Beats the alternative, for now?

“Being,” c. 1923–26, (oil on canvas), by Agnes Pelton, in the show “Some American Stories,’’ at the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine.

The museum says:

“‘Some American Stories’ is a thematic presentation of works from Colby’s collection in the museum’s Lunder Wing that leads visitors on a journey from before the founding of the United States to the present day. Galleries represent a different topic within the broader narrative of American art and history, reflecting a great diversity of experiences’’

Chris Powell: Rent control won’t Build housing; Alleging ‘Meanness’ is not an argument in School-Trans-athletes issue

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Connecticut's cost of living is high, in large part because of housing prices, and nearly everyone says the state needs much more housing, especially ‘‘affordable" housing -- most of which is rental housing. But whether everyone who says that the state needs more housing really believes it is a fair question.

That's because most of the housing legislation proposed in the General Assembly wouldn't increase the supply of housing at all. Most proposals would just scapegoat landlords, though more rental housing requires  more  landlords. Other proposals would just increase the dependence of renters on government. 

State government action that might actually get any “affordable" housing built remains too controversial, even for many Democratic legislators who ordinarily prattle about helping the poor even as many of us argue that Democratic administrations have lately been grinding the poor down with inflation, including high electricity prices, and ineffectual schools.

For example, Democratic legislators want a big increase in state government rent subsidies to tenants, which turn housing into political patronage and take tenants hostage.

Democrats want to forbid landlords from evicting tenants at the end of their leases without ‘‘just cause." End-of-lease evictions undertaken so that landlords can raise rents would be prohibited. This would be rent control, which never got any housing built but only destroyed the private sector's incentive to build rental housing.

Democrats want to forbid landlords from charging more than a month's rent for a security deposit, as if landlords shouldn't have the right to judge how much of a deposit is necessary to protect their property against damage by tenants. 

Democrats want to restrict the rent increases that can be charged upon sale of a property -- more rent control.  

Democrats want to require even smaller towns to establish “fair rent commissions" -- still more rent control.

Legislation called “Towns Take the Lead" would require towns to set housing construction goals, but there would be no firm enforcement mechanism for achieving them.

Democrats want state government to increase its obstruction of federal immigration-law enforcement and provide more medical-insurance coverage to illegal immigrants, thus incentivizing more illegal immigration, even as state government has never made any provision for housing Connecticut's estimated more than 100,000 immigration-law violators.

The most helpful of the Democratic housing proposals may be the one that would formally authorize homeless people to live, eat and sleep on public land.

Connecticut has many destitute, addicted and mentally ill people, and some of them panhandle and live largely out of sight in the woods or underbrush, but so far the state lacks anything like the sidewalk tenting camps of Los Angeles and Portland, Ore. Maybe that kind of visibility for the destitute and disturbed is necessary to get Connecticut thinking seriously about its housing policy, social disintegration and declining living standards.

The only sure way to get a substantial amount of new housing in Connecticut is for state government to commission it directly and let landlords charge market-rate rents. 

Connecticut's cities, with their populations impoverished by state welfare and education policies and their governments surviving mainly on state financial aid, are already wards of the state. They also have large tracts of decrepit industrial and residential property already served by water, sewer, gas and power lines and public transportation -- property that practically begs for redevelopment, especially mixed-use redevelopment, with commerce at street level and residences upstairs, redevelopment that doesn't worsen suburban sprawl.

A state redevelopment authority could be authorized to purchase or condemn such properties and provide them to developers, specifying their development format and completion schedules, while leaving rents to the market so the new properties won't become more government-engineered slums. Cities might resent their loss of control to the state redevelopment authority but then few cities are operated well enough to deserve control of state housing policy any more than suburbs deserve to control it with their exclusive zoning.

 Any  new middle-class housing will help bring down the cost of  all  housing nearby, and the cost of living generally. If Connecticut's decentralized political system can't get housing built, state government will have to do it.   

‘Mean’ Is No Argument

According to the leader of the Democratic majority in the Connecticut Senate, Norwalk’s Bob Duff, Republican legislators are “mean" for proposing legislation to prevent boys from participating in girls' sports when the boys think of themselves as girls.

“Mean" is pretty tame as Democratic criticism of Republicans goes these days. At least Duff didn’t call the Republicans racist, misogynist or right-wing extremists, as is commonly done by many Democrats without prompting other Democrats to call them “mean."

These days anyone who suggests, for example, that state government shouldn’t be controlled by the government employee unions anymore is bound to be called one of those things, maybe all three. For as Lenin or some other totalitarian is supposed to have observed: If you label something well enough, no argument is needed.

Calling Republicans “mean" for wanting to keep males out of female sports is not an argument. It is a distraction, because there  is  no argument against keeping males out of female sports, except that doing so may hurt the feelings of the males who think of themselves as female.

But keeping those males out of female sports doesn't deny them the ability to participate in sports, as is sometimes alleged, since they remain free to participate in male sports. 

If anyone really needs reminding, the premise of segregating the genders in sports is that on average males are larger, stronger and faster than females, and that only such segregation can assure equal opportunity for females, which the 1972 amendments to Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were meant to achieve.

But now that the transgenderism cult has taken over some of the Democratic Party, the party implies that physical differences between the sexes have disappeared and there is no unfairness in requiring females to compete against males, even as males competing as females have famously robbed the latter of deserved victories in Connecticut and throughout the world, sometimes inflicting physical injuries on the females.

That unfairness is what is “mean," though Duff affects not to see it.

If a male can deny biology and merely  think  himself female and induce government to compel everyone to pretend along with him, what becomes of reality? After all, if the adage is true -- that you’re only as old as you feel -- how can adults be prevented from playing in Little League and lording it over the kids there?     

Most people know that the transgenderism cult in sports is nonsense but many are reluctant to say so lest they risk having the cult’s many demagogues call them “mean" or something worse. After all, they may figure that there is only a little injustice here -- to the few females who lose to the males who purport to have transcended their gender and its physical advantages. 

Even so, it’s injustice all the same, and resolving the issue in favor of justice might be easy in Connecticut if a team competing against the University of Connecticut’s beloved women’s basketball team recruited a transgender player or two who proceeded to knock the UConn women around in a blowout on television.

The resulting popular indignation might give Connecticut Democrats some political courage.

The Biden administration turned Title IX on its head, the Trump administration is striving to put it back upright, and a few Democratic leaders may be realizing that the country is not inclined to keep pretending along with them that males belong in female sports, bathrooms and prisons, nor to pretend that immigration law enforcement should stop. Indeed, only such Democratic nuttiness could have helped to bring Donald Trump back to the presidency.     

California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, who aspires to his party’s next presidential nomination, appeared to have deduced this the other day when he told an interviewer that male participation in female sports is unfair. This was amazing, since California is where much nuttiness originates.

If Newsom can repudiate the nuttiness, could Senator Duff and other Democrats in Connecticut repudiate it someday as well? Or would that be too “mean"?    

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).