I've been reading a book about New York and how it's changed since the blackouts and other things that happened in the city. More about that later, perhaps. But one of the changes, of course, is that so many of the kind of people who made the city what it is are being priced out. So this project certainly strikes me as interesting, and could perhaps provide a needed countertrend.
Providing housing for the formerly homeless isn't an easy task, though. Obviously money and rent are an issue, which maybe hopefully this modular housing can help resolve. But there's also the fact that a lot of people don't want to live with the homeless, or the obviously poor. You can factor in the fact that there are irritating people in any group, but I think a lot of Americans think the poor are immoral and so their suffering is God's will. That's at least a common interpretation of a lot of Protestant doctrine. So the HPD really needs to commit themselves to being firm.
Providing housing for the formerly homeless isn't an easy task, though. Obviously money and rent are an issue, which maybe hopefully this modular housing can help resolve. But there's also the fact that a lot of people don't want to live with the homeless, or the obviously poor. You can factor in the fact that there are irritating people in any group, but I think a lot of Americans think the poor are immoral and so their suffering is God's will. That's at least a common interpretation of a lot of Protestant doctrine. So the HPD really needs to commit themselves to being firm.
2 comments:
From what little I've read about NYC recently I've learned that not only poorer people but also long established businesses have been priced out of the city. Landlords, unsurprisingly, want to make as much money as they can from the properties they own but beyond a certain point paying those prices becomes impossible. Of course adding to this problem is the fact that many people are deep in debt and only marginally employed if employed at all. When manufacturing was outsourced en masse it was never going to happen that everyone would become rocket scientists or computer programmers (even many of those were brought in as cheaper hires on HN1 visas).
The other thing is that just about every city in North America is seeing an amazing array of new high end condo development. It's true here too so I can only imagine what NY is like now.
The idea of modular housing like that you linked too is that, like in the bad old days, the places look cheap and kind of nasty - or will do after a few years. It simply never works to put all the less well off into centralized housing developments. Where they're going to rebuild neighbourhoods when urban land is at such a premium I have no idea. It's not God's will but the 'not in my backyard' faction that's responsible for so much misery.
New York, and a number of other cities, seem to have been taken with the idea that if you take away the places where poor people live and congregate, the poor themselves will simply disappear. Of course if this worked it would put LBJ's War on Poverty to shame. But it doesn't. You're talking about people who have nowhere else to go. Especially when, again, the same processes seem to be happening everywhere.
Putting all the homeless in a central location probably is self-defeating in the long run. The problem is that while it may be a bad idea, too few are even trying to find a better one. It's an issue that takes a lot of effort to even approach.
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