By Andy Brack, editor and publisher | One of the best things about vacationing in Quebec for the last week has been that we haven’t had to listen to people talk about Donald J. Trump.
Most of the newspapers and television stations are in French, as is much of the conversation overheard while visiting interesting places in Montreal and in villages just north of the border with America.
By Andy Brack, editor and publisher | In 35 years of attending and covering public meetings from rural towns to major halls of power, I’ve never encountered a stupider meeting than last week’s audit committee of Charleston City Council.
Apparently, the point by various city councilmen who want to be mayor (those running and those who are puppeteers) was to find something awry in spending by Charleston Mayor John Tecklenburg and his office. Unfortunately for these baldly political operatives working against the common good, the draft findings of the $50,000+ audit were a nothingburger — nothing worth wasting any time over and no evidence of intentional wrong-doing. Sure, there may have been some administrative oversights, but there was nothing in the audit worth spending more than an average city employee’s annual salary.
Via Digit Matheny, contributing editor | This Is Us. Jane the Virgin. Black-ish. What do they have in common? They are all family television programs that have members of multiple generations living under one roof. But the reality of multi-generational living is more than sitcom fodder.
According to the 2019 Home Buyer and Seller Generational Trends report by the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR), multi-generational housing continues to be a growing trend among homebuyers. This trend is driven largely by Gen Xers, who are the second-largest band of homebuyers today at 24%. Of that cohort, one in six purchased a multi-gen home, half of whom cited accommodating adult children as their reason for doing so.
When it comes to millennial buyers, 9 percent purchased a multi-generational property they could share with aging parents, per the report.
By Andy Brack, editor and publisher | The S.C. General Assembly now has a license to steal your vote, courtesy of the U.S. Supreme Court.
In a late June decision that surprised many students of representative democracy, the high court ruled it was perfectly fine for state legislatures to draw election district lines for partisan purposes.
By Fred Palm, contributing editor | The City of Charleston is required to identify severely flood-damaged properties so that if the damage is extensive, the properties are removed from the floodplain and, if not, they are brought up to a higher level of resilience to better survive the next flood event.
This is a long-term, common-sense strategy to correct past planning and building decisions that did not work with increases in flood events and to lessen the replacement cost borne by all taxpayers. This also is a “common good” policy offering transition. Carried out over decades, owners are to be compensated for their losses, at-risk housing is removed from the floodplain, and we get to live in a more resilient community.
Unfortunately, the sensible policy is not being done well enough and treated more on a par with sloppy housekeeping by the city. …
By Andy Brack, editor and publisher | An Australian journalist phoned the other day wanting a South Carolina take on the two recent Democratic presidential debates.
“Didn’t watch the debates,” I said. “It’s all a little bit too early. There are eight months before the primary on Feb. 29, 2020. There’s more than enough time to make an informed choice.”
By Charlie Smith, special to Charleston Currents | I moved home to Charleston 23 years ago after two years at Clemson working on a master’s degree in planning and 12 years of living in Miami. Soon after returning, I walked into Dudley’s on King Street and ran into an old acquaintance who had lived up the street from me in graduate school. He asked what I intended to do for a living.
I told him that I intended to establish South Carolina’s first openly gay-owned and -operated real estate brokerage, marketing primarily to the LGBTQ community. His immediate response was “You’ll never make a dime in this town!” I never forgot those words. I immediately set out to prove him wrong.
Real estate was a tight-knit business community back then. It was not all that welcoming to people who had no intention of working under an established broker, but rather who planned to start an office from scratch. It was also 1996 and the internet was in its infancy as a real estate tool.
By Andy Brack, editor and publisher | There’s a reason that a horse wears blinders: So it won’t get spooked by something weird that’s outside of its vision tunnel.
All across our country, too many people are wearing blinders on an array of issues that is unraveling the fabric of the American way of life. We are ignoring big problems, hoping they’ll just go away. But they get worse and worse.
Instead of proactively confronting issues from race and gun violence to immigration reform and the decay of our democracy, we keep drinking from the font of ignorance.
By Mike Robertson, College of Charleston | There’s hot, and then there’s Charleston hot – the kind of heavy, suffocating hot that has residents wondering why they live here and visitors knowing why they don’t. Yep, Charleston knows hot. It also knows what it’s like when you add a nice thick layer of humidity to that hot. In the South, we call it summer. And, while most of us have adapted to the summer heat, even Southerners are susceptible to the dangerous and even life-threatening effects that extreme heat can have on our bodies.
By Andy Brack, editor and publisher, part 2 of 2 | If you ignore the bloody prick of a rusty nail, the wound may become infected or lead to something much worse.
Across America, but particularly in the South, the underpinnings of our society continue to be infected by the ooze of racism. While there are laws on the books to provide equal access and treatment for the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness, there’s still a lot of unfinished business bubbling under the surface that inhibits progress.
We Can Do Better, South Carolina! (2019) by editor and publisher Andy Brack offers incisive commentaries on the American South, politics, the common good and interesting South Carolina leaders. Available exclusively for Kindle for $7.99. A paperback version will be ready soon. Learn more.
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