Where can you afford a home on your income?

[ken_sylvania]

Did Jesus teach us to try to make life easier for fornicators?

By example - yes. He refused to condemn the woman who was caught in the act of adultery, and essentially told the Pharisees they should not be punishing her unless they were sinless themselves.

I don’t think Jesus taught us adultery is okay and that we should take efforts to make life easier to adulterers at all. The New Testament doesn’t reflect the idea that only “sinless” people can judge others for being in sin or not, and the early church certainly didn’t function that way either.

If you believe that, you are welcome to your beliefs, but it means we have fundamentally different religions and faiths. I believe Jesus came to set sinners free from sin, not to excuse sin as being no big deal and something that should be tolerated.

That little "if" is doing a lot of work there.

[Ken]

Ken, that’s why I agreed to call them “fornicating mothers” (or “fornicating parents” if need be). Do you object to that term?

Yes, we know you disapprove of such women. And you are free to call them anything you want.

But that isn't a useful definition if we are discussing things like making it harder for single mothers to live in a particular neighborhood. Or making it harder for them in general. Which are actual things that you have proposed in this thread.

That is because most policies are centered on the children not the mothers. Like the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Or the Head Start program. Or food assistance programs like SNAP. Or housing assistance. We don't sort children into groups based on the circumstances of their conception.

Actually, “we” most certainly do. Ken, have you personally applied for or seen an application for SNAP or WIC or Medicaid recently?

You are asked if you are married or not, and if so, to include a husband’s income amount. If unmarried, the father’s income isn’t included. The amount of SNAP awarded is higher for fornicating single mothers than it is for married, chaste mothers (unless their husband doesn’t work).

And say to one child "you get to eat and have a roof over your head but this other child does not because we disapprove of how she was conceived." Not only is such a notion immoral. It would most certainly be unconstitutional.

That is exactly what the current system does. If my wife and I were unmarried, my children would get a bigger food stamp allowance each month.

All of that has nothing to do with the circumstances of the child's birth. Or whether or not the mother is "fornicating" as you put it. That is simply an assessment of the family income. If you have a rich husband then you really aren't poor are you? Even if your personal income is zero.

Curious how in your world it is the single mothers who are "fornicating" and the married mothers who are "chaste". The real world doesn't fall neatly into those categories.

[ken_sylvania]

Ken, that’s why I agreed to call them “fornicating mothers” (or “fornicating parents” if need be). Do you object to that term?

Yes, we know you disapprove of such women. And you are free to call them anything you want.

But that isn't a useful definition if we are discussing things like making it harder for single mothers to live in a particular neighborhood. Or making it harder for them in general. Which are actual things that you have proposed in this thread.

That is because most policies are centered on the children not the mothers. Like the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Or the Head Start program. Or food assistance programs like SNAP. Or housing assistance. We don't sort children into groups based on the circumstances of their conception.

Actually, “we” most certainly do. Ken, have you personally applied for or seen an application for SNAP or WIC or Medicaid recently?

You are asked if you are married or not, and if so, to include a husband’s income amount. If unmarried, the father’s income isn’t included. The amount of SNAP awarded is higher for fornicating single mothers than it is for married, chaste mothers (unless their husband doesn’t work).

Does the system treat a chaste widowed mother differently than a "fornicating single mother" (to use your term)?

[Josh]

Yes, we know you disapprove of such women. And you are free to call them anything you want.

But that isn't a useful definition if we are discussing things like making it harder for single mothers to live in a particular neighborhood. Or making it harder for them in general. Which are actual things that you have proposed in this thread.

That is because most policies are centered on the children not the mothers. Like the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Or the Head Start program. Or food assistance programs like SNAP. Or housing assistance. We don't sort children into groups based on the circumstances of their conception.

Actually, “we” most certainly do. Ken, have you personally applied for or seen an application for SNAP or WIC or Medicaid recently?

You are asked if you are married or not, and if so, to include a husband’s income amount. If unmarried, the father’s income isn’t included. The amount of SNAP awarded is higher for fornicating single mothers than it is for married, chaste mothers (unless their husband doesn’t work).

Does the system treat a chaste widowed mother differently than a "fornicating single mother" (to use your term)?

No, it doesn’t.

If my wife and I got divorced tomorrow, my children’s SNAP amounts would go up.

[temporal1]

Does the system treat a chaste widowed mother differently than a "fornicating single mother" (to use your term)?

not directed to me ..
the system doesn’t understand the two mothers will talk, compare notes, the former will do the math.
over decades, many have done the math. it’s sorrowful on so many levels.

“look, honey. all you have to do is have another baby.” $$$ (one young woman after another.)

[Josh]

All of that has nothing to do with the circumstances of the child's birth. Or whether or not the mother is "fornicating" as you put it. That is simply an assessment of the family income. If you have a rich husband then you really aren't poor are you? Even if your personal income is zero.

The system treats a husband and wife differently than an unmarried father and mother. How is this a good idea, Ken?

Curious how in your world it is the single mothers who are "fornicating" and the married mothers who are "chaste". The real world doesn't fall neatly into those categories.

A number of people in this thread objected to my use of “single mother”, so I have been more explicit now by saying “fornicating single mother” to make it clear what I am talking about.

[ken_sylvania]

Actually, “we” most certainly do. Ken, have you personally applied for or seen an application for SNAP or WIC or Medicaid recently?

You are asked if you are married or not, and if so, to include a husband’s income amount. If unmarried, the father’s income isn’t included. The amount of SNAP awarded is higher for fornicating single mothers than it is for married, chaste mothers (unless their husband doesn’t work).

Does the system treat a chaste widowed mother differently than a "fornicating single mother" (to use your term)?

No, it doesn’t.

If my wife and I got divorced tomorrow, my children’s SNAP amounts would go up.

So then it's not actually based on the circumstances of the child's conception.

[Bootstrap]

Request: Could this thread please be about affordability of homes by region?

We have two maps that contain data on that. The second has a lot more about the economy and incomes that is helpful. Feel free to ignore other data that it presents. Or to provide better sources for this data.

But let's please return to the topic of this thread.

[Ken]

Request: Could this thread please be about affordability of homes by region?

We have two maps that contain data on that. The second has a lot more about the economy and incomes that is helpful. Feel free to ignore other data that it presents. Or to provide better sources for this data.

But let's please return to the topic of this thread.

This is an issue I pay a great deal of attention to because I live in an area of really low housing affordability and I have three daughters who also live in different cities that are pretty high on the unaffordability chart.

While there are a lot of inter-related issues that affect housing affordability. In my mind the biggest one is that we simply prohibit the construction of affordable housing in many parts of the country through zoning laws, building codes, design reviews, and a vast regulatory state that is designed more to obstruct housing than encourage it. Cities like Portland which I live near compound the problem by trying to use top-down regulatory and governmental methods to generate more housing instead of simply relaxing the existing regulations that have caused the problem in the first place.

It is instructive to look to other developed countries that do not have the same housing affordability problem to see what they are doing.

With a growing economy and growing population, trying to restrict housing (as we are currently doing) is like trying to squeeze a balloon. If you squeeze it on one side it simply pops out on another side. In the case of cities, when we restrict housing and increased density in our central cities, it just generates more sprawl on the edges, eating up farmland, green spaces, forest land, exacerbating traffic, pollution, and forcing people into unsustainable car-centric lifestyles. In another generation there won't be much farmland left within 50 miles of any big city and what remains will be weekend country estates for the wealthy and not productive farms. I don't think that is a good thing. But it is the inevitable consequence of encouraging growth while restricting housing.

The very worst example of this that I have seen is Silicon Valley. Last summer I did a college road trip with my youngest daughter and we looped through California and some other western states visiting universities. We stopped at Santa Clara University in the heart of Silicon Valley partly to make her Catholic grandmother happy. The extended family was following our trip on our own private social media photo sharing account and so we had to stop and visit some Catholic universities But it was instructive to see the heart of Silicon Valley which I had never visited before. By all rights, the center of the world's technology industry and headquarters of Apple, Google, Facebooks, Oracle, etc. etc. should be a gleaming high-tech center of innovative architecture and urbanism. Like a North American Singapore or some such. What does it actually look like? Santa Clara is mostly 1950s suburbs interspaced by random strip malls with a kind of weedy older core that looks more like some college town in Iowa surrounded by nondescript sprawl reminiscent of suburban Dallas. Why? Because they prohibit anything else. That is how you get nondescript 1950s era 1800 sf ranch houses selling for $2.5 million: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/586- ... 3288_zpid/ and a downtown that looks like this: https://maps.app.goo.gl/WZBeXSqv28ydSr2M6 One can stomach that sort of development in saw Enid Oklahoma or Shreveport Louisiana. But in the richest and most innovative region in the richest country in the world, that's the best we can do?

At the moment, Seattle is going through a big revisiting of its zoning and revising its master plans to accommodate more growth. And they are making all the same mistakes and setting that city up to become as unaffordable as Silicon Valley. The inevitable consequence will simply be more sprawl as young people are forced to move further and further and further away to find any place they can afford to live. With a daughter who lives in Seattle this concerns me.

[Josh]

Perhaps y’all should consider living in a place where housing is affordable, then?