The affordable housing crisis

[Ken_J]

in this area if you look for a room even on craigslist in the roommates section the average cost for a 9x10 room with shared kitchen and shared bathroom is $1200/month. a single studio will run you around $1300, a 1br about $1800, and 2br are around $2200.

the cheapest place you could buy in the state is a mobile home in a park in the middle of nowhere. The monthly park fees are around $600. and the mortgage to buy the 'house' is $15000 down, 30 years, $95000. and the taxes are about $1000 a year. so it'll cost you about $1300 a month for 30 years if the fees, taxes or mortgage rate don't go up... which we know they will. and the place looks like it will probably need a new roof, windows and likely new siding (that's the outside. Inside likely needs new wiring and plumbing repair. the heater is probably dying and the bathroom likely has rot and mold issues that would require it to be torn out and redone.)

there are a handfull of rooming houses in the state, and a room (essentially a walk in closet with a bed in it) will run you $800/month charged by the week, sometimes by the day. you share a kitchen with 40-60 other people and there is often a shared bathroom for them too. They are divided up by gender (male only places, women only places) to make sure the prostitution doesn't happen in the houses. But drug use and bed bugs are overflowing from them.

the government assisted housing has a 14 year waiting list. and there is no room at the homeless shelter even if you wanted to have your belongings stolen, get attack, or wanted to get a case of bed bugs.

And many of the cheaper places are grifts, where you pay first and lat months rent and a security deposit on a month to month lease, do not renew the rental for the next month and keep the security deposit and last months rent. Often renting the space out immediately the second month to pull the same thing again.

I really have no idea what's going to happen going forward but it's going to be terrible.

[caltrek]

The Importance of Home
by Kazmyn Ramos
December 6, 2023

Introduction:

(Other Words) Too many of us have to depend on sheer good luck to make it — especially when it comes to putting a roof over our heads.’

We grow up hearing that hard work alone will lift us above the hardships we’re born into. But many of us also watched as our parents worked two and three jobs, relied on extended family to watch us, and still struggled to afford stable housing. Far too many of us are living that same struggle ourselves.

It’s not that we aren’t resourceful. My grandmother, who barely scraped by with factory work and countless odd jobs, pulled together with neighbors who supported each other through a mutual aid network. Thanks to her resourcefulness, our community, and luck, we had someplace to call home. That gave my mother the chance to become the first one in our family to go to college. I followed in her footsteps to attend graduate school.

We made it work. But I’ve learned through generational poverty that the lack of affordable housing is one of the biggest obstacles to thriving. I learned even more through my work with Healthy Families, a national, research-backed program.

I conducted home visits with low-income mothers, addressing maternal health, birth outcomes, and child development. Their poverty was different from what I grew up with. Many of these mothers were immigrants with language barriers and no access to the extended networks, mutual aid, or stable housing that I had.

Read more here: https://otherwords.org/the-importance-of-home/

Here is a link to the Healthy Families America website: https://www.healthyfamiliesamerica.org

[40lightyears]

Man, housing costs are insane, especially in the US. Rent's gobbling up more than half the paycheck, and jobs are playing games with hours. Buying a home? Forget it. Even the dumps cost a fortune.

[caltrek]

Could the Land Value Tax Reshape American Housing?
by Rachel M. Cohen
January 5, 2024

Introduction:

(Vox) Over the last six months, an obscure housing policy idea has emerged as one of the most talked about proposals to revive Detroit, Michigan — an idea that could potentially spur development on the city’s vast amount of vacant property as well as lower the city’s punishingly high taxes on homeowners. Economists are buzzing with interest, and the city’s mayor, Mike Duggan, is all in.

Meet the land-value tax, a form of taxation rarely tried in the United States despite being popularized globally by an American political economist in the 19th century. Versions of the tax have been implemented in countries all over the world, including Mexico, Denmark, Singapore, Russia, and Taiwan.

For nearly all of US history, American property taxes have taken a pretty standard form. Individuals pay a tax based on the assessed value of their land, buildings, and any other improvements to their property combined. If you renovate your house and make it nicer, for example, your overall property tax could go up. The proposed land-value tax in Detroit, by contrast, would effectively tax land at a higher rate than any buildings or amenities on the property.

Mayor Duggan, who is spearheading the effort, hopes this land-value tax idea will incentivize development on blighted property as well as offer some tax relief to homeowners, who bear some of the highest rates in the country. The Duggan administration estimates that under his proposal 97 percent of Detroit homeowners will see an average decrease of 17 percent in property tax. The proposal is not about lowering taxes generally, but about increasing taxes on those who own vacant land (a big problem in the city) and decreasing future taxes on people who develop their land.

Conclusion:

“There are some places where the political cost may be too high, making it not worth it to incite backlash,” said Hohman, of the Mackinac Center. Still land-value tax proponents have their eyes on more than just Detroit, and the Motor City might just be the proof point they need.

Read more here: https://www.vox.com/24025379/detroit-l ... t-blight

[weatheriscool]

Housing is now unaffordable for a record half of all U.S. renters, study finds

Source: NPR

Over the past two years, Genuine Campbell was shocked at how rent for her two-bedroom apartment in Philadelphia just kept going up — from $1,300 a month to $1,600. She's a single mom of four, and right as her rent was rising, her hours as a hotel valet were getting cut.

In fact, more such households and many others also now struggle to pay rent, according to a newly released report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. It finds that in 2022, as rents spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic, a record half of U.S. renters paid more than 30% of their income for rent and utilities. Nearly half of those people were severely cost-burdened, paying more than 50% of their income.

"What we are building is at the high end, because of the increased cost of construction and because we have a lot of demand from higher-income renters," says Airgood-Obrycki. Most new apartments over the last decade have gone for $1,400 a month or higher, "and that's not affordable to the majority of renters."

At the same time, she says the market has lost millions of low-rent units for $600 a month or less. And these trends are continuing a long-term, growing gap in what people can afford. Since 2001, the Harvard report notes, median rents have risen by 21% while the median annual income for renters has risen just 2%.

Read more: https://www.kccu.org/u-s/2024-01-25/hou ... tudy-finds

[caltrek]

You Can’t Afford to Buy a House. Biden Knows That.
by Rachel Cohen
April 1, 2024

Introduction:

(Vox) Biden is in campaign mode, and the president wants voters to know he understands housing is out of control.

Over the last month, Biden has ramped up his bully pulpit focus on the housing crisis. In his State of the Union address, the president pledged new tax credits for first-time homeowners and to “crack down on big landlords” who price-fix rents. His new budget includes proposals to expand vouchers and housing supply, and he gave a second speech promising to “build, build, build” to “bring housing costs down for good.” When the president hit the campaign trail in late March, he dedicated a Las Vegas stop to stumping his affordable housing initiatives, and on Friday his administration even announced it would embrace some new rent control.

You don’t have to squint to see how the housing crisis is complicating the otherwise positive economic message the president hopes to sell.
Mortgage rates are so high that most homeowners feel they can’t afford to move, and most renters feel priced out of the idea of homeownership altogether. Wages have gone up, but not faster than home-buying costs, and over 22 million households now spend more than a third of their income on rent as of 2022.

Inflation and the economy remain the top issues for voters, and economists cite high housing costs as a main culprit for inflation still exceeding the Federal Reserve’s target goal of 2 percent.

Read more here: https://www.vox.com/politics/24113340/ ... -mortgage

[caltrek]

We Need Housing, Not Handcuffs
by Farrah Hassen
April 10, 2024

Introduction:

(Other Words) As the cost of housing has exploded, so has the number of people experiencing homelessness. And unfortunately, instead of trying to house people, more states and cities are criminalizing people simply for lacking a safe place to sleep.

According to the National Homelessness Law Center, almost every state restricts the conduct of people experiencing homelessness. In Missouri, sleeping on state land is a crime. A new law in Florida bans people from sleeping on public property — and requires local governments without bed space for unhoused people to set up camps far away from public services.

Laura Gutowski, from Grants Pass, Oregon, lives in a tent near the home where she resided for 25 years. Soon after her husband unexpectedly passed away, she became unhoused. “It kind of all piled on at the same time,” she told Oregon Public Broadcasting. “Flipped my world upside down.”

Grants Pass, like most cities today, lacks enough shelter beds to accommodate its unhoused population. It’s now the subject of a Supreme Court case: Grants Pass v. Johnson, which started when Grants Pass began ticketing people for sleeping in public even when there weren’t enough shelter beds.

People can be fined hundreds of dollars and face criminal charges “simply for existing without access to shelter,” said Ed Johnson, an attorney for the unhoused residents of Grants Pass. The Supreme Court’s decision will have far-reaching ramifications as communities grapple with rising homelessness and housing costs.

Read more here: https://otherwords.org/we-need-housing ... ndcuffs/