OPINION
6A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2016
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
HEATHER RAMSDELL, Circulation Manager
OUR VIEW
No growth in
housing is not a
realistic choice
F
ew residents of the Lower Columbia region will deny that
lack of affordable housing is one of our biggest problems.
It is a dilemma that hits workers who see an increasingly
painful share of income go to ever-escalating rent. It impacts exist-
ing employers and those who would like to get into business here
by limiting the size of the workforce. Even those who already own
satisfactory homes are affected, as property assessments increase
and options decrease for children who may want to live here.
Agreement on possible solutions seems far away. Collapse of
plans to build multifamily housing in Miles Crossing — scaled
down from 168 to 48 units — is a timely example of the chal-
lenges that lie ahead. Located within an easy commute of Astoria
and Warrenton, and close enough to North Coast resort commu-
nities to house some of their hospitality and retail labor force, the
Miles Crossing project would have been a signiicant irst step
toward alleviating pent-up demand.
Neighbors’ concerns weren’t lacking in merit. Rural utility and
transportation infrastructure might not have been up to the job of
accommodating several hundred new residents. And we all live
close enough to the Portland and Seattle suburbs to be aware of
how poorly planned urban growth can dramatically impact qual-
ity of life. In particular, south King County between Seattle and
Tacoma has addressed city housing needs, but at a huge cost to the
landscape. People who lived there 30 years ago would barely rec-
ognize the place.
We can, however, learn from nearby bad examples and yet
work to accommodate economic development and the natu-
ral growth that is intrinsic to healthy communities. Acting upon
longterm plans for expanding workforce housing and other types
of residential development will inevitably displease some.
We must, however, persevere in identifying areas to build mul-
tifamily housing, subdivisions for single-family residences and
places for manufactured homes. For developers and agencies,
a key part of this task will be to make certain streets, water and
sewer systems, schools, policing and other municipal services are
up to the task.
Growth is no panacea. Many who live here like things just as
they are, and hope policy decisions will aim for minimal or no
impacts from new housing. This is understandable, but unrealistic.
Northwestern Oregon is attracting tens of thousands of new res-
idents a year. They have to live somewhere, and some are going
to live here, along with city residents seeking more peaceful and
scenic surroundings at the coast. Our housing shortage must be
addressed in a deliberate and intelligent fashion.
To that end, The Daily Astorian is publishing a ive-day series
on our area’s housing shortage starting Oct. 24. We’re talking to
people from all walks of life impacted by the dificulty in inding
a place to live and painting a clearer picture of what the problems
are and presenting possible solutions.
COMING FRIDAY: ENDORSEMENTS
IN LOCAL, STATE, FEDERAL ELECTIONS.
Can the US win
this election?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
New York Times News Service
S
eriously, why didn’t we sell
tickets? If only our national
election had been pay-per-view
for the rest of the world, we could
have wiped out the national debt.
But while viewers around the world
seem to be lapping up our national
reality TV show, are we, the citizens
of America, going to get anything
out of it?
Speciically, are we going to
get the thing we need most and
have enjoyed least this century:
effective government? We have
too much deferred
maintenance to ix,
too much deferred
leadership to gen-
erate and too much
deferred re-imagin-
ing to undertake to
wait another four years to solve our
biggest problems, especially in this
age of accelerating technology and
climate change.
If we will have indulged in almost
two years of electoral entertainment
and pathos just to end up back where
we were, only worse, with even more
venomous gridlock in Washington, it
won’t just be emotionally depressing,
we’ll really start to decline as a
nation. When we forfeit governing
our country strategically at the
national level for this long, inevitably
the roof will start to leak and the
loors will start to buckle.
But how can anything good come
from a campaign where the enter-
tainment is increasingly X-rated and
where the winner will be so morally
injured — because of the hatchet
wounds that were inlicted by the
loser or that were self-inlicted?
Fixing the end
What needs to happen for this
election-drama script to end differ-
ently, or at least not so tragically?
For starters, this version of the
Republican Party has to die. I don’t
say that as a partisan. I say that as a
citizen who believes that America
needs a healthy center-right party
that offers more market-based solu-
tions to problems; keeps the pressure
on for deregulation, freer trade and
smaller government; and is willing to
compromise. But today’s version of
the GOP is not such a problem-solv-
ing party.
We have known that ever since
the GOP speaker of the House
John Boehner quit, not because he
couldn’t work with President Barack
Obama but because roughly a quarter
of House Republicans, the so-called
Freedom Caucus, were simply not
interested in governing and had made
his job impossible.
For the sake of the country, this
version of the Republican Party has
to be fractured, with the extreme
far right going off with the likes of
Donald Trump, the Tea Party, Ted
Cruz — along with all the right-
wing TV and radio gasbags who
thrive on chaos — leaving behind a
moderate center-right bloc, which,
one hopes, one day would become
the new GOP. But it will need to
nurture a new base, one inspired by
a Jack Kemp spirit of conservative
innovation, not by Trump dog whis-
tles of anger, xenophobia and racial
enmity.
Toward that end it is particularly
important that Trump be crushed at
the polls to send the message inside
the GOP and out that someone of
his poisonous ilk can never win in
America, and to strip him and his
loyalists of any argument that the
election was rigged.
At the same time, we have to
hope not only that Hillary Clinton
wins the national election but also
that Democrats retake at least the
Senate, so she has some real leverage
to forge trade-offs with a more sane
GOP to start ixing things: putting
in place common-sense gun laws,
like restoring the Assault Weapons
Ban, requiring universal background
checks and making it illegal for
anyone on the terrorist watch list
to buy a gun; borrowing money at
near-zero interest rates to rebuild
our infrastructure; replacing some
income and corporate taxes with a
revenue-neutral carbon tax to stim-
ulate more clean-energy production;
ixing Obamacare; and implementing
sensible immigration reform and
responsible tax and entitlement
reforms.
The bigger Clinton’s margin of
victory, the less dependent she’d be,
I hope, on the left wing of her party,
and the more likely she’d work with
Republicans, as she vowed during
the last debate, by “inding common
ground, because you have to be able
to get along with people to get things
done in Washington.”
I say “hope” because I don’t
know who the real Hillary is — the
more Bernie Sanderish one speaking
publicly or the more Bill Clintonish
one who spoke privately to Goldman
Sachs.
Nightmare scenario
The nightmare scenario —
ruling out, God forbid, a Trump
victory — is that Clinton wins
with a slim majority and the GOP
holds the House and the Senate.
The Democratic left would have
a stranglehold on Clinton while
Trump, who would start his own TV
network and movement, would keep
the Republican base in a state of
permanent anger, intimidating every
Republican lawmaker who contem-
plated compromise. If that happens,
America will be adrift.
One more wish. Within hours of
the leak of the “Access Hollywood”
tape showing Trump saying vile
things about women, WikiLeaks,
which seems to have become an
arm of Russian intelligence, leaked
Democratic Party emails meant to
embarrass Clinton. The Clinton camp
suggested that Russia was trying
to tilt the election to Trump. If so,
crushing Trump at the polls is the
best way for Americans to say to
Vladimir Putin, “You can manipulate
your elections, but you can’t manip-
ulate ours.”
But please, Lord, let that not be
the only good thing to come out of
this election.
A great ight of our times: stagnation
By DAVID LEONHARDT
New York Times News Service
T
hink, for a moment, about the
stories that your family likes
to tell about itself. They are
probably miniature versions of the
American story, with progress as the
central theme.
Maybe your great-grandparents
arrived here as striving immigrants,
and you now talk about how proud
they would be.
Maybe you’re the
irst college graduate
or doctor in the
family, and your
parents brag about
you. Maybe your
grandparents couldn’t vote because of
their skin color — and then had the
thrill of voting for a president with the
same skin color.
These stories aren’t about only
your family. They are also stories of
tribal pride — about Italians, Irish,
African-Americans, Jews, Asians,
Latinos and others — that make peo-
ple feel part of something larger.
When progress is the norm, it
feeds on itself. People can trust that
their own sacriices will usually pay
off. They can endure hard times
without becoming cynical and can be
generous toward others.
Now, imagine a different reality:
one in which your family — or whole
community — had known scant prog-
ress for decades.
You couldn’t tell stories of upward
mobility, because they wouldn’t be
true. Instead, you would be frustrated,
about hard work gone unrewarded,
and anxious, for your future and your
children.
Such stagnation is the reality for
much of the country’s population —
roughly one third by many measures,
closer to half by others. Some of the
statistics are familiar. But as a group,
they’re chilling.
The typical household, amazingly,
has a net worth 14 percent lower
than the typical one did in 1984,
according to a forthcoming Russell
Sage Foundation publication. The
life-expectancy gap between the
afluent and everyone else is growing.
The number of children living with
only one parent or none has doubled
since the 1970s (to 30 percent). The
obesity rate has nearly tripled (to 38
percent). About 8 million people have
spent time behind bars at some point
in their life, up from 1.5 million 40
years ago. While college enrollment
has grown, the norm for middle-class
and poor students is to leave without a
four-year degree.
Central challenge
This column is my irst for the
Op-Ed page, which is why I’m
devoting it to the great American
stagnation. That stagnation is a central
challenge of our time.
And we don’t feel nearly enough
urgency about it.
One reason is that many
Americans don’t have daily contact
with it. College graduates who live in
a major metro area — those who tend
to read a national newspaper, to put
it another way — do enjoy a rising
standard of living.
Yet even for them, the stagnation
looms over life. It breeds political
dysfunction, and it helps explain why
so many Americans aren’t swayed by
facts. When you have been struggling
for decades, you tend to lose faith in
society’s institutions and their sober-
minded experts.
Without that faith, all of our other
problems become harder to solve.
America’s standing in the world will
be diminished. The damage from
climate change — one problem that’s
even more important than stagna-
tion — will accelerate in the face of
inaction.
Obviously, the past year has
highlighted the depth and breadth of
the frustration. It takes different forms
and crosses demographic and political
boundaries.
Most productively, the Black
Lives Matter movement has focused
attention on the persistent ways
that discrimination blocks progress.
Police shootings are only part of it:
The typical white household earns 70
percent more than the typical black
household, unchanged from 40 years
ago.
Most dangerously, Donald Trump
has captured a presidential nomi-
nation with one of history’s oldest
tricks — using economic frustrations
to attract political support by igniting
ethnic hatred. Much of the hatred may
have been lurking already, but the
frustrations let it come out of hiding
and lourish.
The country’s immediate task is to
reject Trump — for each of us to help
ensure that his deeply un-American
campaign remains un-American. I’d
encourage everyone to ind one con-
crete way over the next four weeks to
play a part.
But rejecting Trump isn’t enough.
If that is all we do, Trumpism will
return, with a savvier frontman.
The real answer has to involve
ensuring that a large majority of
Americans enjoy a rising quality of
life. Doing so means better, more
equal schools. It means a tax code
less favorable to the rich and, yes, the
upper middle class. It means criminal
justice reform. It means a bigger
emphasis on good-paying jobs.
The moral case for a fairer society
is clear. But there is also a self-in-
terested case. If the trends continue,
the United States will ultimately
become a worse place to live, for all
Americans, no matter how insulated
they may feel today.