"Do we really want to live like this?" (Sept. 25) was a well-written article about the Metropolitan Council's housing plan for 2021 to 2030. Katherine Kersten explains the issue very well and offers up her standard fix for the problem. Besides encouraging "the formation of strong families," she wants to reform education and lower taxes and create a friendly business environment aka lower regulation.
In a 2015 survey, CNBC selected Minnesota as the state with the best business environment. Housing, schools, regulation, taxes and educated workforce all played a big role in our 2015 ranking.
Bill Ojile, Lino Lakes
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Kersten's commentary should serve as a powerful reminder of the inescapable fact that everyone living in the seven-county Twin Cities metro has ceded significant control over their lives to an unelected bureaucracy. Why have we granted so much unchecked power to people whose views are entirely unaccountable? We have no idea what motivates them, yet they exert far greater control over our 186 communities than do our mayors and city councils, all of whom were elected by their local citizens.
The legislators who created the Met Council in the late '60s did so from the conviction that our metropolitan area needed a rational, coordinated strategy for its long-term growth. However, the council and its minions have gone well beyond the bounds of that original mission to the point that they are dictating where we shall live, what types of housing we will occupy and whom our neighbors will be. Their goal now is to improve the financial well-being of low-income residents by dispersing them throughout the metro area. The rationale: Relocate to a better neighborhood and good things will follow. Nonsense. Societal good will come only when we Minnesotans do the hard work of helping low-income individuals to form stable families, providing their children with a variety of educational alternatives and encouraging them to seek full-time employment.
Many of our churches, synagogues and mosques are actively engaged in the effort. Free individuals encouraging others to find their way is vastly superior to all of us receiving diktats from officialdom.
Mark H. Reed, Plymouth
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Kersten argues for preserving socioeconomically exclusive communities, with judgmental put-downs of workers in low-wage occupations who lack spouses with good jobs. Her same-old housing policy, traceable to early-20th-century planning commissions, requires a low-wage class to reside in cast-off houses or tenements in neighborhoods with little employment opportunity. This serves only to preserve the unjust and unhealthy status quo. As a college-educated (now retired) pink-collar worker who proudly scrimped and saved all my life to afford a below-median-price home, I want my hardworking neighbors, along with inner-city citizens and their children, to have a better chance at the American dream.
