Voinovich's Tour

Sen Voinovich took a bus tour to see the city's housing yesterday. The article states that as they were in the Crawford St. area, Becker mentioned that Crawford had the highest housing abandonment rate/highest crime and the highest number of Section 8 housing. How coincidental! It is truely amazing that this Council doesn't want to get rid of as much Section 8 as possible, given the problems that Sec. 8 presents. There are too many negatives to having this program and I see no positives. Marty K. said that Franklin St. is "at risk" because of the number of abandonments and that "action needs to be taken" which is a broad, non-meaningful,rubber-stamped, pacification statement typically made by a city official when they don't have anything with substance to say. Again, for the umteenth time, WHY do we have programs like this in a town that can ill-afford to attract more lower income/less educated people and lower it's image anymore? Our "leaders" are taking this town from a respectable blue-collar working town to a 3rd world country slum by putting out the welcome mat to attract people to this program. ENOUGH ALREADY!    

John- as to your comment about excellent housing values in the nice neighborhoods- mute point in trying to sell those excellent values in nice neighborhoods if the town can't attract the upscale income people who can afford them and who want to live here. As to good and bad sections in most cities- True but I see Middletown as having a disproportional amount in the goodsection/ bad section ratio skewed to the bad side. This also goes for the ratio of nice/well kept neighborhoods to run down neighborhoods, skewed to the latter.