Okay, that is seriously fucking cool. How did I not know about this? Is it because it works exactly like it should?
Now we need about 50,000 more.
They might not translate to dense city cores and surrounds as well as in smaller cities, where marginal industrial zones are proximal to other city services, resources, and opportunities.
Certainly, but add hourly or half hourly bus service to major transportation hubsā¦
Or perhaps as part of the microbusiness segment have education in how to use etsy, craigslist, and eBay?
Also, not to go off the rails too muchā¦ But the moment you have three things: an address, a US post office utility bill, and financial services (cheap prepaid visa card, subsidised by the village?) The world becomes 1000% easier.
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I agree with you. Iām currently working with a friend to get her Section 8 housing voucher here in San Diego. Itās a nightmare of bureaucracy, and there are no shortcuts.
The Section 8 waiting list here in San Diego is TEN YEARS. Thatās ten years that you have to have a mailing address (to receive periodic update notices, some of which you have to respond to in a timely manner, with no second chances.) My friend was fortunate enough to live in rural Oregon when she first applied, where the wait was only (ONLY!) a year and a half. She finally received her approval and final voucher and is in the process of āportingā it back to San Diego.
Despite it being previously approved in Oregon, she basically has to re-do all the paperwork now that sheās back in San Diego. Certified birth certificates for her and the kids, original SS cards, SSI, welfare, and food stamp award letters, all of which have to be recent. A release from a court about a misdemeanor crime she had from seven years ago. Skip a step, miss a deadline, screw up somehow, and itās back to the bottom of the list for you, with no meaningful way to appeal. Itās just crazy.
Iām a hyper-organized, wealthy, middle-aged, middle-class homeowner, and Iām having trouble keeping track of this process. For a borderline-homeless broke single mother with an infant and an autistic toddler, itās damn near impossible.
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The whole tulip-bubble model of housing investment is completely dependent on increasing stratification between haves and have nots. That model of the haves living off the efforts of the have nots is already starting to run out of gas as the have nots are more and more crunched for disposable income and time to work, by unaffordable housing as well as debt and lack of safety net. Eventually the poor people will just die off or move to Mexico or some country where itās possible to live on less if we keep going this direction. Then the haves will not have anyone to leech off of.
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Took my brother almost three years, a lawyer, a family (like you), and a rock star case worker.
So I guess I should amend my original question to: how do you give away housing that costs $10k to build and $200 a month to operate per family? And like you and I have experienced, for families that canāt bootstrap their own tiny home by themselves.
Apparently, if you raise property taxes high enough, people stop treating houses as investments. Also, while you canāt totally avoid these types problems in a city experiencing an economic boom, having social programs that helps put and keep people in homes are absolutely required, but I think that NGOs are better suited to the task.
The problem with letting NGOs do it is, what do you do when they stop funding the program? It leaves the recipients worse off than they were before. This is happening in San Diego this week: VOA drops program
Thereās a whole bunch of intersecting issues here in Seattle that all combine into a nasty feedback loop, and a lot of it is down to really shitty planning at the city level.
The whole transit/traffic issue is an excellent example (that also ties in with the housing issue). We have horrible traffic. This is known. As a response to this, the city has for many years done things to ādiscourage drivingā. Reducing parking space, making it more expensive to park at city meters and in city owned garages, reducing lanes on surface streets, etc. In a sane city, this would be part of a comprehensive plan in which you were building a grade separated mass transit system, so all those people thinking that driving is a real pain in the ass would have an alternative to look to. In Seattle, we just have the āmake driving shitty and inefficientā part, and have pretty much entirely neglected to do anything to give anyone a realistic alternative to driving (yeah, you can ride the bus. In my experience the bus generally takes at least 4x as long to get you somewhere than driving, so your 30-45 minute commute just became a 2-3 hour commute. Take an extra 3 or 4 hours out of your daily schedule and see if you can still make your life work. Oh, also, bus services have been slashed dramatically in recent years due to state level austerity horseshit, particularly service to outlying areas).
This contributes to the housing problems in several ways. It makes it unpleasant to live farther outside of the city core, so if youāre a high wage worker somewhere downtown or in South Lake Union or whatnot you can improve your quality of life significantly and relatively easily by reducing or getting rid of your commute, and since you have the money to spare you bid up housing costs in/close to the city. This makes it unaffordable for lower wage workers (who are, lets recall, still necessary to the general functioning of the city even if you think they are plebs who deserve what they get for not having an engineering degree or whatever oneās personal hurdle to be considered fully human happens to be) to live in/close to the city, so they end up having to commute in (increasingly from places where bus service is extremely sparse, making that even less viable an option than it already was), which makes the traffic and parking situations worse, which encourages the housing prices to go up, which completes our vicious circle.
Hopefully weāll be able to pass the funding to expand the light rail into a comprehensive city wide transit system. Weāll then need to try and expand it out to serve farther flung areas, effectively expanding the area in which you can reasonably live in and still consider yourself a part of Seattle. This will unfortunately take a decade or so, assuming we have the political will to do it at all. In the meantime, we need to try and come up with ways to mitigate the problems of the feedback loop (protections for existing low and middle income housing, provisions requiring new developments to have some units at low and middle pricing, assistance for those who have been displaced already and are now living on the street or in busted old RVs in various semi-industrial interstitial spaces around the city, etc.). The first step to doing that is very definitely voting out most of the City Council incumbents, who are the ones who dodged dealing with this issue 10-15 years ago when it was already pretty clear that the city needed to be building a real mass transit system.
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When I moved here nigh on 20 years ago now I was agog at the squabbling and need more study bullshit on light rail. St. Louis just said guess what we are doing this and pushed through the first line. It was so well used and popular that when the tax levy for extending it to the south and to the west it passed overwhelmingly. Now I will probably be retired by the time I can take a train from Northgate to downtown and transfer to one that will take me over to Eastgate.
Govāt programs can also disappear and leave people homeless, so I still think NGOs are the way to go.
I might be misremembering, but I donāt think any transit related measure has failed in Seattle since Iāve been here (13 years). If any have, theyāre relatively rare. This would indicate that the reason we donāt have proper mass transit is obstructionism from the Council (which means obstructionism from the business interests that hold their reins) over the last 20 years, specifically in the form of constantly dithering around with the unending studies. It makes them appear to be interested in supporting transit, but puts it off for another few years so the NIMBYs and Kemper Freemans and Downtown Business Associations will be happy that you kept the riffraff from Renton from besmirching their shopping centers, and makes them appear sagacious to people who think any change to the status quo is potentially a slip nā slide to an Orwellian nightmare or something. I mean, we even passed that idiotic monorail thing, and it was shady as hell (plus that episode of The Simpsons had been out for YEARS already! We shouldāve known better!).
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