Rent Control in D.C.

Council member Jim Graham is going to introduce a stronger rent control law for the District:

Dear Friends,

It’s time for some real rent control in the District of Columbia!

Many of us have watched rental prices go up, up, up… despite the rent control law the Council wisely and recently extended for five years. The real estate boom in the District shows very little sign of slowing down. We must act now to preserve the affordable rental housing that’s left.

I am proposing to strengthen rent control.

On Tuesday, seven other Council members and I will introduce legislation to place an annual cap on a rent increase for an occupied apartment, and to limit the amount a landlord can raise the rent of a vacant unit, in rent-controlled buildings.

Please join us for a rally on the front steps of the Wilson Building before the bill is introduced, and come to the Council Chamber for the introduction.

Rent Control Reform Now! Rally
Tuesday, October 11, 2005 - 9 a.m.
Wilson Building, 1350 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW

Please spread this message far and wide. Bring a friend and a sign. Thank you for your support!

Bests, Councilmember Jim Graham

Woodson House Update

I got this over a neighborhood listserv about the Carter G. Woodson house:

Carter G. Woodson National Historic Site — Presented by the National Park Service, which took ownership of Dr. Woodson’s home at 1538 9th St. intends to open it up as a National Historic Site in the next 5 to 10 years. The focus of the site will be as a cultural resource and learning center. Over the next several years the NPS will be securing a dedicated source of funding for the site, doing studies to determine the historic place and significance of the
site, and how best to present it. They are currently negotiating with Shilo Baptist Church to purchase 1540 and 1542 and feel confident that those negotiations will conclude soon to purchase them adding more space for the creation of the national historic site. The NPS hopes to have an acquisition ceremony in 2006.

A Student Think Tank?

I attended an event today held on Capitol Hill hosted by the new “student think tank” the Roosevelt Institution event on Capitol Hill today launching their new policy journal. Speaking were Doug Bailey, founder of the Hotline, Quinn Wilhelmi, executive Director of the Roosevelt Institution, and Jesse Wolfson, the editor of their new journal, The Roosevelt Review.

I also met there a columnist for a paper at George Washington University who had written this column (or here if you don’t want to register) about progressivisim.

I also met someone from a think tank called the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. They seem like a very interesting think tank I was not aware of previously that was “Founded in 1970 by black intellectuals and professionals to provide training and technical assistance to newly elected black officials” but now studies a range of issues relevant to the African American community.

Three authors of articles from the first journal spoke briefly on their topics, which were in general sound progressive policy proposals: 1. A proposed a different approach to HIV/AIDs prevention in Africa, taking into consideration power dynamics between men and woman, 2. A proposal to increase the gas tax to reduce gasoline consumption in the U.S. and prevent ANWR drilling, and 3. A proposal to provide health insurance to uninsured children in the U.S.

I was approached by an enthusiastic student with the Brown chapter and I told her that although the ideas were good I wondered if they had thought about how they planned to obtain the political power to implement their ideas. She spoke of her personal connections with such people as someone with the Office U.S. Trade Representative and other officials and said they were building relationships. Overall I am lukewarm on the idea of the organization, it seems too much like young suits creating a platform to further amplify their already loud and privileged voices. That said, I am always one to take advantage of existing structures and when I spoke about how I thought they should be focusing on issues not generally studied by the mainstream think tanks like student voting rights, student disenfranchisement, community broadband, and the politics of communications policy and she seemed interested and took some notes.

I’d love to see them write a student-centered assessment of Horowitz’s “Academic Bill of Rights” because the NEA and AAUP both approach the issue from the perspective of teachers, not students. What other topics deserve a wonky student perspective?

Google Gets Into the Portal Business

I’ve been experimenting with Google’s new personalized home feature which enables anyone with a Google account to create a customizable homepage. In typical Google style they don’t out-do the competition (like MyYahoo) on features, but instead simplicity and ease of use. You can drag and drop the content units around freely from the normal display mode, and the system provides support for converting any RSS feed into a box in addition to providing integration with Gmail and a number of pre-set content units. I have it set up to display my gmail, weather, WMATA’s service advisories (provided in RSS), a couple craigslist searches I am monitoring, as well as a few blogs I am watching, in addition to some of the news blocks they have pre-set. You can even convert customized google news searches into boxes. Like a9, they also have a search history feature that keeps track of your searches - which I find a bit creepy, but they provide a mechanism to easily turn it off.

While I have long pushed the privacy concerns I have had with Google out of my mind, this latest tool has made me realize the company now has access to 1. My email, 2. My IM chats on google talk, 3. My search history.

New Orleans Photos

My friend Eric is an intelligence officer with the 82nd Airborne Division of the U.S. Army. He just returned from his deployment in New Orleans, and has posted over 100 photos he and his friends took while there to Flickr. See the Flickr photo set here. He even got to meet Senator Collins, being the only Maine native in the unit.