August 14, 2026

Rev. Charles Reginald Johnson

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Washington's housing affordability crisis is real, and Black families are among those paying the highest price.

Across our state, rising rents have made it harder for working families to save for a home, build wealth, and remain in the communities they've called home for generations. When policymakers look for ways to address those challenges, they deserve commendation. 

Only about 36% of Black families own homes in Washington, compared to 67% of White families. Black renters spend more of their income on housing. than White renters do Every year that new homes are not built is another year that these families fall further behind building wealth and security for their children.

As cities like Bellingham, as well as lawmakers around the state, consider restrictions on algorithmic rent-pricing software, they should resist the temptation to ban every use of housing data. Instead, they should follow the lead of jurisdictions like Rockville, Maryland, and Berkeley, California, which have drawn an important distinction between public information and nonpublic competitor data. For protecting affordable housing across our state, that difference means a lot.

Some competing landlords are sharing confidential information that isn't available to the public. Governments have every reason to scrutinize that practice. Consumers deserve competitive markets. Private information-sharing, which leads to collusion and higher prices, is anything but competitive. But lawmakers should make sure their ban doesn’t extend to publicly available information, as some measures, like Bellingham Initiative 26-01, would do if not modified soon.  

Apartment listings, advertised rents, neighborhood vacancy rates, census data, construction trends, and local market conditions are available to everyone. They are used not only by landlords, but also by developers deciding whether to build new housing, lenders evaluating projects, affordable housing organizations, researchers, and local governments themselves. As such, banning the use of this data could end up hurting the very people it’s intended to help.

Treating public information as though it were part of an anticompetitive conspiracy doesn't solve the housing shortage. If anything, it risks making it worse. This is because, if affordable housing developers have less data, they have less confidence that now is the right time to build. This leads to fewer units constructed. Fewer units mean higher prices for the ones that are currently standing (because prospective residents begin to bid each other up).

At the same time, corporate landlords that are secretly sharing private competitor information that no one else should see must be stopped — and soon. This inexcusable collusion is doing serious damage to the cause of affordable housing, and it’s encouraging to see our elected officials taking action against it.

But while this is a step in the right direction, the truth is that Washington doesn't have a rent algorithm problem nearly as much as it has a housing supply problem. For years, our state has failed to build enough homes to keep pace with demand. The result has been higher rents, fewer vacancies, and fewer opportunities for first-time homebuyers to enter the market. Those pressures fall especially hard on Black communities.

Fortunately, our political leaders understand this and are making significant progress in getting more affordable units online. As former Washington State Senator Kevin Van De Wege recently put it, “Washington lawmakers have actually been leading on this. Last year, the legislature passed HB 1217, capping annual rent increases statewide and giving tenants new protections against junk fees and short notice.

In 2023, it passed HB 1110, legalizing duplexes, triplexes and four-plexes in neighborhoods that used to allow only single-family homes — a real, supply-side answer to a supply-side crisis. Both were the right calls, and both deserve to be built on, not overshadowed.”

This progress matters because every year that housing remains scarce is another year that many families are forced to delay building equity and passing wealth on to the next generation.

The families struggling most with housing costs need more homes, more choices, and more opportunities to build wealth. Let’s protect competition and renters. But let’s also protect the public market information that helps make new housing possible. Washington can do both at the same time.

Rev. Charles Reginald Johnson is Senior Pastor, Mt. Zion Baptist Church

Seattle, Washington. The church was established in 1890, shortly after Washington became a state, reflecting the growing African American community in Seattle. He is also a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Urban League.

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - When we forget the first fights over voting rights, we forget who profits when the many are divided.

Voting rights is back in the news because some people are still trying to decide whose votes deserve trust. In Georgia, the Justice Department and FBI under President Donald Trump have reopened questions around Fulton County’s 2020 election records after agents seized hundreds of boxes of ballots. The Associated Press reports the FBI has assigned 260 analysts and operations staff to review them.

Fulton County includes most of Atlanta and sits at the heart of Georgia’s transformation. It has a large Black electorate, growing Latino and Asian American communities, and many newer residents drawn by the Atlanta region’s jobs and universities. It voted against President Trump. Yet Georgia’s 2020 result was not some partisan rumor. Local officials counted the ballots. The state counted them three times, including once by hand. Republican officials certified the result. Each count confirmed the same outcome. That matters because vote suppression has often followed the same pattern: discredit the voters, divide the people, deprive enough citizens of the ballot, and move power upward.

The country has largely forgotten one of its earliest broad voting rights victories: the campaign to end property qualifications for white men. In many states, a man could be white, free, taxed, armed and called to defend the Revolution — and still be denied the vote because he did not own enough property.

Those men did not suffer as long as Black men, women, Native people or others shut out of democracy. Their exclusion still reveals the old fault line. Power rightfully belongs to the people. Yet wealthy interests have often tried to keep too much of it for themselves.

Some people profit from our forgetting. If we forget that landless white men once had to fight for the vote, we can miss the pattern when it returns in new clothes.

Benjamin Franklin saw the absurdity. He told the story of a man whose vote depended on owning a jackass worth enough money to qualify him. When the animal died, the man lost the vote. Franklin asked the obvious question: “In whom is the right of suffrage? In the man or in the jackass?”

Thomas Paine gave the moral answer. “Man did not enter into society to become worse than he was before, nor to have fewer rights than he had before, but to have those rights better secured.”

There is irony in President Trump’s love of President Andrew Jackson. Jackson and his allies built the Democratic Party with a founding promise: government should answer to the landless many, not merely the propertied few.

Jackson’s democracy was badly bounded. It excluded Black people, women and Native people. His politics also embraced slaveholding white supremacy. Still, he saw one danger clearly. In his veto of the national bank, he warned that “the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.”

That warning fits this moment. Vote suppression has often worked by discrediting voters, dividing working people against one another, and depriving the many of their full voice so some rich and powerful people can bend government toward themselves.

That was much of the logic of monarchy: divide and conquer. It was much of the logic of Jim Crow: tell poor white people their enemy is Black freedom. It was true in the 1820s. It was true in the 1920s, when immigrants from predominantly Catholic countries like Ireland and Italy were cast as threats to real America. It is true today, when immigrants from predominantly Catholic countries like Haiti and Mexico are made into scapegoats again. Tell rural voters their enemy is city voters. Tell Election Day voters their enemy is mail voters.

The tools change. The purpose often does not. Property requirements became poll taxes. Poll taxes became literacy tests. Literacy tests gave way to purges, ID rules, closed polling places and attacks on early voting, same-day registration and mail ballots.

The burden comes as paperwork, deadlines, long lines, missing names and ballots questioned after the people have spoken. A poll tax charged money. A long line charges time. Cutting early voting can tax people who do not control their schedules. Restricting mail ballots can tax seniors, disabled voters, rural voters and caregivers.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson spent his life widening the meaning of the many. He urged young people to hold “a diploma in one hand” and “a voter registration card in that other hand.” Education and the ballot. Knowledge and power.

I come to this history as a son of the Revolution, the abolitionist movement, and the Southern populist tradition that rose in the decades after the Civil War and united working men across color lines. My great-great-grandfather, Edward David Bland, was born enslaved and died a Virginia legislator.

He helped build the Readjuster Party, a post-Civil War, multiracial voting rights movement that brought together Black men who had been enslaved and white men who had fought for the Confederacy. Their cause was schools, fairer taxes, debt relief, voting rights and democracy. When they gained power, they abolished Virginia’s poll tax.

After they were broken, Virginia’s ruling Democrats wrote a new constitution in 1902 that brought the poll tax back with literacy tests and other barriers. Black voters were almost wiped out as a political force. White voting was cut roughly in half. The old ruling class knew whose coalition it was trying to prevent from rising again.

Imagine if every schoolchild learned that the poll tax was not only an attack on Black voting power but also on poor white voting power. We might see the trick more clearly when it returns in new clothes.

The Democratic donkey did not come from Franklin’s parable. It came from Jackson’s enemies calling him a jackass, an insult he embraced and cartoonists later made stick. Still, the echo is hard to miss.

If Democrats keep the jackass, they should remember Franklin’s question. The right was never in the jackass. It was never in the deed, the poll tax, the ID card, the Tuesday work schedule, the mailbox or the database.

The right is in the people. Every generation that won more democracy ultimately did so by resisting efforts by the few to divide the many. That is our work now: remember the history, reject the division, and defend the vote for every one of us.

Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former national president and CEO of the NAACP.

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - When we forget the first fights over voting rights, we forget who profits when the many are divided.

Voting rights is back in the news because some people are still trying to decide whose votes deserve trust. In Georgia, the Justice Department and FBI under President Donald Trump have reopened questions around Fulton County’s 2020 election records after agents seized hundreds of boxes of ballots. The Associated Press reports the FBI has assigned 260 analysts and operations staff to review them.

Fulton County includes most of Atlanta and sits at the heart of Georgia’s transformation. It has a large Black electorate, growing Latino and Asian American communities, and many newer residents drawn by the Atlanta region’s jobs and universities. It voted against President Trump. Yet Georgia’s 2020 result was not some partisan rumor. Local officials counted the ballots. The state counted them three times, including once by hand. Republican officials certified the result. Each count confirmed the same outcome. That matters because vote suppression has often followed the same pattern: discredit the voters, divide the people, deprive enough citizens of the ballot, and move power upward.

The country has largely forgotten one of its earliest broad voting rights victories: the campaign to end property qualifications for white men. In many states, a man could be white, free, taxed, armed and called to defend the Revolution — and still be denied the vote because he did not own enough property.

Those men did not suffer as long as Black men, women, Native people or others shut out of democracy. Their exclusion still reveals the old fault line. Power rightfully belongs to the people. Yet wealthy interests have often tried to keep too much of it for themselves.

Some people profit from our forgetting. If we forget that landless white men once had to fight for the vote, we can miss the pattern when it returns in new clothes.

Benjamin Franklin saw the absurdity. He told the story of a man whose vote depended on owning a jackass worth enough money to qualify him. When the animal died, the man lost the vote. Franklin asked the obvious question: “In whom is the right of suffrage? In the man or in the jackass?”

Thomas Paine gave the moral answer. “Man did not enter into society to become worse than he was before, nor to have fewer rights than he had before, but to have those rights better secured.”

There is irony in President Trump’s love of President Andrew Jackson. Jackson and his allies built the Democratic Party with a founding promise: government should answer to the landless many, not merely the propertied few.

Jackson’s democracy was badly bounded. It excluded Black people, women and Native people. His politics also embraced slaveholding white supremacy. Still, he saw one danger clearly. In his veto of the national bank, he warned that “the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.”

That warning fits this moment. Vote suppression has often worked by discrediting voters, dividing working people against one another, and depriving the many of their full voice so some rich and powerful people can bend government toward themselves.

That was much of the logic of monarchy: divide and conquer. It was much of the logic of Jim Crow: tell poor white people their enemy is Black freedom. It was true in the 1820s. It was true in the 1920s, when immigrants from predominantly Catholic countries like Ireland and Italy were cast as threats to real America. It is true today, when immigrants from predominantly Catholic countries like Haiti and Mexico are made into scapegoats again. Tell rural voters their enemy is city voters. Tell Election Day voters their enemy is mail voters.

The tools change. The purpose often does not. Property requirements became poll taxes. Poll taxes became literacy tests. Literacy tests gave way to purges, ID rules, closed polling places and attacks on early voting, same-day registration and mail ballots.

The burden comes as paperwork, deadlines, long lines, missing names and ballots questioned after the people have spoken. A poll tax charged money. A long line charges time. Cutting early voting can tax people who do not control their schedules. Restricting mail ballots can tax seniors, disabled voters, rural voters and caregivers.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson spent his life widening the meaning of the many. He urged young people to hold “a diploma in one hand” and “a voter registration card in that other hand.” Education and the ballot. Knowledge and power.

I come to this history as a son of the Revolution, the abolitionist movement, and the Southern populist tradition that rose in the decades after the Civil War and united working men across color lines. My great-great-grandfather, Edward David Bland, was born enslaved and died a Virginia legislator.

He helped build the Readjuster Party, a post-Civil War, multiracial voting rights movement that brought together Black men who had been enslaved and white men who had fought for the Confederacy. Their cause was schools, fairer taxes, debt relief, voting rights and democracy. When they gained power, they abolished Virginia’s poll tax.

After they were broken, Virginia’s ruling Democrats wrote a new constitution in 1902 that brought the poll tax back with literacy tests and other barriers. Black voters were almost wiped out as a political force. White voting was cut roughly in half. The old ruling class knew whose coalition it was trying to prevent from rising again.

Imagine if every schoolchild learned that the poll tax was not only an attack on Black voting power but also on poor white voting power. We might see the trick more clearly when it returns in new clothes.

The Democratic donkey did not come from Franklin’s parable. It came from Jackson’s enemies calling him a jackass, an insult he embraced and cartoonists later made stick. Still, the echo is hard to miss.

If Democrats keep the jackass, they should remember Franklin’s question. The right was never in the jackass. It was never in the deed, the poll tax, the ID card, the Tuesday work schedule, the mailbox or the database.

The right is in the people. Every generation that won more democracy ultimately did so by resisting efforts by the few to divide the many. That is our work now: remember the history, reject the division, and defend the vote for every one of us.

Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former national president and CEO of the NAACP.

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a dominant engine of U.S. economic activity. With the largest economy in the world, America’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is over $30.62 trillion. In 2025, AI-related spending and investments accounted for approximately 1.6% of America’s total GDP, and that small percentage equates to nearly $500 billion in annual economic activity focused on infrastructure, including data centers. Estimates, according to 24/7 Wall St., are forecasting the AI spend will be between $1.7 and $3.5 trillion by early 2030s. 

AI is America’s new dream, but for some Black communities, it’s a nightmare.

According to Benjamin Dixon, an AI ethics researcher, “Black communities are collateral damage in the AI arms race—targeted for infrastructure nobody wants in their backyards. Once highways, oil refineries, dumps; today its data centers.” Dixon goes on to say, “the harmful impact to our communities will be felt in: 1. environmental and public health, 2. resources, and 3. economic and social displacement. The demand for AI; however, can be met without environmental racism targeting our communities, achieved with greater efficiencies economically, and without harming the environment. The only question is why are AI companies doubling down on antiquated and damaging technologies?”

Data centers can be run using backup diesel generators and on-site gas turbines that emit nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) and fine particulate matter (PM2.5). Elon Musk’s data center located in the historically Black Boxtown neighborhood in Memphis, Tenn. saw its peak NO₂ levels rise by 79% as a result of his hyperscale data center. Health burdens include increased risks for cancer, asthma, heart disease, chronic respiratory conditions, sleep disruption from constant noise, heat-related illness, and cumulative toxic exposure from NO₂, PM2.5, and other hazardous pollutants.

From a resource standpoint, these hyperscale data centers require insane amounts of energy and water. The high demand for energy is being felt by our communities with skyrocketing utility bills. In addition, the number of servers requires millions of gallons of water daily for cooling.

Data centers promised jobs but day-to-day operations only require between 50-100 people and those individuals are rarely local. As for the site of the data centers: can you say red-line districts and gentrification? 

Bigger is not always better, and AI experts in the East are standing ten toes down on this philosophy. In 2022, America’s OpenAI released Chat GPT. One could argue this was the first time that AI became available to the general public at a development cost between $80 - $100 million. Meanwhile, in the East a Chinese firm, DeepSeek, released their AI model at a cost of $5.5 million. 

At the expense of Black communities, AI companies are doubling down on $500 billion annually in overpriced, inefficient hyperscale data centers—contractually locking in decades of water depletion, energy strain, and pollution—despite breakthrough research proving frontier AI can be achieved for 95-99% less cost and environmental impact. 

“At this point, America is committing to building gas guzzling Model-T Fords of AI over the next decade, while the East is building fuel efficient, autonomous driving EVs of AI,” Dixon stated. 

Samsung, a South Korean firm, developed a new AI model known as the Tiny Recursive Model (TRM). TRM was trained with only 7 million parameters for under $500, and yet it outperforms AI models costing $5.5 million (DeepSeek), $20–$30 million (Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet), $100+ million (OpenAI’s ChatGPT), and $191 million (Google’s Gemini Ultra). No data centers needed, this AI model can run on consumer hardware from laptops to smart watches!

Furthermore, when you compare Energy Per Task: Samsung’s TRM consumes 0.5 Watt-hour vs. GPT-4 estimated at 150 Watt-hour. The environmental impact becomes non-existent.

American AI companies know TRM is an industry disrupter. But instead of adopting advancements in the field of AI, they’re committing to building brute force data centers in the most vulnerable communities. Dixon concluded stating: “As an AI ethical researcher, the behavior of American capitalism has once again shown a lack of regard for the Black community.” 

Dr. Carl Mack is former president of the Seattle King County NAACP and former executive director of the National Society of Black Engineers. Benjamin Dixon is host of the Benjamin Dixon Show and an AI ethics researcher.