City Council: We can be first to serve the bottom
In our last meeting, a Councilor asked where huge hostels have been done. This Councilor asked some time ago where any city has restored the rate system that for fifty years kept water and sewer rates throughout the world low and stable. To some public servants, any new idea that has been tried somewhere else is a good idea whether it works or not, but old tried and true ideas from their own constituents cannot be good. Huge, cheap places to sleep are not new; they are an old business that is occasionally mentioned in song and historical fiction. They were called flophouses. They were not comfortable, private, or safe, but their customers were out of the weather for a nickel or a dime. Flophouses disappeared in the first half of the Twentieth Century with the advent of cheap used cars that people could sleep in. In the eighties, states started mandatory car insurance, which kicked a lot of people out of their cars and into doorways, alleys, and bus...