Building units for use instead of commodification also means accessibility based on income, and building something that won't start falling apart in 20 years.
The current paradigm is great for people who live home lives that are isolated with just their nuclear families, who drive 0.8 cars per capita to work 15-40 miles away, who maybe have a dog they let out in the yard twice a day, who consume 5 gallons of gas equivalents per day, and who take up 0.1 acres of land apiece not counting needs outside of housing. It's not designed for a healthy society.
Building units for use instead of commodification also means accessibility based on income, and building something that won't start falling apart in 20 years.
Sure. But the 5-over-1s that have been churned out for the last two decades appear to have largely stood the test of time.
I'm all on board with doing some actual civil engineering and city planning, rather than just letting Highest Bidder decide the next random thing we construct. But that's a 5-year-plan problem and homelessness / immediate housing shortage is a We-Can-Solve-This-Tomorrow problem. Grab those unsold units in the Houston Galleria Area "Astoria" and surrounding mid-rise blocks. Turn them into public sector units and you'll be well on your way to housing everyone that needs it practically overnight.
We saw this play out under former mayor Anise Parker, abet in the more capitalist friendly way of simply paying market rate for units. We had several hundred homeless veterans and we simply... rented some rooms in the area around the VA center and the problem was done with... until the next mayor decided to cut the budget for the program and let people get kicked out again.
The current paradigm is great for people who live home lives that are isolated with just their nuclear families, who drive 0.8 cars per capita to work 15-40 miles away, who maybe have a dog they let out in the yard twice a day, who consume 5 gallons of gas equivalents per day, and who take up 0.1 acres of land apiece not counting needs outside of housing. It's not designed for a healthy society.
No. I'm talking about Multi-Family Units inside 610 situated on some of the few functional mass transit lines the city actually maintains and work in the downtown service sector anyway. I'm not saying put the Houston homeless population in some Hwy 99 Katy Exurb. You can do this entirely within the inner loop and have units to spare.
Building units for use instead of commodification also means accessibility based on income, and building something that won't start falling apart in 20 years.
The current paradigm is great for people who live home lives that are isolated with just their nuclear families, who drive 0.8 cars per capita to work 15-40 miles away, who maybe have a dog they let out in the yard twice a day, who consume 5 gallons of gas equivalents per day, and who take up 0.1 acres of land apiece not counting needs outside of housing. It's not designed for a healthy society.
Sure. But the 5-over-1s that have been churned out for the last two decades appear to have largely stood the test of time.
I'm all on board with doing some actual civil engineering and city planning, rather than just letting Highest Bidder decide the next random thing we construct. But that's a 5-year-plan problem and homelessness / immediate housing shortage is a We-Can-Solve-This-Tomorrow problem. Grab those unsold units in the Houston Galleria Area "Astoria" and surrounding mid-rise blocks. Turn them into public sector units and you'll be well on your way to housing everyone that needs it practically overnight.
We saw this play out under former mayor Anise Parker, abet in the more capitalist friendly way of simply paying market rate for units. We had several hundred homeless veterans and we simply... rented some rooms in the area around the VA center and the problem was done with... until the next mayor decided to cut the budget for the program and let people get kicked out again.
No. I'm talking about Multi-Family Units inside 610 situated on some of the few functional mass transit lines the city actually maintains and work in the downtown service sector anyway. I'm not saying put the Houston homeless population in some Hwy 99 Katy Exurb. You can do this entirely within the inner loop and have units to spare.
Certainly, open up all the arbitrarily-vacant stuff by force. But that's just the beginning of the solution.