive families and communities, and of course decent and affordable homes for all!

Barrington Village - Reuse, Recycle, Reinvent

The Wall Street Journal Online has a piece today about Raleigh's Barrington Village and its developer, Builders of Hope. This neighborhood is one of the smartest uses of human and social capital and environmental responsibility I've ever seen. The idea is beautiful in its simplicity:

1. Instead of knocking down old homes to make way for new ones, homeowners donate the homes to Builders of Hope.
2. Builders of Hope moves the house free of charge.
3. The owner keeps a demolished home out of the landfill, gets a tax deduction, and avoids the evil eye of neighbors for tearing down the home.
4. Builders of Hope relocates the house to its development, rehabs it, makes it energy efficient, and sells it to someone that needs affordable housing.
5. Along the way, they employ homeless workers in the construction, giving them experience and skills they can then use to find other jobs.

Everybody gives a little, everybody gets a little - a beautiful way to protect our environment, housing stock, and build human capital.

June Is National Homeownership Month

This month, we celebrate National Homeownership Month. The celebration is meaningful for what it says not only about our ambition in creating more access to the American dream of homeownership, but also for what it means when our ambitions fall short.

President Bush designated June as National Homeownership Month in 2002, with the goal of adding 5.5 million minority homeowners by the end of the decade. Achieving this goal would have a major effect on our nation. Historically, homeownership has been step one in the creation of wealth for Americans, leading to better economic prospects, access to more financial resources, and the ability to pass that wealth on to future generations.

This year, National Homeownership Month is especially poignant. 2008 marks the 40th anniversary of the 1968 Fair Housing Act. A centerpiece of the Act is the prevention of discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, familial status (families with children), and disability. Over the past six years, opportunities for minorities to become homeowners have flourished. New loan programs meant greater access to financing for more people, which meant access to homes. This represented the best in our quest for fair housing and for the goal of increasing homeownership.

As we now know, it also represented the worst. Minorities are expected to make up a disproportionate percentage of the foreclosures sweeping the nation. Entire neighborhoods (and in some cases, entire cities) have lost a generation or more of wealth created through homeownership. In the push to create homeowners on paper, we neglected to provide the underpinnings that would have made them homeowners in fact – i.e., staying a home long enough to put down roots, build equity, and accumulate wealth.

Without proper financial education for all Americans, regulation of lenders, and an economic system built on something more stable than consumer spending, the promises of homeownership will not pay off as well as they should. A recent article in the News and Observer noted that customers often did not understand how to prioritize their bills. They faced disconnection of their electricity, believing that the cable bill had to be paid first, since the cable company’s grace period was shorter. Local utility companies have started programs to help customers understand how to pay bills in order of importance, explaining to them that if they don’t have electricity, they won’t have cable, whether they paid the cable bill or not.

As is fitting, the theme of National Homeownership Month 2008 is “Back to Basics”. From the HUD website:

“This year's theme - "Back to Basics" - is designed to underscore the importance of having strong, common-sense fundamentals as a way to maintain a sustainable housing market. Many of those basics (verification of income, ability to repay) were ignored in the lead-up to the housing bubble. The Department will focus on helping families learn what the federal government is doing to help struggling homeowners; how to protect themselves against predatory lending; to better understand what goes into owning a home; and how to own a home they can afford. “

Couldn’t have said it better myself. Let’s all live up to our potential and make homeownership the dream we know it can be.