John Bossange deserves our gratitude for his April 8 commentary “Do we really need 40,000 new homes by 2030?” Evidently, we don’t.
The executive director of the Vermont Housing Finance Agency later said as much before the House Environment and Energy Committee in an eloquent, humorous, breezy, emoji-spattered presentation reminiscent of a stand-up comedy routine by Jerry Seinfeld.
Yet, her essentially “My bad!” admission falls way short of the mark of explaining how a blog post on the housing finance authority’s website became a mantra used by all sorts of biased parties, as Mr. Bossange wrote, “beginning with the governor’s office to local, county and some state officials, along with Realtors, developers and financial lending institutions.”
Slogans, though, have long served as shields to hide ulterior motives. “Remember the Maine” helped launch the Spanish-American War. The “Gulf of Tonkin” incident led to an escalation of the Vietnam War. And, of course, most of us remember how the claims about Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” unleashed the shock and awe destruction of Iraq.
They may later have been debunked, but the damage had been done.
Obviously, the “40,000 blah, blah” mantra won’t launch a war, except on Vermont’s landscape. Yet, its effect persists, as do the Vermont Housing Finance Agency’s claims. On the date of this letter, they remain prominent on its website, the latest being “Why Vermont needs 30,000-40,000 more homes.”
My question is: Why haven’t we gotten to the bottom of how this inexcusable fiction came to such prominence?
Bruce S. Post
Essex
