Just posted the transcript from the Tim Ryan interview we did back in November here. An excerpt:
Patti Choby: I’d to switch the topic here to housing. This is Patti Choby with the Reframed Dialogue Sessions, and I was really excited when you started talking about the Western Reserve Heritage Area. In the Community Development classes that I teach at Case Western, we always use the Connecticut Western Reserve as the oldest example in this region of community development. I mean basically people came here, transportation and commerce converged. It was settled, and as you described, well over 100, almost 200 years of real economic prosperity. Not everybody benefited from that, but in general it was a very prosperous region.
We have a big issue with housing in this region, in this state. I mean it’s the number one state for foreclosures. Is there anybody in Congress looking at revisiting the Housing Act of 1949 and coming up with a new Housing Act that will meet needs of people today in terms of the quality of housing, the affordability of housing, the issue that in this region we have a lot of old, substandard housing full of lead paint and lots of other things that make it cost-prohibitive to redevelop. And if not, is there a way for us to focus attention on that, because housing is a huge economic development issue.
Tim Ryan: Yeah. I haven’t heard of any major plan to address the housing issue in the country. I personally think it needs to be part of what I describe as an urban renaissance that we need to have in the country where we focus on what we’re going to do with our cities. You know Akron, fortunately, has done a great job and in good measure to the kind of leadership of Mayor Plusquellic, but I think the housing component and addressing gentrification within that. I think downtown housing, I think, needs to be promoted. I used to have a little apartment in downtown Warren, you know, pine floors, brick walls, and I was paying $500 a month and I had a beautiful view of Courthouse Square. If it was in New York, it would have ran me $5,000 or more. So I think there’s a lot of opportunity to take advantage of what’s going on, and at the same time that I can address this sprawl issue and make sure that we have balanced cities and balanced growth and address these in a very thoughtful way. And the lead paint issue is a huge issue in Mahoning and Trumbull County. We’ve got about two or three thousand cases a year. Some of these kids that live in these old homes, they have lead poisoning to the point where they almost are mentally retarded, because it had such an effect on them, and you know you see these kids in school, you think they’re on drugs, they’re not paying attention, they’re falling… They have lead poisoning, and there are about 3,000 kids in Mahoning County, so I’m sure Cuyahoga’s even worse within the population.
So I think all of that needs to be addressed, and not just say, “Well we’ve just got to do housing.â€? See, we have a problem in this country that we’re not doing anything for the long view anymore. We just pick one issue and pretend like it’s not connected to any other issue, you know. I mean housing is connected to urban development, economic development, what your downtowns are doing, is there a university there (how does all this kind of fit together?) transportation; you know when you’re talking about senior housing. We’ve got to stop siloing all this stuff and just pretending like, “Okay, here’s education. Here’s healthcare. Here’s energy,â€? it’s all, and the more we realize that we’ve got to have all these different conversations and unify them, and I think that’s why things like this are very important, and your conversation that I’m going to go listen to with the Anthropologist, we’ve got to start having those discussions. So there’s nothing (to get back to your question) pressing or I can’t even think of anything in Congress right now, that’s dealing with that issue…
Meet.The.Bloggers* would like to acknowledge the support of the Washington Monthly Magazine, who paid for the production of this transcript for a story on Congressman Ryan that will appear in an upcoming issue.