State public housing, K-12 Covid vaccines, and the abortion win in Kansas
Hi all,
Last newsletter that went out was about the upcoming referendum in Kansas. By now probably most of you have heard that supporters of reproductive rights won, and won by a really decisive margin! Nearly 60 percent of voters cast their ballot last week to preserve a state constitutional protection of abortion.
This is a huge deal and has led to a lot of post-Kansas discourse about what it means for the midterms and other battles. I think it would be a mistake to look at Kansas and conclude 60 percent of voters would turn out to reject the many abortion restrictions that still exist in the state, but it does send a clear signal about what voters might do if they believe a total ban is on the ballot. I spoke on a podcast with two of my Vox colleagues yesterday about the politics of abortion. We talked about the results in Kansas, the midterms, Congress and the Biden administration. You can listen to that here. I’m also back this week reporting out some new stories on abortion politics and hope to have those for you later this month.
I was super thrilled to publish this story last week on states and local government stepping up to build new public housing. From Rhode Island and Hawaii to Colorado and Maryland—states are rediscovering their own self-interest in developing housing to address the affordable housing crisis. You can read the story here.
And lastly I have a new story about why states are not requiring K-12 students to get the Covid vaccine for back-to-school, and why Washington DC is the exception. This was definitely not where it seemed like at least blue states and liberal-leaning school districts were headed last fall and winter. You can read that here.
I hope this newsletter format of sharing updates is still useful! I’m aware we all get too many emails, so I don’t want to add to that inbox stress, but for those who want to keep up with my reporting and find it easiest to do so by getting links to your inbox, I want to keep making time to get those to you. I don’t have much time/bandwidth unfortunately to write much more beyond what I have been doing, but we only have so much energy in a day and I figure mine is better spent getting more formal articles out for all of you. Especially without an editor. Though I’m also now exploring TikTok, for the same reason as why I have this newsletter, in that I’m trying to bring my reporting to where people are. We’ll see how all this goes! As always I welcome your feedback on this or other ways of distributing work. Thank you for reading.