Category Archives: artists’ housing

Housing as a Vaccine

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The 2016 Homelessness Awareness Day and Vigil was held at the Vermont State House in Montpelier on January 7th. Two House committees Housing, General and Military Affairs and Human Services had a joint hearing on homelessness, taking testimony on housing and homelessness issues. A number of other hearings regarding homelessness happened in the building during the course of the day.

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Opening the hearing was nationally recognized pediatrician Dr. Megan Sandel (principal investigator on Children’s Health Watch,  Associate professor at Boston University’s School of Medicine,  and Medical director, at  the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership at Boston Medical Center), who has done path-breaking work on the effects of housing insecurity and homelessness on children. She gave a brilliant presentation on “Housing as a Vaccine: A Prescription for Child Health.”

At that hearing, Representatives and attending members of the public also heard from Vermont homeless service providers Linda Ryan (Director of Samaritan House) and Sara Kobylenski (Executive Director of Upper Valley Haven) on the latest trends and some recommended solutions to end or decrease homelessness in Vermont.

At Noon, community members, legislative leaders, administration officials, and advocates took the State House steps for a vigil to remember our friends and neighbors who died without homes, and to bring awareness of the struggles of those still searching for safe and secure housing. U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy and other legislative representatives and advocates joined and spoke at the vigil.

How can Housing be a Vaccine?

Dr. Megan presented data to support her thesis that housing can be protective for health. The quality, stability and affordability are important determinants to heath of all people. That means improving housing can provide multiple benefits. According to Dr. Megan, timing and duration of housing insecurity matter greatly to a child’s health. By increasing availability, affordability, and quality of housing, the health effect of housing insecurity can be decreased. Dr. Megan also provided specific evidence regarding housing quality and children’s health. For example, developmental issues, worsening asthma and other conditions have been tied to specific housing conditions such as pests, mold, tobacco smoke, lead exposure and so forth, and tied to long term effect with poor health outcomes.

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According to Children’s Health Watch, “unstable housing, hunger and health are linked” because evidence shows that being behind on rent is strongly associated with negative health outcomes such as high risk of child food insecurity, children and mothers who are more likely in fair or poor health, children who are more likely at risk for development delay, mothers who are more likely experiencing depressive symptoms. Research conducted by the National Housing Conference from Children’s Healthwatch illustrates that there is no safe level of homelessness. The timing (pre-natal, post-natal) and duration of homelessness (more or less than six month) compound the risk of harmful childhood health outcomes. The younger and longer a child experiences homelessness, the greater the cumulative toll of negative health outcomes, which can have lifelong effects on the child, the family, and the community.

Several community representatives spoke in support of increasing housing affordability by targeting more public funding to support housing affordability and housing stability and adding to state housing directed funds with a $2 per night fee on hotel, motel and inn stays.

 

Something out of nothing

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Here’s an intriguing strategy for revitalizing moribund downtowns that doesn’t cost anything and bypasses political machinations:  renew3 It’s called “Renew,” and it was first employed in the decaying Australian city of Newcastle several years ago — with notable success.

The basic idea is to install artists or craftspeople in vacant storefronts and let them work, market, or exhibit in exchange for their paying the utility bills. renew1 In other words, let them dress the places up and draw people in… until the spaces are commercially leased, at which point the artisans have 30 days to vacate. A nonprofit organization facilitates these pop-ups.

Renew Newcastle spread to other cities, gave rise to Renew Australia, and was the subject of an article in The New Republic earlier this month, “Hacking the City: A New Model for Urban Renewal.” There’s no reason, the article suggests, why “Renew” couldn’t work in American cities, and not just big ones. Renew’s creator, Marcus Westbury, offers an aphorism – “Activity creates activity, and decay creates decay” — that would seem to apply anywhere. Even in small-town Vermont, where vacant storefronts are a common sight in many municipal centers — St. Johnsbury or Barre, Springfield or Rutland. Eastern Avenue in St. Johnsbury, for example, has a stretch of empty, eye-averting properties that could theoretically — with a Renew-style makeover — become a destination.

What does any of this have to do with housing? A downtown commercial/cultural revival might produce a hub of burgeoning activity where all sorts of people might want to live, thus drawing housing developers to a municipality they might otherwise be inclined to avoid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n0ADYyy28w

More brainstorming: self-building

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The housing-unaffordability problem is too big, pervasive and complex to yield to single, simple remedies. Yes, government at all levels has to play a substantially bigger role than it does now. But without substantial new federal funding and subsidies — which can’t be found on mainstream politicians’ lists of spending priorities — we might as well brainstorm about piecemeal, alternative solutions.

Having touched on co-living and cohousing in the last post, we bring you a continental variant of this idea: collective building.baugruppe1

This intriguing headline in the Guardian, “The do-it-yourself answer to Britain’s housing crisis,” offers an entrée: community members, with help from a land trust, building their own affordable homes. Britain even has an organization, the National Custom and Self-Build Association, to promote such efforts.

Self-building seems to be an even bigger trend on the continent. In Germany, baugruppen, or building groups, are active all over, and reportedly account for 10 percent of new homes built in Berlin. baugruppe3These are groups of people who come together, often with something in common (they might be musicians, say, or share a political philosophy), and take responsibility for acquiring land, hiring architects and contractors, and creating their own housing. For a summary of how it works, click here, or another brief description, here.

The baugruppe is a well-established form of organization in Germany and apparently gets a good deal of institutional support, including financing from a state bank. Whether something like this could work in this country is an open question.

Mike Eliason, a designer who was author of a seven-part series on baugruppen, seems to think it could, at least in a place like Seattle. For the first article, on the website of a Seattle advocacy organization called The Urbanist, click here. As Eliason describes it, baugruppen projects cost less than traditional models because they do without developers and marketing, as well as real estate agents.baugruppe2

It all sounds reminiscent of cohousing, except that it’s commonly done in an urban setting — as the photos in this post reflect. It also sounds like a fairly middle-class phenomenon, considering how much of a personal investment it requires of its participants. Who has the time and energy necessary to do all the meeting and planning and hiring and so on? Probably not someone who holds down two minimum-wage jobs. Not that we don’t need affordable housing, sometimes called workforce housing, for middle-class professional types, too.

So what if?

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If you’re fed up with the high-priced housing here and want trade the Champlain Valley for the Treasure Valley (Boise, Idaho), be careful. Boise If you’re making less than $35,000 a year, you’ll be hard-pressed to find an affordable apartment, according to this article in the Idaho Statesman. (“Low-income housing crisis,” blares Idaho Public Radio.)  Sure, average rents are lower there than in Burlington, but they’re rising fast. What’s more, developers say they can’t make a profit on affordable housing without more incentives than Idaho makes available.

If you think you’ll be better off in Illinois,Illinois1 be aware that you probably can’t get on a waiting list for a housing choice voucher (72 percent of the Section 8 waiting lists are closed, we learn from a report whose title says it all, “Not Even a Place in Line.” True, average rents in Illinois are a bit lower, as is the “housing wage” — the amount you need to earn an hour to be able to afford a two-bedroom apartment.  (“Afford” means you pay no more than 30 percent of your income for housing.) Vermont’s 2BR housing wage is $20.68 an hour; Illinois’ is $18.78. Don’t spend the difference all in one place.

If you still hanker for California in hopes that you can make do outside the glitzy metro areas, think again. Even Bakersfield, site of a recent “Affordable Housing Summit,” is brooding about a housing “crisis,” with rent inflation far outpacing wage growth. (Bakersfield!)

In Denver, described as “a landlord’s market,” at least you can call a housing hotline for advice, but you might be put on hold. Calls are coming in steadily, with affordability the main concern and callers reporting rent hikes of $200 to $400.

If you think a career in academia will spare you housing-unaffordability travails, you might be right in the long run … but not necessarily in the short run in Ithaca, N.Y.,  where junior faculty at Ithaca College are reportedly struggling.

If you’re a prospective student at Middlebury College with an ambulatory disability, you might wonder if a new townhouse-style dorm under construction – sans elevators — will fully accommodate you. But you can take heart that scores of accessibility/visitability advocates at the college are in your corner.

If you’re an artist hankering for affordable artists’ housing – something that is emerging in warehouses and abandoned factories around the country, as we’ve noted before – you can forget about Burlington’s celebrated artists’ enclave, the Enterprise Zone in the South End. The mayor said no to housing there, as did the City Council, as did the Housing Action Plan. Did anyone take a serious look at whether affordable housing could be introduced there without gentrifying the neighborhood? Not that we’ve heard.

Oh well, Kingston, N.Y., had another idea. An old lace factory Kingston there has been converted to affordable housing  for “writers, dancers, graphic designers, musicians, painters, photographers, and even a puppeteer,” we learn from a local news account.

Signs of desperation

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The housing affordability problem, which sometimes seems intractable in the current political climate, is generating some novel ideas around the country – would-be solutions and would-be explanations, among them:

  • A school district in the San Francisco Bay area is contemplating building housing for teachers who otherwise can’t afford to live there. Imagine that: A school board going into the development business just so it can hold on to the faculty.
  • NIMBYism apparently pervades wealthier suburbs outlying Chicago, which have less than their share of tax-credit supported low-income housing, according to a regional analysis. Advocates of “affordable housing” admit that the term itself can draw discriminatory, responses and that they might have more success if they called it something else. But alas, resistance to inclusiveness is more than a public relations problem.
  • Further signs of desperation in California: One county is considering a tax on Airbnb to help fund affordable housing development. Another is contemplating rent control. And a renters’ federation is complaining that the Sierra Club (the Sierra Club!) is standing in the way of needed housing density.
  • Denver’s housing crisis has been exacerbated by marijuana legalization, or so some surmise. That seems like a stretch, but the argument goes like this: (a) Legalization has pulled in a surfeit of millennials, driving up rents. (b) Growers are snapping up old industrial areas and driving out the artists who inhabit them. Mercifully, artists seem to have other options in Colorado.

So much for artists’ affordable housing

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When Burlington’s mayor announced that he would not support housing in the South End’s Enterprise Zone, he won cheers from artists who feared gentrification. While the mayor’s isn’t necessarily the last word in “Plan BTV South End,” the product of extensive public input (or so the city proudly insists), it does stack the odds against any kind of housing in the zone.

Too bad. One of the more intriguing prospects raised in the draft plan was to create work/live spaces – aka, affordable housing – for artists. Could that be done deftly in some of those South End warehouses without gussying up the surrounding neighborhood and driving up rents for everyone else? Maybe, maybe not, but it seems a shame not to consider this. A blanket ban on housing seems to foreclose the possibility.

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Well, it’s a possibility that’s being embraced elsewhere, all around the country – in little towns and big cities, both. “Colorado’s affordable artist housing efforts catching on quickly,” read a headline in Saturday’s Denver Post. Artspace, out of Minneapolis, has been developing work/live artists’ lofts for more than 20 years – but apparently none yet in New England.

If Burlington’s artists aren’t interested, perhaps their counterparts in other warehouse-rich Vermont towns might be. Bellows Falls, Springfield, Rutland, Brattleboro, among many others? Here’s the view in Colorado, according to the Post article:

“The hope is that some rural projects will have the added advantage of preserving historic structures in need of attention. That makes Trinidad, with its excess of significant, and underused, buildings, a good candidate for the pilot program…”

Check out what’s been done in Fergus Falls, Minn. (pop. 13,300)…

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or  Hastings, Minn. (22,400).

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If you’re looking for an example of a dreary warehouse transformed, look at Council Bluffs, Iowa …

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or even Memphis – which is fashioning an arts district around its project.

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Now, it may be that some of projects, the affordable housing notwithstanding, have contributed to surrounding gentrification. But if so, did it have to be that way? Municipal planners take note.