J Bartlett Says - We Should Accept Afghan Refugees (And?) We have a Housing Shortage - Granite Grok

J Bartlett Says – We Should Accept Afghan Refugees (And?) We have a Housing Shortage

Tents tent city

We’re huge fans of The Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy but sometimes – even from intelligent people saying sensible things – something happens to make it look like you are making no sense.  Take this, for example.

Someone forwarded an email update from J Bartlett.org. You know the sort. You sign up – Grok has one – and get an email update. It lists headlines and maybe a blurb or some text. JBartlett’s email leads with “New Hampshire Should Accept Afghan Refugees.”

They make a decent case for the idea, but the following article is: “Bartlett Center to host housing conference.”

It’s about land use regulations and the state’s housing shortage. Housing Shortage!

We have a massive housing shortage. Rent, responding to demand, is very high, and the outpouring of people from urban areas to escape liberal craziness after the riots last year has driven housing prices up as well.

We do not have the inventory to meet demand, and we know it, but hey, let’s bring in a few hundred Afghan refugees for whom we’ve no homes.

See what I mean by not making sense?

I’m not opposed, assuming vetted “refugees,” but we may need to revisit an older tradition. Sponsorship. Someone needs to sponsor these folks or families before we even offer to take them; otherwise, where do these hundreds of Afghans go?

Housing shortage!

Yes, we have tens of thousands of job openings, and hopefully, there are matching skillsets, or they will learn (and hard-working people are happy to learn), but it’s hard to have a job when you have no address.

We’ve also got hundreds of thousands of people piling up at the southern border, at least a few of whom may have a legitimate asylum claim.

The Government’s response to that has been to put them on buses and planes and drop them somewhere in Middle America, and at least a few of them have already been dumped in New Hampshire.

Aid agencies get paid billions to pretend to help them acclimate, including finding housing and connecting them with resources to help them integrate. History tells us that rarely happens the way it should, so what do you do when there’s no housing?

Welcome to New Hampshire; I hope you like tents?

It’s almost winter which is only seven months long, and despite all the Global Warming BS, it gets very cold.

Maybe, before you offer assistance, you should be able to provide it.

And the answer is not to use government force to make things happen. It is, as I suspect we’d learn from the J Bartlett land use research, to get Government out of the way.

And while J Bartlett may or may not have intended it, they have shown us a bigger problem than one or the other of their featured articles. We have opportunities, lots of available jobs, and we need people to fill them.

But we have no place for them to live.

You can’t legally park a car in a lot with no spaces.

What’s the plan, Stan?

 

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