I have recently become aware of several different ideas for affordable housing that I am conflicted about. One of the blogs I vaguely follow, Climate Progress, talks about the fact that shipping containers (those large, metal boxes often featured in horror movies and police dramas) are piling up in the United States, because it’s cheaper to make new ones than ship them back, and some artist/architect has come up with idea to turn them into affordable housing.
A new blog I found today, which is excellent, End Homelessness @ Change.org, has several posts on “creative” affordable housing. For example, sixty-four square foot, brightly colored college design projects, and their logical conculsion as provided by the Vancouver, Canada government in pre-fab modular housing for temporary, affordable housing. (Which are bound to become permanent, affordable housing, as the blog points out.)
The reason I am conflicted about these designs is that they seem to ignore the underlying reason why there is not a lot of affordable housing. And they seem to ignore that once these “afforable housing solutions” are built, they need to go onto a piece of land — and land prices increase because of zoning laws that require low density developments, as well as fights against those zoning laws, on top of paying to hook up housing utilities to county/city water, sewage, and electric grids.
Granted, these two ideas could be considered Housing First — the blog at Change.org advocates the philosophy — because they want private, secure places for families so that they can be self-sufficient. They’re much better than other art-student “activism,” which includes designing urban furniture (park benches) so that it can convert to a shelter at night, completely missing the point of helping the chronically homeless.
