On Sept. 4, 2006,
Florida Workforce Housing Network will launch a community blog modeled after DailyKos.com - a daily habit to which I've been joyously addicted since Sept. 4, 2004.
At Florida Workforce Housing Network, we're aiming at a slightly different mission from what most community bloggers are used to.
Florida Workforce Housing Network aims to promote a specific political, social and commercial outcome: the development and construction of "workforce" homes that average people in Florida can afford to live in.
I'd appreciate any criticism of the site, and I'll explain some of the strategy in the extended text.
First, the situation: over the past five years, housing prices throughout the U.S. and especially in Florida have ballooned beyond the reach of most people. In growth states, and that's Florida, the median housing cost is more than twice what the average-earning household can afford.
That's great for me - I own a home that's paid for and now worth more than I ever dreamed - but it means pain and misery for almost everyone who doesn't.
In Florida especially, where 'service' is the dominant industry, we doom people to near slavery - working two jobs just to pay the rent and a third job to get ahead. For people like single mothers, that is unconscionable.
Okay, maybe not as unconscionable as murdering civilians in Iraq or stealing elections, but the fact is that home builders have behaved like oil companies over the past few years and many otherwise moral individuals have joined party to the looting.
As a result, way too many people have to struggle just to stay even.
I happen to know a little about housing (though not as much as bonddad, whose dKos "housing" diaries are linked and front-paged at Florida Workforce Housing Network, and a lot about public relations and marketing, so my personal contribution to progressive Democratic principles is Florida Workforce Housing Network, an about-to-be-born community blog designed to appeal to builders, developers, public agency planners, state and local elected officials, community activists, local government administrators, non-profits, lenders and the news media. Did I forget anyone?
On Sept. 4, we will "launch" with a series of four news releases and a target news release list of about 2,000 folks (I've spent about 300 hours so far scratching out the email list).
Every reporter in Florida who's written a story about workforce housing, affordable housing, the housing boom or anything close over the past three months is on that list, and several more outside Florida.
Our goal is to substantially increase the volume and frequency of MSM attention on workforce housing - the need for it, efforts under way to create it, and the obstacles and shortcomings of an economic and governmental system that prices a basic human need - housing - too high for a majority of us.
By focusing on a specific "micro" issue, and by targeting specific market segments, I think Florida Workforce Housing Network, might lure a new and relatively large "generation" to blogistan. Most of the professionals I've talked to think of "blogging" as a brand new and quirky social phenomenon and tend to equate DailyKos.com with MySpace.
After two years at dailykos.com, including several passionate and fulfilling months helping to organize ePluribusMedia, I know this is the way we human beings will analyze issues, inform each other and generate large social movements in the future. The MSM is realizing this quickly - almost every major daily newspaper has launched a series of topic-themed blogs over the past 12 months.
If you visit Florida Workforce Housing Network, you'll see some original reporting that's conducted the same way the MSM used to do it - by talking to knowledgeable sources and recording facts. You'll also see some opinion and some rants, all of which will occur more frequently once we launch.
Okay, enough meta crap. I have lots of work to do before launch date.
I'm not asking anyone here to `join' Florida Workforce Housing Network. There are many far more immediate, important and engrossing issues analyzed here at dKos.
However, if you'd be so generous as to spend a moment looking the site over and another moment telling me where we're short, I'd be most grateful.
And if you spend a third moment appreciating just how powerful a tool Marcos has unleashed on the world - and how many variations of that tool there are to come - then this diary won't be just another case of blog-pimping.
Many thanks!
(A substantially different version of this diary is semi-cross-posted at Soapblox.net)