When I spoke with some friends about the Recorder’s tabloid-caliber front page headline from April 10 [“‘Housing is out of control’: Experts testify that county needs 1,200 more units to satisfy demand”], their response was “but what does that even mean?” The article was about a teleconference held to discuss how to make Greenfield more affordable to live in; the headline was a bizarre quotation from a local advocate.
To start with, “housing” is a grammatically incorrect euphemism for “residence;” generally consulting a house, apartment, or condo. Call it what you will — neither abstract concepts nor buildings can be anything like “out of control,” and we should not expect any solutions to affordability or homelessness until we start to dial back the rhetoric.
The truth is that “housing” is not out of control — we are. We Americans take up more space than we should, more than we realize, and advocates — who are rarely in need of the services they seek for others — are severely misguided in their efforts.
We live in a nation, a state, and a region littered with abandoned, condemned, and otherwise vacant buildings, which advocates and political appointees with office jobs don’t see as fit for the homeless (the homeless, of course, do). So if the lack of four walls and a roof isn’t the problem, allow me to make the case for four other factors instead.
Building codes and other government regulation. According to a local building inspector, building codes were created as a favor to insurance companies, given them an excuse to deny claims. Today they work to increase property values (good for homeowners, bad for homeless) and artificially inflate construction costs (bad for both). The argument for stringent safety standards sounds good when you’re housed but sadistic when you’re homeless, and while we need tools to hold landlords accountable, we must understand that higher standards will necessarily increase rents.
We take up more space than we used to. As a society, we have forgotten how to share — I doubt this will surprise anyone — but roommates, house guests, and intergenerational family arrangements have been steadily replaced by home offices, playrooms, and TV/game “dens.”
Private Speculation. The average price of a 1-bedroom apartment in Oakland, California is $2,600/month, and there are more vacant homes (whole houses) than individual homeless people. Why? Real estate holding companies sit on the houses to inflate the rents for their other properties. Oakland is an extreme example but this goes on across the country.
Divorce. If you are in an unhappy marriage and you can’t work it out, divorce is often a good decision, and I am by no means opposed to divorce. However, the fact of the matter is that when two adults go from occupying one house to two, the demand outpaces the supply and prices go up. And the more that people get divorced (and especially when both parties need multiple bedrooms for their children), the more that the price of homes and apartments will rise and the ability of marginalized people to find an afford them will be curtailed.
The bottom line is that interests of those in government and advocacy (mostly high-income homeowners) are not aligned with those of the homeless, the recently incarcerated, and minimum wage earners. No one living in a tent cares whether a home has mold or rotten floorboards. No family of six living night by night in a cheap motel would turn their noses up at a two-bedroom apartment. And three quarters of the people on Earth would have no idea what the hell we’re talking about if this article reached their one-room uninsulated shacks where they live with their second cousins’s grandparents.
There is enough “housing” in Franklin County for everyone who needs it. We just have to get our governments and our lifestyles under control.
Jasper Lapienski, of Amherst, has been mired in building codes and red tape for the past two years and will finally be moving to Greenfield later this month.