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Readers write: Borders in the Middle East, housing in the United States

Letters to the editor for the July 4, 2016 weekly magazine.

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Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
Roommates Jin Long Chen (r.) and Gao Xin Wu hang out in the living room in their small 2-bedroom apartment in Chinatown in Boston, Massachusetts.
  • By Eric Klieber Monitor reader
  • Peggy Renaud Monitor reader

Borders in the Middle East

Regarding the June 6 Focus story, “Why the Mideast isn’t falling apart”: The Ottoman Empire was not the only empire to crumble in the wake of World War I. Bosnians, Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Serbs, and Slovenians from the Austro-Hungarian Empire were thrown together in Yugoslavia and Czechs and Slovaks in Czechoslovakia.

Today, one world war and one cold war later, these forced unions have dissolved. If this was the proper solution in Europe, why not in the Middle East? Or Africa, for that matter?

Eric Klieber

Cleveland Heights, Ohio

Housing in the United States

Regarding the April 25 & May 2 cover story, “The price isn’t right”: What is the effect of international buyers on the market in US coastal cities such as Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, and New York? What happens to neighborhoods when so many luxury units sit empty? I suspect opportunity for more jobs supporting those phantom households is lost as well as the vibrancy associated with occupied units.

Vancouver, British Columbia, has supported the construction of secondary units on the property of larger houses. Portland, Ore., and Seattle have considered incentives to do the same. 

Given the recent research highlighted in the Monitor regarding upward mobility among the poor if living in a more affluent area, it would seem that we need to aggressively support inclusion of low- and moderate-income units in higher-income developments. Such inclusion can lead to a more interesting, dynamic, and diverse community.

In addition, too many buildings are being constructed without regard to access to the outdoors via patio, courtyard, or balcony. Too many buildings are being built without a thought given to gracious landscaping or integration with the rest of the streetscape or improvement of the streetscape.

Peggy Renaud

Seattle

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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