It can be owned and it can be cheap enough to buy with the cost amortized over time, if we make enough housing.

That’s better than being chained to a lease and paying rent for life.

Yes you can.

Owning a home you can live, by itself is wealth.

The market price of the home going up is just a measure of market price, because the home and the quality of life you derive from it is the same.

I think part of giving a path to homeownership for people should include some form of lower transaction/tax costs for people buying their first home.

You have a point.

There are two job openings for each unemployed person in the US. Plenty of opportunity.

>Given a path to home ownership? They’re free to buy something whenever they like

Not when they can't accumulate any wealth, because the wages are artificially low, because their leases are kept artificially low (rent regulation), because of government interference.

Meanwhile, we spend 3 billions on homelessness, and the problem doesn't have an end in sight.

San Francisco has a budget per capita 50% higher than NYC, and the problems are worse there.

No amount of budget will fix the problems created by the capture of the city by those political groups. In fact, all they want is more budget, to perpetuate their serfdom system.

Forcing how?

No one is forcing NY politicians to not govern in the interest of the people in those districts, and lose votes as a result.

The only thing which forcing it here is the stubborn ideology that ignores the people.

Renting is great for the short-term, where people want mobility and the option to easily move out.

But long-term tenants should really be given a path towards home ownership, so that they never have to deal with landlords, have stable housing and accumulate wealth over time.

This class system that chains tenants to their leases for life should never exist, and only benefit the politicians who profit from perpetuating such struggles while posing as their "advocate".

It still sounds like you have no problem with totalitarianism.

Sure, I edited my comments for correctness.

The fact that you care about the precise wording makes it sounds like you dislike fascism, but you have no problem with totalitarianism.

>My brother in christ read the next sentence. Republicans are blocking it at the Federal level

And that gives us a license to suppress the will of NY voters?

Some people think that fighting fascism requires employing totalitarianism.

>The solution to fix gerrymandering is only at the Federal level, but guess what?

Then fix at the federal level, but don't use gerrymandering to get there, otherwise the incentive to fix will disappear.

We shouldn't be resorting to totalitarian shit in NY.

> Cuomo said the GOP gains shows that Democrats can’t be “crime deniers,”

The only crimes that were acknowledged were the ones in republican states.

If crimes in republican areas are so much worse and given that progressives really care about that, why don’t progressives go there and win a lot of seats from the republicans, instead of hiding in safe districts here?

And maybe solve their crime issue too to show them how it should be done.

I write in names like “More Candidates” if i don’t know who is in that ballot.

If I know the candidate is terrible, I vote for “Golden Retriever” or “Mickey Mouse”

I’m writing in a protest vote in all unopposed ballots.

It was meant as temporary. Your comments here says a lot about you, but I’ve unblocked you nonetheless. Hopefully we can have constructive dialogs in the future.

>The professor then admitted privately over email that the U.S. census count is actually 1,227,788 police.

It took me 5 minutes to figure out that the 1.2M figure includes police and correctional officers.

The BLS currently indicates:

• 808,200 Police and Detectives [1]
• 419,000 Correctional Officers and Bailiffs [2]

Which adds to 1,227,200. That's obviously counting the head-count of policing and incarceration personnel, which is exactly what the cited article is aiming to separate.

Alec Karakatsanis is just being sloppy and hasty in trying to push his political agenda, and making himself look intellectually dishonest in the process.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/protective-service/police-and-detectives.htm

[2] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/protective-service/correctional-officers.htm

>Your mealy-mouthed response is pretentious, cowardly, and fools nobody.

Anyone who reads my original comment with honestly can see I did not conclude for "tough-on-crime". That interpretation came from your own bias.

You could've asked in good faith and I would've answered.

I'm actually in favor of less punishment, I elaborated more in https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/yong64/comment/ivfq98g/

One specific policy that I see push back is the inclusion of a public safety consideration in the bail laws. I don't believe that's tough-on-crime, because every other state in the nation has it.

Stewart-Cousins is the leader of the NY Senate, and she had famously threatened to hold climate change and gun control legislations hostage just to block such measures.

And I don't believe blocking that is a progressive thing to be honest. That's why I refer to it as "progressive" in between quotes, or just fake-progressive.

Such things perpetuate inequities on POC and disadvantaged people and communities who are disproportionate victims of crimes.

>However, I believe a lot of that violence in underserved neighborhoods begins with policing. Armed cops who see any citizen as a potential threat have an inherently violent effect.

You're right on point with that. Mistrust in the police is also a stronger factor leading to community violence than poverty.

>Also, with regards to the deterrence point. I don’t really think criminals are doing illegal things because they’re like “the DA won’t prosecute he’s too weak on crime.” I’ve seen you discussing your issues with Bragg below, how does that tie into your view on this issue?

Messaging/signaling is a big deal. And I suspect that's at the root of more crimes than we give it credit for.

For example, leave some property unattended, and it'll signal that no one cares about it, and it will increase the likelihood of it being stolen/defaced etc. The other way around works too: if it's credible that someone cares about it, it can be a deterrent for crimes.

One concrete example was in the use of street lighting at night: https://www.newsnationnow.com/us-news/northeast/nyc-used-street-lighting-to-cut-crime-without-more-arrests/

>“What I take from that is that it’s not just about lighting. There is some kind of demonstration and signaling effect here that you’re letting people know this is an area that’s being watched. This is an area that’s being cared for,” he said. Additionally, they monitored communities around the public housing developments and did not find that crime was being displaced to other locations.

Another concrete example is how the increased enforcement of misdemeanors (in the 90s) led to the decrease of felonies: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w9061/w9061.pdf

With Bragg specifically, both of the issues I had/have with him entails messaging:

• In his first day of office he decided to wholesale downgrade armed robberies to misdemeanors. That was quite a slap in the face given the rise in gun violence that was going on around that time.
• In the Trump's case, he didn't even try to present the case to a grand jury and had the lead prosecutors resigning in protest. That's another slap in the face given that such outcome would've only be expected from a republican DA, and that it helps perpetuate the lack of accountability of the powerful.

I had DM you after you requested citation, but hours before you told me here you didn't want a DM.

>This the same clown that made post about removing Alvin Braggs by any means.

Any attorney in NY can be fired for any reason, at any time. Firing the DA should be no different than firing any other attorney in NY, considering that the district is the client here.

District voters should have the right to express their will to fire the DA.

The lack of such right is causing a distortion in our elections. If Manhattan had the right to vote for that, it would be a heck lot easier for people to vote for Hochul.

I saw the twitter threat. There's a lot of fear-mongering in his retorts filled with "anti-cop" political agenda.

Filtering out the fear-mongering/political stuff, the main logical gap in the counter-argument from Alec Karakatsanis is that he's trying to count any law-enforcement as "police". We all know that the typical border patrol officer is not investigating murder cases in our communities, for example.

The second gap: he points out the undercounting of "private police" as problem in the study. It's actually the other way around: the emergence of "private police" only bolsters the study argument that many locations in the US are severely under-policed.