I spent yesterday working at a Habitat for Humanity project. It was fun; I hadn’t done contruction work of any sort (beyond the odd bit of inept homeowner handimannery) in over twenty years.
Most of the day was wrapped up in building things (and I did finally get the whole “hanging drywall” thing straight, thank goodness).
But the folks at Habitat – a non-profit – did carve out a bit of the day for “education”. Over lunch hour, we heard a bit about the “affordable housing” mission. We also learned that Habitat houses – always built to the absolute latest in current safety codes, and they are doozies – take a lot of money to build, above and beyond all the donated labor (from three Twin Cities corporations at our site yesterday, totalling around thirty people, some of whom knew what they were doing).
Naturally, my mind wandered a bit.
I remebered a lecture I attended, starring former Saint Paul mayor Jim Scheibel, the fellow who served the term before Norm Coleman was elected. He’d been a dismal, malaise-prone mayor – but he had impeccable liberal credentials, so after he left office he went to work for one “affordable housing” group or another. In the lecture, he stated his goal; that everyone in Saint Paul (and, naturally, elsewhere) have safe, attractive, up-to-code housing, convenient to mass transit and the amenities of city life, for less than 30-odd percent of their income.
I asked him where the money would come from for that vision.
I don’t think anyone needs me to tell them the answer, do they?
In pondering this, I thought back to the house we were living in when both of my kids were born (although we left when Zam was three months old). It was drafty; the walls were made (it seemed) out of cardboard. The carpet was dismal, the kitchen ancient, the windows leaky, the basement pungent. Mice roamed the place like the buffalo herds in Dances with Wolves.
But it was a three-bedroom house for $600, which at that time was about the ragged edge of what we could afford without government assistance (remember that last qualifier). It was a dingy roof and four drafty walls and, most important of all, we could manage it on what we earned back then. It was what you’d call a “fixer-upper” (and, indeed, someone bought the house from the landlord a few years back, and fixed it up; it looks nice today). And when the opportunity came to find something better, we worked our butts off to make it happen.
And that was a very good thing.
I thought, as I looked around the brand-new house taking shape in Frogtown, that this would be a much better way to be poor! Of course, Habitat for Humanity gets about 500 applications a year; between new builds and renovations, they put about 50 units a year into commission.
Where does everyone else go?
Until recently, they rented cheap houses; plain asphalt-sided frame houses in Frogtown; old railroad houses with three feet of clearance between buildings in the North End; dilapidated, past-their-prime but livable Edwardians up on Dayton’s Bluff.
But the mortgage craze of the past ten years took a lot of those places off the rental market; the popping of the bubble has left 2,000 of them vacant in Saint Paul, with more coming every day.
As I noted in my “Saint Paul Land Grab” series (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, and more to come), The City of Saint Paul is requiring all rgistered vacant homes to be brought up to current building codes before issuing them a Certificate of Occupancy, which will, depending on who you ask, revitalize the city with block upon block of safe, modernized, renovated homes (that was Councilman Bostrom and Councilwoman Lantry’s tack on the issue), or create neighborhoods strewn full of vacant lots, all ready for the city to seize for one project or another (largely to house the vast numbers of people who won’t be able to afford to live in Saint Paul because the cheap housing is gone). Until these properties’ owners bring them up to current code – meaning $50,000-$120,000 work for a house that might be worth $20,000, counting the land, today – they’re off the market.
No crappy homes equal no cheap places to live. What are the options for the poor if there are no cheap places to live?
Liberal governments have long declared war against things that are crappy; crappy jobs, crappy houses, crappy apartments. “Living Wage” ordinances and minimum wage hikes decrease the supply of entry-level and subsistence jobs – meaning people can’t enter the market or subsist. Have you seen the teenage unemployment rate lately?
“Rent Control”, like New York’s infamous rent caps, dry up the supply of rental housing (which is why even twenty years ago it was impossible to find an inexpensive apartment in Manhattan even as huge swathes of the city were covered in slums). Other cities that try to artificially spiff up the market – San Francisco, Portland – have similar results.
If the Saint Paul City Council’s latest bit of economic jiggerypokery continues as I predict, it’ll soon be impossible to get an “affordable” house in Saint Paul. Without government assistance, anyway.
There is value to crappy things; jobs, houses, whatever. They’re a place to start. They’re a place to fall back to. They’re something to fix, or to strive to get out of.
And when crappy jobs, houses and apartments are outlawed – what will be the alternatives?
Refugee camps?
If you were a single parent, a new immigrant family, or a young couple starting a family, which would you rather have:
– a crappy house in a mediocre neighborhood that you could buy cheap and fix up until you eventually could move to a nicer place – and provide some other beginners with a place they could afford to grow – while your kids play in their own yard?
– an up-to-code apartment in a brand new Low Income Project that has a modern shared coin-op laundry room and a blacktop playground?
When did we let the nanny city kill the concept of a “starter home?”
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I hope the rest of the libs don’t kill me, but I agree with a lot of this. There is definitely a lot of value to crappy.
I don’t agree with nate’s “suburb good, city bad” philosophy, but that’s a whole other issue.
And when crappy jobs, houses and apartments are outlawed – what will be the alternatives?
once upon a time it was called “The New Town In Town” and it sprouted up on the West Bank in the form of those cement monuments to Stalinist era architecture known as Cedar Square West or as its known to the locals “Little Mogadishu”.
Jeff,
Point of order; I don’t believe there’s any “city bad” in Nate’s comment; actually, without revealing any info held in confidence, I know he is tangibly not of that mindset.
I’d really like to get this going as a serious discussion; much of the mainstream left’s approach to housing is “set high standards, and the housing will appear (AND be affordable)” – which was sort of Scheibel’s line in the meeting I attended. The St. Paul City Council certainly is taking that approach to vacant buildings. I think the approach ignores human nature, as well as economic reality.
Uh, Jeff – there are “up-to-code apartment in a brand new Low Income Project that has a modern shared coin-op laundry room and a blacktop playground” places in the suburbs, too. I don’t think Nate’s argument is a city/suburb thing necessarily. Some suburbs are nanny cities in their own right.
One of the greatest differences between the Left and the Right is that the Left believes people are poor because they lack government services and the Right believes that people are poor because because they lack certain essential virtues.
Given this fact the Paulians are fools if they believe that both parties are equally ‘anti-freedom’.
In the interests of furthering the discussion, I’ll add my anecdote.
My wife and I move into one of those “crappy fixer-uppers” in Crystal back in the 80s. We lived in it long enough (15 years) to sell and move into a nicer place, about five miles away.
Would I have opted for “- an up-to-code apartment in a brand new Low Income Project that has a modern shared coin-op laundry room and a blacktop playground?” Hell no. Property is property, and equity is a good thing.
There used to be flop houses too, were a guy could get a room for the night for a few bucks panhandled during the day. Now they sleep on the streets.
…Left believes people are poor because they lack government services and the Right believes that people are poor because because they lack certain essential virtues.
And libertarian types believe that people should be left alone to make decisions on how best to live. You want to be poor, or you aren’t willing to work hard enough to be rich? That’s fine, you’ve made a choice.
Kermit’s example is of that “choice” thing. He choose to work hard and build equity in return for living in a dump for a while rather than immediately living in a somewhat nicer place where his money wasn’t working for him but for someone else.. Not everyone would make that same choice and providing freedom of choice is important.
Mitch,
Perhaps you noted that teen unemployment is escalating due to ‘under employment’ of older workers taking teen jobs.
Teenage unemployement in areas without living wage ordinances is no higher OR LOWER than where they have them, your oblique tie of the two is falacy.
Bottom line, the split of profits has shifted dramatically upward since 1981 – as has the band of pay that is considered “normal”, a great divergence – both upward and downward. This has NOT been good for the country, certainly not good for the poor, and has NOTHING to do with liberalism, that’s just cover you’re seeking for the failed economic policy that is conservatism writ large. We have many low paying jobs, they pay too little to afford ANY house really, but your solution – apparently – is to laud slums, rather than address the enormous inequity between the ultra-rich ‘haves’ (CEOs etc) and the impact it has on the rest of us.
Evidence, Penigma2? Certainly the state of Michigan, with its living wage ordinances, would tend to contradict your claims.
One of the greatest differences between the Left and the Right is that the Left believes people are poor because they lack government services and the Right believes that people are poor because because they lack certain essential virtues.
People don’t have virtues, people are taught virtues.
The Right believes people are poor because what the Left is teaching them is self-destructive.
Remember that bit from “My Fair Lady”?
Eliza: You’re no gentleman, you’re not,
to talk o’ such things. I’m a good girl, I am. And I know what the likes of you are, I do.
Higgins: We want none of your slum prudery here, young woman. You’ve got to learn to behave like a duchess.
The upper classes can afford to be immoral – they have resources that insulate them from their destructive choices. It’s usually their grandchildren who pay the price. The poor have no such luxury.
The “Great Society” was the greatest mistake this nation ever made.
Most libertarians are functionally of the Right. They believe,as does the GOP, that freedom produces virtuous behavior (as in Kermit’s case). The tricky part comes in when you define the responsibilities of the state in promoting virtuous behavior.
I would argue with my libertarian friends that the sexual revolution — removing the social stigma from illegitimate birth, divorce, and homosexuality — has perversely (hah!) not increased individual freedom because it has, de facto, increased the power of the state to regulate human relations.
Again, you are off-topic.
Perhaps you noted that teen unemployment is escalating due to ‘under employment’ of older workers taking teen jobs.
Right; that doesn’t contradict anything I’ve said.
Teenage unemployement in areas without living wage ordinances is no higher OR LOWER than where they have them, your oblique tie of the two is falacy.
Please substantiate this. And by “substantiate”, I mean with a linkable source whose data and methodology can be examined (as opposed by “my neighbor, the economics professor with two Nobel Economics titles or whatever your neighbor will be this week).
Oh, and Peevish?
Would you are to respond to the subject of the post – that the left’s efforts to ban crappiness (in jobs and housing, among other things) just makes life worse for those they ostensibly wish to help?
Perhaps you noted that teen unemployment is escalating due to ‘under employment’ of older workers taking teen jobs.
Or perhaps you’ve noticed that when you actually enforce immigration laws and restrict the supply of semi or unskilled workers their effective rates of pay rise, as is happening in Arizona now.
If you look at the various quintiles of the population you’ll see a distinct trend where the bottom quintile got relatively larger than all the others and their pay actually lost value over the last few decades. The rise is mainly illegal immigrants of lower skills. More low skill folks, more supply of their labor, thus lower wages for the overall population of those workers. Supply and demand.
If the Left really cared about blue-collar Americans they’d be for shutting down illegal immigration. But we’ll likely be seeing flying porkers and wind power turbines in Martha’s Vineyard before then.
I hadn’t intended to make a city-suburb point, but I can see how it can be construed that way.
I was thinking of a person – hypothetical of course – who once lived in the 500 block of Charles (Frogtown), then moved to the 1500 block (Midway) and now lives just East of Como Park and has his eye on a house on Saunders in Highland Park. It’s all city, just moving up the ladder to nicer neighborhoods.
That can’t happen if you can’t afford the first house in Frogtown, if a “starter home” costs $200,000.
This policy affects renters, too. My buddy is a landlord who rents out single-family houses in Midway. He constantly gets calls from Section 8 voucher holders looking for rentals because their prior residences were foreclosed and the City says the homes cannot be occupied so the tenants get evicted through no fault of their own. My buddy no longer participates in the Section 8 program because the Public Housing Authority people are so awful to deal with.
It’s not a rich-getting-richer thing, it’s the adverse and unintended fallout of well-intentioned nanny-city do-gooding.
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And it’s not just housing. The University of Arizona has a program call the Garbage Project as part of their Archaeology department. It has the students excavating new garbage to understand looking at old garbage. In doing so they have done several digs at land fills, and even some open dump sites. They have found that there is far fewer appliances in the open dumps. Why? Because at the open dumps people will scavanger the appiances and repair them. A perverse sort of trickle down but very real economy. But now government regulation has cut this way for people who are of lesser means to improve their lot by recycling. Disposal fees have people dumping in the contry large appliances, instead of give others a chance to rehab them. England has a large problem with this under EU rules.
It’s almost impossible for individuals who have spent their schooling & adult lives believing that society would be better off if they were running things that, well, they’re just jerking off.