If we triple up, most of us can squeeze in. “Units of public housing the federal government plans to demolish by the year 2000: 100,920. Units it plans to construct by then: 24,679” (Harper’s “Index,” October).
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The silver lining. “The economic conditions that have been weakening the labor movement . . . have also created the possibility for new coalition building,” Jim Benn of the Chicago-based Federation for Industrial Retention and Renewal tells Janet Hotch in The Neighborhood Works (November/December). For instance? “In Chicago,” writes Hotch, “the housing-rights nonprofit ACORN recognized that members working in the home health care industry needed a union. As a community organization, ACORN could not organize workers, so in 1984 it worked with its members to establish an independent union. Eventually that union voted to affiliate with the Service Employees International Union and formed Local 880. Local 880 and ACORN now refer to each other as sister organizations and share the same organizing principles and mission. Today the local represents 12,000 workers statewide, most of whom are home health care workers.”
Things gun-controllers don’t want to know, from a recent paper by John Lott and David Mustard of the University of Chicago. Total U.S. firearm deaths from homicides and accidents in 1991: 19,187. Lowest estimate (National Crime Victimization Survey) of defensive uses of guns during assaults, robberies, and household burglaries in a given year: 80,000.
