Latest news with #Baines
Sky News AU
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Sky News AU
The Project and Q&A programs tanked by 'youth exodus' as Big Tech shifts the Australian media industry into another gear
Australia's media industry, once a vibrant tapestry of nightly news, gritty dramas, and unifying sports broadcasts, is at a crossroads – caught in a digital storm that is challenging its economic and cultural core. The cancellation of once iconic shows like Network 10's The Project and the ABC's Q+A this month, along with Foxtel's 3.4 billion AUD takeover by global streaming giant DAZN in April are signals of a seismic shift. Three forces drive this upheaval: a youth exodus away from traditional media consumption, Big Tech's stranglehold, and hyper competition in content creation, a once highly barriered industry. The Great Youth Exodus Young Australians (4–17 and 18–39), in-line with their counterparts around the world, are abandoning traditional television for digital ecosystems at an exponential pace. OzTAM data shows a 75–80 per cent drop in free-to-air (FTA) viewership among youth from 2009 to 2024, with primetime audiences skewing over 50. More fundamentally, they are leaving not only for television-style content on other distribution channels, but for alternative forms of entertainment altogether. A 2024 ACMA report estimates of the ~30 hours of weekly leisure time available to 16–24-year-olds, only ~2 hours (7 per cent) are spent on FTA/cable (Seven, Nine, Foxtel), down from 10 in 2010, and 27 per cent spent on television-style content through streaming services. The remaining 65 per cent of youth leisure time is spent scrolling through YouTube and Social Media feeds, playing video games, listening to podcasts and shopping online. This is a fundamental reset of the role of television in society altogether. Once the glowing hearth of family nights and personal escapism - perhaps most vividly immortalised in Back to the Future's 1955 Baines household - television has been dethroned from its former cultural supremacy, with few exceptions. This is certainly a core reason behind The Project's ratings collapse from 1.1 million in 2010 to 238,000 to 357,000 in 2024, and Q+A's decline from 0.5 million to 0.3 million over the same time period. Let's drill down further into what this has meant for top-rated television shows in Australia. All top-rated programs across the key categories of Sports, News and Entertainment have lost ratings over the past fifteen years. One notable exception to this trend has been Sky News Australia's 'after dark' programming, which has steadily grown over this period, demonstrating its value in serving demand for conservative commentary on the news (disclosure: I appear on Sky News Australia's evening lineup three times a week and it is the owner of this site). Meanwhile, streaming content – whether global like Squid Games and The Rings of Power or Australian originals like Boy Swallows Universe – not even on the map in 2010 now command ratings that rival AFL and NRL Grand Finals. Big Tech's Stranglehold and Australia's Unique Disadvantage Big Tech has been both the cause and the beneficiary of this great youth exodus to other forms of digital media and entertainment as demonstrated in their growth from zero to over USD six trillion in market cap in a quarter century – a rise never before seen in human history. The most dramatic consequence of this is seen in the traditional ad apocalypse catalysed by Big Tech's grip. Google and Meta now capture 65–70 per cent of Australia's AUD 16.4 billion digital ad market, up from ~40 per cent in 2015. Meanwhile television ad revenue (FTA and Cable) fell from AUD 5.0 billion to AUD 4.3 billion over the same period, as advertisers increasingly favour digital advertising over traditional television advertising in their budget mix. On the consumer revenue side, Australian consumers spent 11 per cent more with the two global juggernaut streaming platforms, Netflix and Amazon Prime, from 2010 to today (AUD 1.3 to 2.1 billion). Leading Australian digital platforms - Stan, Kayo and Binge - have also demonstrated strong growth over the same period (AUD 548 million to 1.5 billion, or 17 per cent CAGR), but it must be noted that the growth of Kayo and Binge is offset by proportional declines in Foxtel's non-streaming revenue over the same period (Foxtel is the owner of Kayo and Binge). Australia is uniquely disadvantaged in this media industry arms race. Its position as an English-speaking market with limited scale makes it destined to be more of a 'franchisee' rather than a head-to-head competitor in the globalised media and entertainment industry. Government policies such as the 40 per cent producer offset and subsidies like Screen Australia's grants may help on the margins but they lag US tax breaks (e.g., California's 25 per cent credit) and other economies of scale advantages. Content Hyper-Competition and Saturation These market dynamics have also led to a second-order effect of a content explosion that has created a hyper-competitive landscape for creators coupled with diminished economies of scale due to the highly fragmented audience structure this has enabled. Netflix alone is on track to release ~500 original series in 2025, over 10 times as many as in 2015. Not to mention the explosion of user-generated content (UGC) on platforms like YouTube (1.5 billion videos in 2025, up from 300 million in 2015) and TikTok (~2 billion, up from 10 million), and independent podcasters like Joe Rogan (15m+ listeners per episode) also competing directly for eyeballs and attention. This hyper-competitive environment with drastically varied cost structures across UGC and Big Tech juggernauts, further squeezes Australian production competitiveness from both ends. If current trends continue, Big Tech will dominate over 70 per cent of Australia's ad spend and ~65 per cent of Australian consumer revenue by 2030. To compete, Australian media must innovate – thinking outside the norms of the last decade that resulted in show concepts like The Project and Q&A. One example of this would be: Leveraging AI (e.g., AI-assisted script writing and editing, and CGI visual generation) to slash production costs and accelerate delivery to leapfrog over the traditional Hollywood model of production and better compete with Silicon Valley studios. Or we could Identify and double-down on defensible localised niches like outback true crime (Snowtown) or sports underdog tales (The Test). Advocating policies like increased tax credits or relaxed quotas – and considering a radical rethink: defunding the ABC's AUD 1.1 billion budget to instead create a media venture fund and/or generous tax credit scheme to spur individual creators and private media startups in what has quickly become a golden age for new media entrepreneurship. The events of the last couple of weeks with high-profile cancellations, against the backdrop of Big Tech's structural advantage overall and in the Australian market in particular, reveals what time it is for the Australian media industry. The question that remains is: Will Australian media harness AI, own valuable storytelling niches, and pursue policy reform to forge defensible strongholds? Or will it succumb, and accept its fate as a mere franchisee of global giants by 2030? Kosha Gada is a tech entrepreneur who also serves as a board member of sports betting platform PointsBet. She is a broadcast commentator on US and international current affairs, appearing live three nights a week on Sky News Australia
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
How the Passionate Male Friendship Died
One of my favorite monuments looks like it belongs to a married couple. Draped in marble flowers and guarded by fat cherubs, it features two stone portraits joined by a knotted cloth, and script that describes an intimate bond: a 'beautiful and unbroken marriage of souls and a companionship undivided during thirty-six complete years.' But this memorial has nothing to do with a husband and a wife. It commemorates a friendship—one between two men, Sir John Finch and Sir Thomas Baines, Renaissance-era doctors who traveled, worked, and lived together in the 1600s and were buried side by side at Christ's College in Cambridge. 'They who while living had mingled their interests, fortunes, counsels, nay rather souls,' reads their tombstone, 'might in the same manner, in death, at last mingle their sacred ashes.' This exuberant expression of love is a far cry from popular depictions of male friendship today, which tend to portray men as struggling with vulnerability, or reticent to form bonds unless prompted by the women in their lives. Of course, Finch and Baines could have been a couple; they lived in a culture that criminalized homosexuality, in which 'friendship' might have served as a guise. But a platonic relationship as effusive as theirs also wouldn't have been out of the ordinary: In their time, across Europe, passionate bonds between men were publicly celebrated, and women were typically viewed as lacking the emotional depth required for true friendship. Many historians have a ritual they use to shake themselves out of their complacent 21st-century perspectives. When my friend Jo sits down at her desk to write about 19th-century America, she tries to remember that back then, pigs used to wander the streets of New York. While writing my latest book, on the history of friendship, going to Finch and Baines's monument was my trick. In an age when women's friendships are widely idealized—think Sex and the City's foursome and pink glitter T-shirts that read Best Friends Forever—Finch and Baines's memorial helped remind me that the cult of female friendship hasn't always been the norm, and that the way friendship is viewed now may not be how it's viewed forever. [Read: The agony of texting with men] I'm a historian of emotion: I study how cultural narratives act on people as individuals—and how changing social factors play out in our hearts and homes. Scholars in my field often talk about the concept of 'emotional communities' to understand how the behavior connected to a particular feeling can change across time and place. An emotional community shares expectations about which emotions should be felt—which are shown, which are hidden, how each should be expressed. Such rules are enforced through institutions such as schools and courts, and via literature, art, and the rituals of family life. As a society's emotional rules change, so do the ways individuals expect to feel—including in friendship. Psychologists have shown that, far from following a universal template, friendship has 'styles' that differ subtly from place to place. According to the psychologist Roger Baumgarte, some cultures, such as that of the United States, seem to favor a more 'independent' style of friendship, in which friends are highly respectful of one another's autonomy and might become uncomfortable if they sense that someone is overstepping a boundary. In other cultures, such as those of Cuba or China, friends are expected to 'intervene' more in a friend's life and might feel snubbed if help is not given. Although this kind of research can quickly give way to reductive stereotypes, it does illuminate how diverse people's expectations about friendship can be. These expectations can also change across time. Finch and Baines's 17th-century emotional community, for instance, was shaped by highly romantic ideas about male friendship. The two men lived toward the end of a period of astonishing intellectual transformation in Europe, when artists, politicians, scientists, and philosophers had rediscovered, via the scholars of the Islamic Golden Age, great works of classical antiquity and wanted to make their ideals their own. One such work, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, written in the fourth century B.C.E., divided friendship into three tiers. The bottom two tiers were populated by ordinary kinds of friends, in what he called friendships of utility and friendships of pleasure (the only kinds that women were supposedly capable of). Friendships of utility, Aristotle wrote, were 'commercially minded,' based on mutual help and quid pro quo. Friendships of pleasure were bonds formed through diversion and entertainment: You might gravitate toward a friend because they make you laugh, or you might sit with them at a game because they support your favorite athlete. But the third tier, which Aristotle called 'perfect' friendship, was something else—a bond between two men 'alike in virtue,' who saw each other as a 'second self.' It was, as later philosophers explained, as if 'one soul dwelled in two bodies.' This is how Baines and Finch saw themselves. They strove to be 'perfect' friends, and by all accounts, they seem to have succeeded. [Read: Why friendship is like art] Another Renaissance figure who believed himself to be a 'perfect' friend was the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, whose essay 'On Friendship' continues to influence writing on the subject today. In his bond with Étienne de La Boétie, a fellow lawyer and author, de Montaigne believed that he had found the kind of ideal friendship that only a few men in a generation could possibly hope to achieve—and his essay is a soaring depiction of their transcendent connection. In one of the most quoted lines in the history of friendship, he writes: 'If you press me to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be expressed except by replying: 'Because it was him: because it was me.'' Like other intellectuals of the time, de Montaigne did not consider women capable of this ideal. Women's brains could not endure this 'clasp of a knot so lasting, and so tightly drawn,' he wrote. His claim was based on the era's misogynistic medical theories, which held that women's brains were colder and weaker than men's. Women were willows, explained the scientist and poet Margaret Cavendish in 1655, liable to bend in the smallest draft—not sturdy oaks. In this way, most women were declared too flighty, capricious, and stupid for the commitment that true friendship required. They were also thought to be too easily distracted by romantic relationships with men. 'The reason why most women are so little affected by friendship,' wrote the 17th-century French nobleman François de La Rochefoucauld, 'is that it tastes insipid when they have felt love.' Women's friendships from this era were not generally memorialized in stone or glorified in reams of soaring poetry. In the archives, their stories appear as fragments compared with the large, easily accessible corpus on male friendship. But certainly they existed. In my research, I found evidence of women's bonds in scraps and shards—glimpses of women grieving over their deceased friends or helping one another through illnesses, evidence of friends forming households and raising children together, running joint businesses, defending others in court. Men knew the power of these alliances. Friendships gave women agency in a world not designed for them. It is perhaps no wonder that their friendships tended to be dismissed. [Read: What thirty years of female friendship looks like] Within 100 years of Finch and Baines's burial, the rules of their emotional community began to shift. The second part of the 18th century was a period of revolutionary fever and social reform across Europe and America. As abolitionist, women's-rights, and anti-poverty campaigns gathered momentum, so did discussions about emotion and sympathy (the old word for empathy). Poets, artists, and philosophers in this new Age of Sensibility began to speak in reverent tones of the supposed heightened sensitivity of 'the female mind.' They helped advance the idea that women enjoyed some special skill in friendship—and were capable of deeply emotional connections with the poor, the disenfranchised, and one another. By the 19th century, though, this belief in women's empathy had hardened into a new ideal of middle-class Victorian femininity: the 'angel of the house.' The consummate woman was supposed to be tender, loving, and eternally supportive; devoted friendships were seen as proof of her compassionate nature. Girlhood bonds were considered practice for the affection and sacrifice necessary for future roles as wives and mothers. Often, girls were primed with stories of highly romantic female friendships: One popular collection of nursery tales depicts two friends, Beatrice and Alice, who 'loved each other dearly' and 'with their arms about each other would sit under the deep shadow of the trees listening for the cuckoo's notes.' In Victorian novels, the girls who enjoy intimate childhood bonds—think Jane Eyre and Helen Burns—grow up to win the prize of marriage and motherhood, and 'difficult,' solitary, awkward girls, such as Lucy Snowe in Villette, marry unhappily, if at all. Romantic friendships between men didn't fall completely out of favor during this time. Photographs from the 1850s to the early 1900s show male friends holding hands or draping their arms around each other; sentimental letters between men in this period also abound. But by the second half of the 19th century, a new narrative about men's friendships was on the rise. Some began to depict male friendships as blundering and superficial. And as gay culture became more visible, and European sexologists stoked fears of 'sexual inversion,' a growing self-consciousness around male intimacy emerged. In 1863, the English feminist campaigner Frances Power Cobbe published an essay, 'Celibacy v. Marriage,' in the widely read Fraser's Magazine, in which she reiterated what had by then become a familiar story about male and female friendships. Whereas women friends enjoyed 'one of the purest of pleasures and the most unselfish of all affections,' Cobbe wrote, to men, friendship was little more than forming an 'acquaintance at a club.' Americans still, to an extent, live among the ghosts of these Victorian forebears, holding women to high standards of intimacy and portraying male bonds as clumsy and inept. We also live in an age of social fragmentation, in which experts, worried about loneliness and isolation, are puzzling over how to bring people together. To foster more connections, we'll need to reexamine our emotional rules—which ones are worth preserving and which ones we might be better off without. As a historian, I can tell you this: If we want to reimagine the terms of friendship, we can. *Lead image credit sources: Fitzwilliam Museum / Bridgeman Images; Harris Brisbane Dick Fund / The Met; Royal Institute of British Architects / The Met Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
19-05-2025
- General
- Atlantic
When Men Weren't Afraid to Love Their Friends
One of my favorite monuments looks like it belongs to a married couple. Draped in marble flowers and guarded by fat cherubs, it features two stone portraits joined by a knotted cloth, and script that describes an intimate bond: a 'beautiful and unbroken marriage of souls and a companionship undivided during thirty-six complete years.' But this memorial has nothing to do with a husband and a wife. It commemorates a friendship—one between two men, Sir John Finch and Sir Thomas Baines, Renaissance-era doctors who traveled, worked, and lived together in the 1600s and were buried side by side at Christ's College in Cambridge. 'They who while living had mingled their interests, fortunes, counsels, nay rather souls,' reads their tombstone, 'might in the same manner, in death, at last mingle their sacred ashes.' This exuberant expression of love is a far cry from popular depictions of male friendship today, which tend to portray men as struggling with vulnerability, or reticent to form bonds unless prompted by the women in their lives. Of course, Finch and Baines could have been a couple; they lived in a culture that criminalized homosexuality, in which 'friendship' might have served as a guise. But a platonic relationship as effusive as theirs also wouldn't have been out of the ordinary: In their time, across Europe, passionate bonds between men were publicly celebrated, and women were typically viewed as lacking the emotional depth required for true friendship. Many historians have a ritual they use to shake themselves out of their complacent 21st-century perspectives. When my friend Jo sits down at her desk to write about 19th-century America, she tries to remember that back then, pigs used to wander the streets of New York. While writing my latest book, on the history of friendship, going to Finch and Baines's monument was my trick. In an age when women's friendships are widely idealized—think Sex and the City 's foursome and pink glitter T-shirts that read Best Friends Forever—Finch and Baines's memorial helped remind me that the cult of female friendship hasn't always been the norm, and that the way friendship is viewed now may not be how it's viewed forever. I'm a historian of emotion: I study how cultural narratives act on people as individuals—and how changing social factors play out in our hearts and homes. Scholars in my field often talk about the concept of 'emotional communities' to understand how the behavior connected to a particular feeling can change across time and place. An emotional community shares expectations about which emotions should be felt—which are shown, which are hidden, how each should be expressed. Such rules are enforced through institutions such as schools and courts, and via literature, art, and the rituals of family life. As a society's emotional rules change, so do the ways individuals expect to feel—including in friendship. Psychologists have shown that, far from following a universal template, friendship has 'styles' that differ subtly from place to place. According to the psychologist Roger Baumgarte, some cultures, such as that of the United States, seem to favor a more 'independent' style of friendship, in which friends are highly respectful of one another's autonomy and might become uncomfortable if they sense that someone is overstepping a boundary. In other cultures, such as those of Cuba or China, friends are expected to 'intervene' more in a friend's life and might feel snubbed if help is not given. Although this kind of research can quickly give way to reductive stereotypes, it does illuminate how diverse people's expectations about friendship can be. These expectations can also change across time. Finch and Baines's 17th-century emotional community, for instance, was shaped by highly romantic ideas about male friendship. The two men lived toward the end of a period of astonishing intellectual transformation in Europe, when artists, politicians, scientists, and philosophers had rediscovered, via the scholars of the Islamic Golden Age, great works of classical antiquity and wanted to make their ideals their own. One such work, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, written in the fourth century B.C.E., divided friendship into three tiers. The bottom two tiers were populated by ordinary kinds of friends, in what he called friendships of utility and friendships of pleasure (the only kinds that women were supposedly capable of). Friendships of utility, Aristotle wrote, were 'commercially minded,' based on mutual help and quid pro quo. Friendships of pleasure were bonds formed through diversion and entertainment: You might gravitate toward a friend because they make you laugh, or you might sit with them at a game because they support your favorite athlete. But the third tier, which Aristotle called 'perfect' friendship, was something else—a bond between two men 'alike in virtue,' who saw each other as a 'second self.' It was, as later philosophers explained, as if 'one soul dwelled in two bodies.' This is how Baines and Finch saw themselves. They strove to be 'perfect' friends, and by all accounts, they seem to have succeeded. Another Renaissance figure who believed himself to be a 'perfect' friend was the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, whose essay 'On Friendship' continues to influence writing on the subject today. In his bond with Étienne de La Boétie, a fellow lawyer and author, de Montaigne believed that he had found the kind of ideal friendship that only a few men in a generation could possibly hope to achieve—and his essay is a soaring depiction of their transcendent connection. In one of the most quoted lines in the history of friendship, he writes: 'If you press me to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be expressed except by replying: 'Because it was him: because it was me.'' Like other intellectuals of the time, de Montaigne did not consider women capable of this ideal. Women's brains could not endure this 'clasp of a knot so lasting, and so tightly drawn,' he wrote. His claim was based on the era's misogynistic medical theories, which held that women's brains were colder and weaker than men's. Women were willows, explained the scientist and poet Margaret Cavendish in 1655, liable to bend in the smallest draft—not sturdy oaks. In this way, most women were declared too flighty, capricious, and stupid for the commitment that true friendship required. They were also thought to be too easily distracted by romantic relationships with men. 'The reason why most women are so little affected by friendship,' wrote the 17th-century French nobleman François de La Rochefoucauld, 'is that it tastes insipid when they have felt love.' Women's friendships from this era were not generally memorialized in stone or glorified in reams of soaring poetry. In the archives, their stories appear as fragments compared with the large, easily accessible corpus on male friendship. But certainly they existed. In my research, I found evidence of women's bonds in scraps and shards—glimpses of women grieving over their deceased friends or helping one another through illnesses, evidence of friends forming households and raising children together, running joint businesses, defending others in court. Men knew the power of these alliances. Friendships gave women agency in a world not designed for them. It is perhaps no wonder that their friendships tended to be dismissed. Within 100 years of Finch and Baines's burial, the rules of their emotional community began to shift. The second part of the 18th century was a period of revolutionary fever and social reform across Europe and America. As abolitionist, women's-rights, and anti-poverty campaigns gathered momentum, so did discussions about emotion and sympathy (the old word for empathy). Poets, artists, and philosophers in this new Age of Sensibility began to speak in reverent tones of the supposed heightened sensitivity of 'the female mind.' They helped advance the idea that women enjoyed some special skill in friendship—and were capable of deeply emotional connections with the poor, the disenfranchised, and one another. By the 19th century, though, this belief in women's empathy had hardened into a new ideal of middle-class Victorian femininity: the 'angel of the house.' The consummate woman was supposed to be tender, loving, and eternally supportive; devoted friendships were seen as proof of her compassionate nature. Girlhood bonds were considered practice for the affection and sacrifice necessary for future roles as wives and mothers. Often, girls were primed with stories of highly romantic female friendships: One popular collection of nursery tales depicts two friends, Beatrice and Alice, who 'loved each other dearly' and 'with their arms about each other would sit under the deep shadow of the trees listening for the cuckoo's notes.' In Victorian novels, the girls who enjoy intimate childhood bonds—think Jane Eyre and Helen Burns—grow up to win the prize of marriage and motherhood, and 'difficult,' solitary, awkward girls, such as Lucy Snowe in Villette, marry unhappily, if at all. Romantic friendships between men didn't fall completely out of favor during this time. Photographs from the 1850s to the early 1900s show male friends holding hands or draping their arms around each other; sentimental letters between men in this period also abound. But by the second half of the 19th century, a new narrative about men's friendships was on the rise. Some began to depict male friendships as blundering and superficial. And as gay culture became more visible, and European sexologists stoked fears of 'sexual inversion,' a growing self-consciousness around male intimacy emerged. In 1863, the English feminist campaigner Frances Power Cobbe published an essay, 'Celibacy v. Marriage,' in the widely read Fraser's Magazine, in which she reiterated what had by then become a familiar story about male and female friendships. Whereas women friends enjoyed 'one of the purest of pleasures and the most unselfish of all affections,' Cobbe wrote, to men, friendship was little more than forming an 'acquaintance at a club.' Americans still, to an extent, live among the ghosts of these Victorian forebears, holding women to high standards of intimacy and portraying male bonds as clumsy and inept. We also live in an age of social fragmentation, in which experts, worried about loneliness and isolation, are puzzling over how to bring people together. To foster more connections, we'll need to reexamine our emotional rules—which ones are worth preserving and which ones we might be better off without. As a historian, I can tell you this: If we want to reimagine the terms of friendship, we can.
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Public Works Commissioner retiring after 35 years
Jeff Baines, Commissioner of Public Works, is retiring after 35 years of service for the City of Lebanon. 'His knowledge is immeasurable when it comes to the City of Lebanon,' Mayor Rick Bell said. In recognition for the work Baines has done for the city, he was presented a 'Legends of Lebanon' award by Mayor Bell. 'Tonight, Jeff, you're going to be an official legend,' Bell said. 'Are you sure about that?' Baines responded jokingly. Baines is a graduate of Lebanon High School Class of 1976 and in 1980 earned a Bachelor of Science in Engineering at Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville. Baines began his professional career in 1980 with Metro Nashville Public Works. In 1990, Baines was hired by Mayor Bobby Jewell as City Engineer. Eight years later, he was named Commissioner of Public Works. In 2020, the American Public Works Association honored Baines as a lifetime member. Through his 35-year career, Baines has worked with five mayors, numerous city councilors, and for thousands of Lebanon citizens. With a standing ovation, thunderous applause, a handshake and a hug, Baines accepted the Legends of Lebanon award from Bell. 'This is home. It's about serving,' Baines said. 'All the folks who've worked with me [through] the years — we're a team. I believe in the concept of team.' 'On our next agenda, we'll have a resolution to name the public works building the Jeff Baines Public Works Building,' Bell said. A public works complex has been in the works for many years, and Mayor Bell said once the complex is complete, it will be known as the Jeff Baines Public Works Complex. 'All right!' Ward 5 Councilor Tick Bryan cheered regarding the news of the complex. 'You're going to be missed, and I'm sure you're going to be back,' Ward 1 Councilor Joey Carmack said, also noting his long friendship with Baines. 'I've only been here for six short months and I feel like Jeff Baines is my friend for life,' Ward 2 Councilor Geri Ashley said. 'He feels like somebody that I've known forever. He stops whatever he's doing to help.' 'I don't know anybody else that can make sewer, water or engineering more interesting than he can,' Ward 3 Councilor Camille Burdine said, while also reiterating the sentiments shared by other city officials. 'I'm going to continue the accolades for my friend,' Bryan said. 'I've probably known Jeff longer than anyone in this room — other than his mother.' 'He even told me in a kind of a bragging way, when I first got on the council, he said, 'Tick, I know where every sewer lid is on every street in Lebanon.' That was impressive,' Bryan added. Before joining the other councilors in congratulating Baines, Ward 6 Councilor Phil Morehead took the opportunity to also thank Police Chief Mike Justice for addressing speeding in the Five Oaks neighborhood. 'And now to continue with the Jeff Baines show,' Morehead said. 'You've been a mentor. As a [newer] council member, anytime I had a question I could reach out to you. You never put me off, always gave me the straight scoop, and pointed me in the right direction.' Ward 4 Councilor Cris Crowell was absent from Tuesday's meeting. At the adjournment of the City Council meeting, Bell let Baines strike the gavel to end the session. Bell previously let former Ward 2 Councilor Fred Burton adjourn his last meeting when retiring.
Yahoo
16-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Equity-sharing experiment part of new affordable-housing project in Tacoma. Can it work?
A local organization is purchasing four parcels from the City of Tacoma to develop homes that will be collectively owned by the community as part of a process known as 'land banking.' On Feb. 28, the Pierce County Community Land Trust (PCCLT) announced it had acquired the land from to kick off its land banking efforts. PCCLT board member Alyssa Torrez told The News Tribune in an interview that the plan is to use the 36,000 square feet of land to build 48 homes in the next few years. Torrez, who is also a senior planner for the City of Tacoma, called the acquisition a 'perfect storm' of opportunity, as a recent change in the city's zoning code will allow for a higher density of units to be built in plots that were previously for single families. Maria Lee, a spokesperson for the City of Tacoma, told The News Tribune the four surplus properties were sold for $760,000. 'There is an active development agreement that requires 50% of the homes be for homebuyers at or below 80% [Area Median Income],' Lee wrote in an email to The News Tribune. According to U.S. Census Bureau data from 2023, median income for the Tacoma area is $83,857. Lee also said the land agreement dictates 50% of the units would be marketed to Black households. She said that is consistent with recommendations from the City's Disparity Study on homeownership from 2021. Jessie Baines is the founder and president of PCCLT. In an interview with The News Tribune, Baines said members of his organization were aware of such homeownership disparities and began working to reduce them. 'We began to look into how we could further opportunities for folks to become home buyers because we know that's the greatest way to build wealth in the community,' he said. Baines said opportunities are created for home buyers by using down-payment assistance programs such as the Covenant Homeownership Program in combination with down-payment assistance from the land trust to help people who otherwise would not have the cash to buy a home. The catch is that when the home is sold to a new qualified owner, the seller, whose original purchase of the home was subsidized, does not receive the full equity in the home. Baines said under the model the homeowner would receive the equity from a percentage of the appreciated value of the home when they decide to sell. He said the remaing appreciation value is 'paid forward' for the next buyer as a way of keeping the home affordable. Baines said the land trust model allows the community to collectively own the land and provides stewardship to maintain affordable home-ownership opportunities for generations. 'A lot of times folks are thinking that these affordable home-ownership units are highly subsidized by the government,' Baines told The News Tribune. 'They are, but the folks living in them also pay it forward for the next person.' Antavius Mitchell is a PCCLT board member and a prospective resident at the 69th Street and South Proctor Street project. In an interview with The News Tribune, Mitchell said he pays around $3,000 a month in rent for where he and his four kids currently live. 'And that's just rent, no equity,' he said. Mitchell said the PCCLT helped give him 'the keys' to becoming a homeowner. Ultimately he said the opportunity to pay it forward and provide an affordable homeownership opportunity to those who want to live in the home after him was something that caught his eye as well. Baines said the design and construction plan of townhome-style units are still in the works. He anticipated permitting approval to be announced around June 2025.
