Tag: infrastructure

Biden’s Infrastructure Bill Includes Making ‘Diverse’ Neighborhoods Across America Through Zoning Laws

The focus of  President Joe Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure bill is allegedly to address aging infrastructure across the country, but the massive bill covers a vast amount of other spending, including money for “diversifying” neighborhoods.

This portion of Biden’s American Jobs Plan would change zoning laws to end single family home neighborhoods and allow for multiple unit “affordable” or low-income rental housing.

According to the White House Fact Sheet, the housing effort is “an innovative new approach to eliminate state and local exclusionary zoning laws, which drive up the cost of construction and keep families from moving to neighborhoods with more opportunities for them and their kids”:

“For decades, exclusionary zoning laws — like minimum lot sizes, mandatory parking requirements, and prohibitions on multifamily housing — have inflated housing and construction costs and locked families out of areas with more opportunities,” the fact sheet states. “President Biden is calling on Congress to enact an innovative, new competitive grant program that awards flexible and attractive funding to jurisdictions that take concrete steps to eliminate such needless barriers to producing affordable housing.”

In contrast to former President Donald Trump’s Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Opportunity Zones program that partnered the federal government with private sector investors to create less rental housing and increase home ownership, Biden’s plan uses tax breaks for state and local governments, the Fact Sheet states:

“[Biden] is calling on Congress to pass the innovative, bipartisan Neighborhood Homes Investment Act (NHIA). Offering $20 billion worth of NHIA tax credits over the next five years will result in approximately 500,000 homes built or rehabilitated, creating a pathway for more families to buy a home and start building wealth.”

Reuters reported on the shift from free markets to government control:

President Joe Biden is seeking to ease a national affordable housing shortage by pushing local governments to allow apartment buildings in neighborhoods that are currently restricted to single-family homes.

The $5 billion plan could inject the White House into a debate pitting older homeowners against younger workers seeking to gain a foothold in the most expensive U.S. cities, where many families spend a third or more of their income on housing.

The proposal, which would provide financial incentives to local governments that change zoning laws restricting many neighborhoods to single-family homes, is an example of the sort of broad social policy changes Democrats are including in Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure bill.

Biden’s plan even designates which workers will benefit from this housing project — “put union building trade workers to work upgrading homes and businesses to save families money,” the Fact Sheet states.

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American Infrastructure Has ‘Racism Physically Built’ Into It, According to Buttigieg

It’s hard to be surprised anymore over what the left sees racism in. From traffic lights to evergreen trees, there’s really no end. Now, thanks to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, that list is growing to include infrastructure (according to its true definition, not Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s). 

During an interview with theGrio’s White House correspondent April Ryan, Buttigieg explained how roads and bridges divide communities along racial lines and said there’s “racism physically built” into American infrastructure. 

“If you’re in Washington, I’m told that the history of that highway is one that was built at the expense of communities of color in the D.C. area,” he said. “There are stories and I think Philadelphia and Pittsburgh [and] in New York, Robert Moses famously saw through the construction of a lot of highways.”

This “wasn’t just an act of neglect,” he said, but was a “conscious choice.”

Buttigieg is currently working with the Biden administration on the $2.25 trillion “infrastructure” plan; less than 6 percent actually goes toward roads and bridges, however. 

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America’s Drinking Water Is Surprisingly Easy to Poison

On Feb. 16, less than two weeks after a mysterious attacker made headlines around the world by hacking a water treatment plant in Oldsmar, Florida, and nearly generating a mass poisoning, the city’s mayor declared victory.

“This is a success story,” Mayor Eric Seidel told the City Council in Oldsmar, a Tampa suburb of 15,000, after acknowledging “some deficiencies.” As he put it, “our protocols, monitoring protocols, worked. Our staff executed them to perfection. And as the city manager said, there were other backups. … We were breached, there’s no question. And we’ll make sure that doesn’t happen again. But it’s a success story.” Two council members congratulated the mayor, noting his turn at the press conference where the hack was disclosed. “Even on TV, you were fantastic,” said one.

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“Success” is not the word that cybersecurity experts use to describe the Oldsmar episode. They view the breach as a case study in digital ineptitude, a frightening near-miss and an example of how the managers of water systems continue to downplay or ignore years of increasingly dire warnings.

The experts say the sorts of rudimentary vulnerabilities revealed in the breach — including the lack of an internet firewall and the use of shared passwords and outdated software — are common among America’s 151,000 public water systems.

“Frankly, they got very lucky,” said retired Adm. Mark Montgomery, executive director of the federal Cyberspace Solarium Commission, which Congress established in 2018 to upgrade the nation’s defenses against major cyberattacks. Montgomery likened the Oldsmar outcome to a pilot landing a plane after an engine caught fire during a flight. “They shouldn’t celebrate like Tom Brady winning the Super Bowl,” he said. “They didn’t win a game. They averted a disaster through a lot of good fortune.”

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South Bend’s Infrastructure Was So Bad When Buttigieg Was Mayor, Domino’s Had to Help Fill Potholes

A few weeks ago, President Joe Biden named former Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg as his secretary of transportation, despite his lack of experience in the field.

In fact, the one city Buttigieg was mayor of before suddenly rising to political fame had serious issues with infrastructure during his tenure.

According to the South Bend Tribune, the pothole situation in South Bend, Indiana, was so bad in 2019 that residents contacted pizza chain Domino’s to ask for help.

In 2018, Domino’s launched its “Paving for Pizza” campaign. The idea was to give grants to certain cities in order to ensure a smoother ride for customers carrying out their own pizzas.

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