I spent yesterday working at a Habitat for Humanity project.\u00a0 It was fun; I hadn’t done contruction work of any sort (beyond the odd bit of inept homeowner handimannery) in over twenty years.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Most of the day was wrapped up in building things (and I did finally get the whole “hanging drywall” thing straight, thank goodness).\u00a0<\/p>\n
But the folks at Habitat – a non-profit – did carve out a bit of the day for “education”.\u00a0 Over lunch hour, we heard a bit about the “affordable housing” mission.\u00a0 We also learned that Habitat houses – always built to the absolute latest in current safety codes, and they are doozies – take a lot <\/em>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).\u00a0<\/p>\n Naturally, my mind wandered a bit.<\/p>\n I remebered a lecture I attended, starring former Saint Paul mayor Jim Scheibel, the fellow who served the term before Norm Coleman was elected.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In the lecture, he stated his goal; that everyone in Saint Paul (and, naturally, elsewhere) have safe, attractive,\u00a0up-to-code housing, convenient to mass transit and the amenities of city life, for less than 30-odd percent of their income.<\/p>\n I asked him where the money would come from for that vision.<\/p>\n I don’t think anyone needs me to tell them the answer, do they?<\/p>\n 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).\u00a0 It was drafty; the walls were made (it seemed) out of cardboard.\u00a0 The carpet was dismal, the kitchen ancient, the windows leaky, the basement pungent.\u00a0 Mice roamed the place like the buffalo herds in Dances with Wolves<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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).\u00a0 It was a dingy roof and four drafty walls and, most important of all, we could manage it on what we earned back then.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 And when the opportunity came to find something better, we worked our butts <\/em>off to make it happen.\u00a0<\/p>\n And that was a very good thing.<\/p>\n I thought, as I looked around the brand-new house taking shape in Frogtown, that this would be a much <\/em>better way to be poor!\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Where does everyone else go?<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n As I noted in my “Saint Paul Land Grab” series (Part I<\/font><\/a>, Part II<\/font><\/a>, Part III<\/font><\/a>, Part IV<\/font><\/a>, Part V<\/font><\/a>, Part VI<\/a>, and more to come),\u00a0 The City of Saint Paul is requiring all rgistered vacant homes to be brought up to current <\/em>building codes before issuing them a Certificate of Occupancy, which will, depending on who\u00a0 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).\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n No crappy homes equal no cheap places to live.\u00a0 What are <\/em>the options for the poor if there are no cheap places to live?\u00a0<\/p>\n Liberal governments have long declared war against things that are crappy; crappy jobs, crappy houses, crappy apartments.\u00a0 “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.\u00a0 Have you seen the teenage unemployment rate lately?\u00a0<\/p>\n “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).\u00a0 Other cities that try to artificially spiff up the market – San Francisco, Portland – have similar results.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 Without government assistance, anyway.<\/p>\n There is value to crappy things; jobs, houses, whatever.\u00a0 They’re a place to start.\u00a0 They’re a place to fall back to.\u00a0 They’re something to fix, or to strive to get out of.<\/p>\n And when crappy jobs, houses and apartments are outlawed – what will<\/em> be the alternatives?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I spent yesterday working at a Habitat for Humanity project.\u00a0 It was fun; I hadn’t done contruction work of any sort (beyond the odd bit of inept homeowner handimannery) in over twenty years.\u00a0\u00a0 Most of the day was wrapped up in building things (and I did finally get the whole “hanging drywall” thing straight, thank […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-money","category-st-paul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3016\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}