📢 Cascadia Voices 07/25/26

You can count on the issue of housing affordability to be high on the list of issues that CDN readers will want asked of candidates for state and local offices this election season. (See more here about CDN’s Citizens Agenda process and how it helps guide our coverage; there’s still time to participate.) In the meantime, let’s continue the conversation on housing affordability with these recent guest commentaries.

Years ago, Mutchler proposed what he calls a FLEX-IRA, a savings account funded with after-tax dollars. Contributions and earnings could then be used for a down payment on a first home, but also for education, medical expenses or retirement.

“It would encourage families to save early, invest in America’s businesses through stocks, bonds and mutual funds, and build wealth over time,” Mutcher writes. “It would help young Americans become owners twice over: first as investors in the American economy and later as homeowners in their own communities.”

“Rents and home prices are high, not because housing providers have tools that help them analyze market data; they’re high because demand is high and supply is relatively low. That’s it,” writes Kevin Donnelly, executive director and chief advocacy officer for the Real Estate Technology and Transformation Center in Washington, D.C.

Donnelly points to the experiences of two cities and two different paths: San Francisco, which banned pricing software two years ago, yet saw rent prices continue to increase, and Austin, Texas, where the software is in use and where rents are falling. The difference, Donnelly says: “The software likely played a role in accelerating those decreases by letting Austin’s housing providers be more responsive to market conditions.”

Fortunately for Bellingham, local officials are taking steps, he writes, like Mayor Kim Lund’s 2024 Housing Executive Order, that address supply issues, even as more reforms are available to it and other local governments.

There are so many important races and issues to be decided this year. Every vote counts. If you’re wondering how you can learn about the candidates, there are many resources available. One way to hear from the candidates themselves is to listen to the pre-recorded interviews posted on the website of the League of Women Voters of Bellingham/Whatcom County: lwvbellinghamwhatcom.org/.

Visit the website and click on the link in the orange box. The League of Women Voters is a non-partisan organization that does not endorse or oppose any candidate or party.

The Whatcom County Auditor’s office website includes a list of all official ballot drop box locations: whatcomcounty.us/1863/Ballot-Drop-Box-Locations. Locations in Skagit County can be found here: skagitcounty.net/Departments/AuditorElections/dropboxes.htm.

And it’s not too late to register to vote! Click on a 60-second video from the Washington Secretary of State’s office to learn more. Make sure your voice is heard!

Rachel Grossman
Bellingham

Read more letters to the editor here.

Submit a letter to the editor (250 words max) or guest commentary (500–800 words) online at cascadiadaily.com/submissions.

If you’re registered to vote, you should have your ballot. If you’re not registered to vote, there’s still time to do so before the Aug. 4 primary election deadline. And if you have your ballot, with about 11 days before the deadline, now’s the time to mark and return it to a county ballot drop box or through the U.S. Mail.

Area residents had their chance recently to pick up a hunk of the now-crumbled Bellingham Rock that until recently was a landmark along northbound Interstate 5. The boulder, removed for construction, was broken up, with pieces passed out to folks at Civic Field in Bellingham.

So, what are your plans for your chunk of granite? (28 votes total):

The release last weekend of Christopher Nolan’s “Odyssey,” a retelling of the Bronze Age epic poem by Homer — with some inspiration from Virgil’s “Aenid” for good measure — inspired scores of writers and podcasters to reach for personal copies of “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” not touched — if ever — since college. If you’re like me, you read movie reviews after watching the movie; so as to avoid spoilers, if such a thing is possible for a story around for three millennia.

A suggested odyssey of recent reviews and reflections:

Among the more critical, while still appreciative, reviews of Nolan’s interpretation is that of New Yorker film critic Richard Brody, who seems disappointed by the near absence of gods in the Gods and Monsters myth. Save for Athena’s presence in Odysseus’ mind, Nolan’s “Odyssey” keeps its focus on the hero, played by Matt Damon, and his inner struggles with what is now understood as PTSD, following 10 years of war and 10 years of a harrowing journey home that cost the lives of most of his men: “Told in this way, with divine intervention at a minimum, the story remains an exciting adventure filled with passion, terror, tenderness, and wonder, but it lacks the particular thrill that comes with reading Homer, a sense of the gulf that separates modern minds from Bronze Age ones.”

More forgiving of that interpretation — perhaps because she admits to having never read the poem as a student or since — is Monica Hesse’s commentary in The Washington Post. Hesse notes Damon’s transformation from “a brawny war veteran to a scrawny, haunted veteran, a little hubris and a few pounds gradually chipped away as each new calamity calls his leadership into question.” Hesse also praises Nolan’s respect for the film’s portrayal of women, in particular Anne Hathaway’s “flinty” Penelope, wife of Odysseus, who has suffered 20 years of entertaining suitors for herself and her husband’s throne. Hesse applauds the modern take, even as others fault it for straying from Homer: “Because what ‘The Odyssey’ is, at the end of the day, is a very long poem that has been read for a very long time. Long enough for interpretations to shift and bend, each translation reflective of the culture and time in which it was translated. Each era gets The Odyssey’ it deserves.”

Another detractor, even before the movie’s release, was Elon Musk, who raged on X that casting Kenyan-Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy was “woke” and “historically inaccurate.” (Make Myths Historically Accurate!) But for an actual historical examination of the times in which “The Odyssey” was written and the Greek myth’s precedents and successors, give a listen to “The Rest is History” podcast with historians Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Hollard (no relation to the Tom Holland playing Telemachus in the film) and its two episodes on Homer and “The Odyssey,” and even an interview with the other Holland. According to the podcast synopsis: “They trace Odysseus' journey from the fall of Troy, through encounters with the Lotus‑eaters, Polyphemus the Cyclops, Aeolus the wind‑god, the sorceress Circe, the dead in Hades, and the deadly Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, before his disastrous stop on the island of the Sun. The hosts weave literary analysis with historical context, noting how ancient Greek colonization anxieties and later scholarly theories … illuminate the myth. They also reference modern parallels such as Christopher Nolan’s upcoming ‘Odyssey’ film and the influence of ‘Inception.’”