This is written by our resident wingnut, Jim Wooten.
If Wooten is trying to "tut-tut" the issue, you can be sure the reverse is true.
After all, this idiot blogged how he would be "proud to share a fox hole with George Bush:Cobb ‘targeting’ immigrants? Nonsense.
By Jim Wooten | Wednesday, July 25, 2007, 08:10 AM
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
For decades now state and local governments have been stymied in their efforts to police public spaces — downtown streets and parks, for example — because those efforts prompted allegations that they were “targeting” some particular segment of the population.
Cobb County commissioners faced those same allegations Tuesday night in an effort to crack down on a growing neighborhood blight — single-family houses that had become multiple- or extended-family dwellings similar to boarding houses. In one instance reported by the AJC, a family of 10 from Mexico — including a husband and wife, their two children and two of the wife’s brothers, one of whom has a wife and two children — lives in the 1,511-square-foot home. Neighbors complained that the driveway and front yard had become a parking lot.
At its Tuesday night meeting, commissioners unanimously approved a new law requiring each adult to have 390 square feet of living space without county approval. The same would apply to each car visible from the street. No more than six adults, and only two unrelated, are allowed to live in a home, provided each has the 390 square feet of living space. The previous law required 50-square-feet of sleeping space. Critics contend the new law targets immigrants.
But as reporters noted other communities, including Athens, home of the University of Georgia, have similar local laws on overcrowded houses.
Cobb commissioners did the right thing. One rowdy house or one that appears to have gone to seed begins the process of destroying a neighborhood. One of the reasons the Five Points area of downtown Atlanta has been virtually abandoned by the banking, business and legal communities is that the city could never muster the will to police the streets of derelicts so that they became kind of an urban campground. Any attempt to do so brought forth protests that officials were targeting specific populations. The result was that business and people with options fled, allowing the dominant order of the streets to become the lowest conduct tolerated. Now it’s an open-air lounge for the unemployed and the unemployable.
The good news in the Cobb action is that public bodies may be regaining their confidence and their senses and are able to withstand the knee-jerk “targeting” criticism to do what’s best for their communities.
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/shared-blogs/ajc/thinkingright/index.html
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