Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of 75. Sunrise is 5:17 and sunset is 8:37 for 15 hours 20 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 75.3 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Parks and Recreation Board meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1812, Napoleon’s Grande Armée crosses the Neman River, beginning the invasion of Russia. (Within six months, hundreds of thousands in the Grande Armée would be dead, captured, missing, or would have deserted.)
Yesterday, for the first time in a generation, Congress passed comprehensive housing legislation. This legislation received support from the leaders of both major parties, including conservative Republican leaders:
The bill’s passage, by a lopsided 358-to-32 vote, ended months of sparring between the House and the Senate over a sprawling measure that aims to tackle the housing crisis by boosting supply in a country facing an acute shortage of new homes. The Senate passed its version of the same bill Monday, by a vote of 85 to 5.
With dozens of provisions, the 21st Century Road to Housing Act aims to touch communities across the country, addressing rural and urban needs as part of a strategy to eventually bring down housing costs. It loosens federal regulations, making it easier, faster and cheaper to build; eases lending rules; rewards communities that build; delivers aid to communities reeling from disasters; and, in a policy that proved to be one of the biggest flash points but was favored by Mr. Trump, sets new limits on the role institutional investors can play in the market.
[…]
In the years since the 2008 foreclosure crisis, builders have not constructed enough homes to keep up with a growing population. The country is short several million new housing units, according to some estimates. So, home prices have continued to stay high despite weak demand because there simply aren’t enough of them. Building new homes could bring down prices by adding more supply to the market, but that will take time.
See Ronda Kaysen, Congress Clears Housing Bill, New York Times, June 23, 2026.
These provisions — rectifications, truly, of past mistakes — will take time to work. See Tony Romm, Housing Package Passed by Congress Has Wide Appeal, but It’s No Quick Fix, New York Times, June 24, 2026.
One would have preferred purely private action then or now, but even Congress sees that the many public policy mistakes of the past sometimes require intervention simply to set matters right. (There is a reason, after all, that free-market advocates oppose monopoly, oligopoly, and regulatory manipulation to benefit only a few. That’s why there is antitrust law with redress for past imbalances.)
Locally, a tiny clique of landlords has fought these last several years against any significant improvement in Whitewater’s housing stock. Don’t want this, don’t want that, can’t do this, can’t do that, instead preserving a distorted housing market that favored their own student-rental properties over other options. It was, in fact, men of this ilk who, over the last generation, presided over this imbalance during their control of Whitewater’s old Community Development Authority.
Their claims from the Whitewater Common Council lectern during public comment and debate, while lawful, have been exercises in deficient outcome-driven argumentation.
Again, paraphrasing a line from a film: The greatest trick that Whitewater’s special-interest men ever pulled was convincing anyone, even themselves, that they had any credible economic insights to offer.
Consider, though, the position these gentlemen are in now: in the city, in the state, and across our entire nation, policymakers realize that there is a need for more housing options. This recognition comes from leaders of both major parties, representing places big and small, urban and rural.
And so, and so, the choice is quite stark, isn’t it? One can accept the reasoning and insights of policymakers from across the most productive nation in history, or instead choose the claims of a few small-town men pushing only their own self-interest.
Good luck and God bless to all concerned in making that choice.
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Upcoming posts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, and a New Ethics Ordinance.
James Webb Space Telescope captures stunning view of Cigar Galaxy: