The following appeared on Monday, August 21, 2023, in the Blank Slate Media newspaper chain and on its website, theisland360.com:

It is my firm belief that owning a single-family home on a plot of land in suburbia gives people true independence of mind and soul and is the only real independence from the state and their own collective lot.

I agree with the observation made by social scientist Dr. Edward Shapiro that “the essence of American suburbanization is the desire of tens of millions of people to simultaneously enjoy the economic benefits of an industrial-urban economy while fashioning a lifestyle incorporating the traditional American distaste for cities and factories. The names of our suburbs evoke a pastoral image—Short Hills, White Plains, Spring Valley, Ridgewood. Suburbia’s streets are named Forest Drive, Pleasant Valley Way, and Northfield Avenue, while its housing developments are called Holly Farm Estates, Springdale Homes, and Crestmont Village.”

The yearning for a homestead in suburbia began after the Second World War and continues to this day.

During the COVID lockdown, for example, many couples with children, realizing that being cooped up in apartment in New York City without a yard or front porch wasn’t fun, began moving to Long Island. My neighborhood, New Hyde Park, was flooded with young folks buying up every house on the market.

For most people, however, buying their first one-family home is a struggle.

My parents scrimped and saved for 17 years before they could put a downpayment on a house in 1966.

When my wife and I bought our first home in 1983, the mortgage rate was a staggering 17% and the inflation rate was hitting 20%. We had to cut every corner to make the monthly payments.

Back then, I learned that owning a home was not an entitlement. By sacrificing and working hard, we earned the title to our house.

And I came to appreciate British journalist G.K. Chesterton’s comment that “property is merely the art of democracy. It means that every man should have something that he can shape in his own image, as he is shaped in the image of Heaven.”

Today, people still struggle to earn their piece of the American dream.

A July 30, 2023 Newsday study describes the plight of many homeowners attempting to make ends meet.

This phenomenon, Newsday reports, has caused some experts to ask if William Levitt of Levittown fame and “Master Builder” Robert Moses got it wrong. In other words, they are asking if there should have been fewer roads and houses and more multifamily public housing.

As for Moses, what he got right was building roads to the parks—“Parkways.” His motive a century ago was to provide access for working-class people to get out of the city and to visit the numerous parks he built (i.e., Jones Beach Park) on weekends and holidays.

Granted, those parkways became thoroughfares for commuters. But imagine what it would be like if Moses had not built them.

What Moses got wrong: he built scores of multifamily housing projects mismanaged by the New York City Housing Authority, which today are examples of urban blight.

Public housing, the dream of progressives like Robert Moses, is a tenant’s nightmare. And we don’t need such nightmares on Long Island.

As for the creation of Levittown, if one wants to point a finger, it should be at the federal government.

Elitist planners at the Federal Housing Administration encouraged banks to lend on millions of new, low-risk suburban homes while refusing to stake money on older city properties. And to further ensure policy compliance, federal tax code changes gave developers incentives to build new structures in suburbia instead of improving old ones in city neighborhoods. Since many inner-city, single-family homes were disqualified from receiving loans, the mass exodus to Levittown settlements commenced.

The result of this anti-New York City lending policy: Between 1946 and 1979, approximately 70% of all FHA/VA loans in the Metropolitan Area financed homes in Westchester, Nassau and Suffolk counties.

Regardless of the Fed’s motivation, the suburban homes built have fulfilled the dreams of many.

And just like members of the Greatest Generation and the Boomer Generation, who had to struggle to make ends meet after they bought their first home, the younger generations will have to sacrifice to meet mortgage and property tax payments.

Will the struggle be worth it? It was for my family.

The following appeared on Monday, August 7, 2023, in the Blank Slate Media newspaper chain and on its website, theisland360.com:

Here are books I recommend political junkies read while vacationing:

The Rough Rider and The Professor: The Friendship That Changed American History by Laurence Jurdem.  This is a delightful book that describes the 35-year friendship between President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) and Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge Sr. (1850-1924).

Lodge, a Harvard professor who went on to serve 24 years in the U.S. Senate, was a renowned Boston Brahmin. He was a subject of the Massachusetts ditty: “And this is good old Boston, the home of the bean and the cod, where the Lowells speak only to Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God.”

While Roosevelt was a member of New York’s upper crust, he was also a cowboy—literally and figuratively. Unlike the staid Lodge, Roosevelt was impulsive, and that trait led to his ill-advised run for president as the candidate of the Bull Moose Party in 1912.

What is surprising is that these two men, despite their different personalities, revered each other. Lodge not only advised Roosevelt but helped him obtain posts in government on his road to the White House.

While they had a political breakup in 1912, it was later patched up due to their mutual distaste of President Woodrow Wilson.

King: A Life by Jonathan Eig. This book will be the definitive life of Martin Luther King for years to come. The previous King biographer, David Garrow, conceded that Eig’s work “will succeed my own, Bearing the Cross, published in 1986, as the standard account.”

Eig is a top-rate writer of narrative history—which is rare these days. His work is balanced, utilizing recently released FBI Files.

He gives us a picture of an extraordinarily gifted man. King was a great leader and a brilliant strategist.

During the 12 years he led the Civil Rights Movement, King managed relationships with John and Bobby Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, to procure passage of civil and Voting Rights Acts.

Unfortunately, after King’s death, at the hands of an assassin in 1968, his movement was taken over by radicals, including Huey Newton, Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis.

It is not too often I agree with Barack Obama, but in this case we both have John Eig’s King on our recommended reading list.

The Biden Malaise: How America Bounces Back from Joe Biden’s Repeat of the Jimmy Carter Years by Kimberly Strassel. In my judgment, The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel is Washington’s top columnist. She has a “jeweler’s eye” when it comes to detecting the follies of the Capital’s Progressive Establishment.

In The Biden Malaise, Strassel persuasively argues that President Biden, like President Carter in the mid-1970s, “has mired the country in weakness, inflation, and political unease.” And she lays out a plan of action Conservatives would be wise to follow in the 2024 election cycle.

Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Revised Edition) by Allen C. Guelzo. The greatest intellectual historian of our time, Dr. Guelzo, is presently the director of The Institute on Politics and Statesmanship for Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

We are fortunate that Guelzo has devoted his academic career to examining the role of ideas in Abraham Lincoln’s life. His seven books on Lincoln reveal that the 16th president was a deep thinker concerning the political, religious, and cultural issues of his day.

Redeemer President, an award-winning book, is the story of Lincoln’s faith and intellectual life.

Though Lincoln was, Guelzo writes, “practical as a politician and wise as a serpent while harmless as a dove, he nevertheless took certain principles of natural law (especially the ones captured in the Declaration of Independence) as his nonnegotiables, and regarded the price paid for them as only what we must expect as the price paid for sin to a just God.”

Rogue Prosecutors: How Radical Soros Lawyers are Destroying America’s Communities by Zack Smith and Charles D. Stimson. The two former federal prosecutors vividly describe what radical leftist district attorneys, elected with $40 million of George Soros money, have wrought on their towns and cities.

In the eight Soros DA cities examined in the book, “there have been at least an additional 3,090 homicides, 3,580 rapes, 7,500 robberies, 14,800 motor vehicle thefts, countless thousands of non-fatal shooting victims, and hundreds of thousands of other crimes (and victims) in those cities between 2015 and 2021. And of those 3,090 extra murders over 75% of the victims were minorities.”

Rogue Prosecutors should be read by every citizen and elected official committed to the rule of law.

Happy reading during your summer vacation.

The following appeared on Monday, June 26, 2023, in the Blank Slate Media newspaper chain and on its website, theisland360.com:

Lately there have been strange happenings within New York’s body politic. Here’s a sampling:

Every three hours a person in New York City dies from drug overdose. There were over 2,600 such deaths in 2022 and over 1,300 so far this year.

What is the City Health and Mental Hygiene commissioner’s plan to address the crisis? In early June, Commissioner Ashwin Vasan unveiled a street vending machine that contains among other things “safe smoking” crack pipes and lip balm.

Items procured from the machine are free of charge. The city expects to include syringes in the future.

“The pretense,” the New York Post notes, “is that this will slow or stop the surge in overdose deaths, along with other grim side effects of drug addiction.”

Do you honestly believe free drug paraphernalia will combat drug abuse?

My guess: the free products will only further enable drug uses.

Speaking of drugs, the sales tax revenue the Hochul administration projected from the legal sale of marijuana is missing the mark by a mile.

According to a report commissioned the New York Medical Marijuana Operations, “the current state of the cannabis market in New York is an unmitigated disaster.”

The study concludes that “state cannabis laws are too restrictive for legal weed vendors while allowing an illegal market to flourish.”

While there are merely 15 legal dispensaries open at the present time, there are at least 1,400 illegal ones in New York City and hundreds more statewide that are not reporting sales taxes.

What’s being done to crack down on the illegal vendors? Very little. There is more talk in official circles than action.

Shoplifting in retail stores is out of control. Struggling shopkeepers have been forced to expend scarce capital to install plastic anti-theft cases.

I wasted 10 minutes the other day in a New Hyde Park drugstore waiting for a worker to unlock a shelf that contained the toothpaste I wished to purchase!

In New York City there were 13,798 reported retail thefts in the first quarter of this year.

Thieves locked up are slapped with non-bail-eligible misdemeanors if they stole less than $1,000 in merchandise.

The results of no-bail in 2022: 327 people were responsible for 30% of the 22,000 shoplifting arrests.

Nallely De Jesus, owner of Associated Supermarkets in the Bronx, has written, “But the sad truth is too many workers have been attacked, too many stores have been robbed, and too many customers have been placed in danger, which is why we need the state to step up with tougher penalties for recidivist shoplifters who attack retail workers.”

Will Albany legislators act on her plea? Don’t hold your breath.

Assembly speaker Carl Heastie, supports amending “Sammy’s Law” to drop New York City’s speed limit from 25 mph to 20 mph.

However, the speed restrictions are often violated by state legislators.

The Post recently reported, “Speeding appears to be a way of life for the lower chamber. City Records show at least 125 traffic violations, overwhelmingly for speeding, by vehicles with Assembly-affiliated license plates.”

Speaker Heastie’s car with a NYA-1 plate has been hit with speeding violations at least 11 times, the Post reported Monday.

My question:  Were taxpayer dollars expended to pay the fines?

The self-righteous former mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, who claimed he always “put the public interest first,” was slapped with the biggest fine ever leveled by the City’s Conflict-of-Interest Board.

De Blasio has to fork over $155,000 in penalties and another $320,000 in reimbursement charges for using New York police officers for personal reasons.

The 40-page report released by the board lists de Blasio’s many abuses.

For example, cops were ordered to move his daughter’s personal effects from a Brooklyn apartment to her new residence in Manhattan.

Police officers were used as chauffeurs for members of the de Blasio family.

On one occasion, cops picked up de Blasio’s brother at an airport and drove for two hours to drop off the sibling at a New Jersey address.

The Conflict Board concluded that de Blasio, time and again, ignored ethics guidelines and used police personnel during his ill-fated presidential campaign for political purposes.

De Blasio, as well as Speaker Heastie and his Democratic colleagues, apparently subscribe to the adage “rules for thee but not for me.”

I will report more strange but true political happenings in future columns. Stay tuned.