Morning Ed: Housing {2018.08.30.Th}
[Ho1] This is really neat, though I fear being tall as I am it feels cramp and I would not be able to really take advantage.
[Ho2] When we talk about affordability and densification, we should remember the role mobile home parks can play.
[Ho3] However, a lot of people move into trailer parks hoping it will be a bridge to owning their own home, but apparently it’s not working out that way. Things like this, which I linked to before, could help with some of the problems.
[Ho4] Teresa Mathew looks at how we can design better affordable housing, even in the tight housing market of New York.
[Ho5] Sam Dumitriu is not a fan of a recent proposal to restrict mortgage amounts to try to hold prices down.
[Ho6] As one of the most affordable hard blue cities out there, it would really be unfortunate if MSP priced everyone out.
[Ho7] With enough words, you can be woke and FYIGM at the same time.
[Ho8] A different tribute of virtue to vice: Poor doors make their way to Canada.
[Ho9] Wells Fargo oopsied and people lost their homes.
Ho1: Having reached a certain age, my first thought was “And what do you do if your elderly parents or grandparents come to visit?”
Ho2: Most municipalities aren’t against mobile home parks as they exist when new, they’re against what they turn into after 30 years.Report
[Ho1] That’s what its for. You only rent it….Report
[Ho1] Cute, but unlivable.
[Ho5] Restricting mortgage amounts could be a policy of some sort, but it wouldn’t be the policy they think it would be, restricting home prices.
[Ho7] “Extraction, agriculture, industry, services (including professional services), finance, technology, cultural production, civil society, government, academia?—?this is the chain of value production.”
That’s an interesting value chain; plausible, but wrong, I think; from what I can tell, after Services the entire chain is mostly wishful thinking. But I confess that I strangely lost interest trying to figure out why he thought it right… and never quite finished. So perhaps it is genius disguised.Report
Great links today @trumwill
[Ho1] It’s neat but I have daughters, I need an abundance of privacy, walls, and lockable doors.
[H07] While entertaining to read, this article-with all due respect to the author-is a real mess logically and seems to contradict itself in several overlapping circles of reasoning.
Now then [Ho2, Ho3]…
I lived in a double wide trailer till I was 12 years old, and was surrounded by folks living in trailers all up and down the hills and hollars of West Virginia, some quite literally strapped to the hillside. Ours had lime green accents and 70’s shag carpet the color of a pumpkin spiced latte. There was just as much a stereotype and stigma of poor and the rest that is associated with trailers. Putting them in an urban environment and consolidating them into trailer parks no doubt furthers those stigmas. But are they really all that different than government run project houses and apartments other than just aesthetic appearance? Low income housing is always going to have to fight with the problems and challenges associated with low income people. Adding social stigmas is only complicating it, though I know it is inevitable and human nature. We were not poor in our trailer, it was my parents living very frugally so that they could live where they wanted to later on, and did.
Zoning is the obvious answer here, but some officals and advocates need to be practical in understanding low cost housing means just that, low cost, and trailers could be part of that solution in appropriate circumstances.Report
Ho9: Wells Fargo is working hard to be the next Bank of America.Report
And they’re setting aside $20K to compensate each person who lost their home. This seems low.Report
Man, stop doing math, it ruins the positive emotional impact of the big number!Report
The article doesn’t say that anyone actually lost their home, only that it had been “foreclosed on”. So long as it’s just a matter of cleaning up bad paperwork, paying the owners’ legal fees, and forgiving a couple months’ payments, $20K doesn’t seem outlandish. IANAL, but if I were I would probably be reluctant to take on a case of “the bank made an error, corrected it, made the homeowner whole on expenses, and tossed in a couple of the monthly mortgage payments” on spec that I could win a large enough punitive amount to make it worth while.Report
And calling the credit agencies and going through all the hassle of getting them to clean up their records (and we all know just how terribly accurate those records are, and how eager those agencies are to clean up errors).Report
I suspect they are at least a little more responsive when Wells Fargo calls than when you or I call. Especially if it’s the Wells Fargo legal department doing the calling.Report
One would hope…Report
Given something I saw linked on twitter about BoA freezing accounts of those it “suspects” of not being citizens, I think the Bank of America is maybe the new Bank of America.
But yeah. I love my little credit union and I highly doubt they’d pull those kinds of shenanigans (with the housing one, they would not, seeing as they don’t even do mortgages)Report
Everyone hates building housing
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/upshot/home-ownership-nimby-bipartisan.htmlReport
From my house in my (large inner-ring) suburb, I can bicycle to new apartments, new condos, new row houses, new single-family houses. All of it’s infill now, as the city is surrounded by Denver, other suburbs, or untouchable open space. Much of the metro area is seeing the same thing. None of it is ever going to be affordable, though: metro MSP and metro Denver have both added about 350K people since 2010. 60-year-old 1000-sq-ft tract bungalows in reasonable shape on a sixth of an acre in my suburb are selling for $380K.Report
“60-year-old 1000-sq-ft tract bungalows in reasonable shape on a sixth of an acre in my suburb are selling for $380K.”
Seattle resident here chimes in to say, “sounds cheap to me!”Report
Ho1: This is a classic example of architecture designed for architecture magazine spreads rather than for mundane practicalities. I can just imagine a young couple with no kids living there, but I am not entirely convinced even there. I suspect that the absence of privacy would get old fast. Also, I don’t see any railings or lips at the edges of the platforms. Is the furniture bolted down, or is it in constant danger of being pushed over the edge onto someone below? And getting up in the middle of the night to pee becomes a positive hazard. Finally, no closets: a classic sign of architecture designed to be pretty rather than useful. Frank Lloyd Wright did the same thing.Report
Now if you were really into Parkour, that design could be fun.Report
Unhappy Hipsters regularly lampoons this sort of thing.
Generally the housing you see in magazines is for that tiny sliver of the market occupied by dual income no kids upwardly mobile white collar professionals.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
Just that its like soccer dads looking at some Lambourghini magazine spread and wondering how it would carry the groceries home.Report
Ok, this made me chuckle
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Thank you for sharing–I had to add that site to my favorites, especially after reading “Granny Pods”Report
There are plenty of old Edwardians/apartments in SF that are lacking in closet space!! Mine is aparaently an outlier here.
Still while this might be super modern, I refuse to believe in the axiom that good architecture is only in traditionalist styles. I will remain the modernistReport
[Ho7] I think I made it farther on this one than @marchmaine, but he lost me about the time he said, “our healthcare sucks, but we have insurance”. Only someone who has never face the lack of health insurance could write that.
Also, this piece holds the conceit, which is quite common in all political persuasions, that there are only three sides to a debate: Us, Them, and A Pox On Both Your Houses. I think I probably wrote stuff like that once upon a time.
I yearn for a piece that isn’t framed as “those people are terrible” and instead was more like, “Hey, let’s try this, I think it might be better!” But that doesn’t generate clicks, or anger, or political support. I’ve had someone tell me specifically that I don’t know how political organizing is done. Now I do, I suppose. I just don’t like it.Report
Yeah, he went down that rabbit hole of focusing on “exploitation” and power relationships to the exclusion of caring whether people actually have a place to live.Report
Ho1: Dear God no. Where would I hide?
Re: trailers. As a poor Appalachian child I felt downright haughty because I lived in an actual house. Sure, the kitchen ceiling was falling in, we had bats in the chimney, and the family shower stall was in my bedroom, but at least it could not be easily hooked up to a truck and driven off with.Report