Cool, but I hope she’ll keep a spare hat for tossing in the political ring.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer didn’t just beat the stuffings out of her restricted country club opponent, Tudor Dixon. Her decisive re-election victory (along with a finally unfucked legislative map) also helped Democrats flip both chambers in the state Legislature for the first time in four decades. When Democrats have united government, there’s a lot of good they can accomplish.
Last month, Michigan’s House and Senate passed HB 4006— a bill containing a single, yet powerful, sentence. It revokes the 1931 law that criminalized abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest.
So much to like here:
… Brian O’Kane and Peadar Ó Rathaille this week began sending planning enforcement complaints to Cork City Council. They have 60 in already and have plans to send 371 complaints relating to Cork city short-term lets. After hitting the city they’re going to go for 1,700 similar lets in Cork county before shifting their focus to Dublin and the rest of the country. “I’ll be willing to go about this for as long as it takes,” said final year law student O’Kane from Blarney, county Cork.
Fellow law student Ó Rathaille, an Ennis, county Clare man, said he’s “heard oftentimes that every lever is being pulled to address the housing crisis” but was frustrated that no real efforts have been made to address illegal Airbnbs. “To my mind this is probably the easiest lever to pull that hasn’t yet been pulled to return potentially 25,000 houses to the market. I saw that the law was there but it just wasn’t being enforced, which is a general theme in law in Ireland. It communicates that the ‘law is here, but we’re never going to enforce that,’” he said.
O’Kane, who has familial experience of homelessness, has been involved in direct action with a tenants’ union and a housing cooperative in Cork, which has explored what he calls a “non-profit, landlord-alternative housing system”. Confronted with local and national governments that don’t seem to care about the issue, or at least unwilling to deal with it, O’Kane says that “direct action point is a great way for people to turn vague, meandering tweets into real, substantive action that can bring about real change in the short term as well as the long term". …
I wonder if “libraries and their patriots” was actually a typo, and he meant “patrons” instead, but I like it!
I’m in favor of this for corporate owners. In the US, new zoning laws and regulations were passed to make this illegal in places where the majority of owners were women trying to earn extra income to age in place. Of course, evicting them put more houses on the market for corporations to buy for pennies on the dollar, and increased the number of homeless seniors pushed out because of tax liens.
While Little isn’t as horrible as most of the Idaho GQP, don’t mistake this as some kind of honorable or sensible position. If you read between the lines of his critique, it’s the ambuguity that he has a problem with. In other words, his response is more along the lines of chastizing the legislature for passing a law that could just as easily be used to sue public institutions for having a Bible as for having the real target of the bill: books that mention “the Gays,” POC, or other minorities as anything other than inferior. He’s basically telling them to go back to the drawing board and get it “right.”
With any luck, the Streisand Effect can kick in when the ensuing clarified bill comes up, as (one imagines) the Bible’s profane/objectionable material gets its special provisions in law.
My guess is that these law students would be focusing on vacant property. Vacation rentals, “investment properties” and the like.
I don’t think that these students will be targeting grannies trying to stay in their homes.
I wouldn’t presume to understand fully the Irish housing crisis. Doubtless some of our bbs posters in Ireland could chime in here with real life, on the ground info.
I have been following Dr. Rory Hearne’s work for a while now. Private equity, vulture- and hedge funds, along with ahem a less than responsive government have contributed to Generation Locked Out, Generation Rent, and many thousands of Irish people in emergency accommodations, including families with children.
Getting housing justice for the affected Irish people will stem a third exodus from their homeland, where–right now–young people can’t afford to find a place to live for what they earn.
ETA:
ouch
Corporate owners are really the only ones directly affected by this. AirBnB hosting is generally for people who have little to no concern about the condition of the property nor how it is being used.* Owners are letting transitory renters in with few if any methods of enforcing reasonable non-destructive use of the property. This is very different from leasing a property with a deposit. Something with a host of legal responsibilities and protections for all involved.
Corporate owners couldn’t care less if a property is being trashed by transitory renters if their bottom line is intact. They have no personal or direct connection to it. A grannie (or small level landlord like me) looking for extra income with surplus property has a better shot at steady income with few legal hassles from a long term legal tenant.
*I know plenty of people probably AirBnB their personal residences or vacation homes. But its insanely personally risky for a bunch of reasons I can go into detail about if asked.
I really really want to believe!
