Bill Nemitz is back to save us! Hardy har har.

Dear Bill,

Did you read today’s Portland Press Herald article about Papi, the Puerto Rican restaurant whose antique doors from Old San Juan aren’t historic enough for persnickety old Portland? Ironic, isn’t it, that Maine’s biggest city expects surrounding small towns to allow bleak housing projects contrary to local zoning in the name of “progress” yet Papi’s doors must come down in the name of precious history.

In Cape Elizabeth, for example, the 49 unit for-profit low income housing development known as “Dunham Court” pitched by the Szanton Company and rejected by voters resembled a Hampton Inn and sought to be located on the town green next door to the beautiful historic Town Hall and war memorial. The project also would have paved a public ice skating rink, cost tax payers $14 million and not been suitable to house kids or teachers despite being located across the street from blue-ribbon public schools.

Which brings me to your piece in Sunday’s paper announcing The Maine Journalism Foundation, a new non-profit aiming to take over the state’s largest media company from Reade Brower.

That your encore to essentially play Tom Brady for Masthead Media is thanks in large part to two fine journalists from Cape Elizabeth is somewhat rich in irony, too, don’t you think? That place you claim to be so “insular” and stuck in the past - where everyone apparently wants to live and everyone in Maine’s liberal media loves to call the nemesis of affordable housing often with unsubtle racial undertones, like when you wrote that smug piece about Capers needing to get with the program of “diversifying its mostly white, mostly well-off demographics.”

Is that what saving Main Street from Wall Street is these days in your view, Bill, racism? Is preserving what’s good about Cape Elizabeth bad for our future?

Which leads back to your call to action to save Maine journalism alongside another Szanton Company fairytale that works in a dig against Cape Elizabeth for voting down a mortgage-backed security disguised as an affordable housing project not designed to meet the needs of the community expected to pay for it and vulnerable to the same market forces that caused the Great Recession that caused the current housing shortage.

If the profit motive corrupts good journalism and the free press, what impact do you think it plays on delegating to bankers and real estate developers the government function of administering public welfare programs? Surely the private prison experiment was a flop. America is the richest country on earth, Bill, why such a push by investors and special interest groups for cookie-cutter low-income housing besides their bottom line, a good journalist like yourself might ask but hasn’t yet.

Bankers and developers of publicly financed “affordable housing” are not non-profits for a reason, Bill.

Anyway, good luck.

Love,

Cynthia