Considered one of the earliest building materials known to man, adobe is a mixture of dirt, water and straw first used by natives of the American Southwest. Today, adobe homes remain popular thanks to their ability to regulate climate during blistering summers and cold winters. But in an area of West Texas along the Mexican border, the cost of adobe is skyrocketing.
At the center of the controversy are newcomers to Marfa, Texas — a desert outpost turned arts mecca. As the town continues to gentrify, the wealthy residents moving here have given adobe a new cachet, in the process driving up the cost of the once-affordable material. And in a county where the average median income is just above $29,000, the adobe homes now on the market are going for upward of $1 million. That has forced locals to abandon adobe in favor of cheaper building options like concrete.
Local resident Sandro Canovas is a third-generation brickmaker on a mission to keep the adobe building tradition alive — and to keep the cost of it down. To do so, Canovas has been holding public workshops on building with adobe for free.
Watch the video above to see how Canovas’s efforts are preserving the historical significance of adobe construction and inspiring a new generation to learn the craft.
More: This Group Is Documenting Ancient Murals in Texas Before They’re Wiped out by Climate Change
Tag: Housing
Buffalo’s Recent Economic Boom Leaves Longtime Residents Behind
Ordering lobster from gourmet food trucks in Buffalo, New York, might’ve been ambitious a decade ago. Now, it happens weekly.
The food trucks that line Buffalo’s Larkin Square on Tuesdays during the warm summer months attract locals from all over the city, including its suburbs. But its lack of diversity is what shocks me most: Almost half of the city’s population are people of color, yet nearly everyone in the park is white.
Even the music reflects this fact, with a boomer-aged jam band rocking covers of Jethro Tull and Chicago.
I’m being shown around the square by Kayla Zemsky, a project manager with her family’s company, Larkin Development Group. Her family is responsible for some of Buffalo’s most well-known revitalization projects, including the newly built parklet that we’re wandering around that night. But the square, along with many other Zemsky family developments, are notorious among locals, who talk about how these kinds of developments have brought about gentrification in parts of this economically depressed city.
Zemsky tells me about the importance of revitalizing old neighborhoods, where abandoned and blighted homes litter residential streets (Buffalo has one of the largest shares of abandoned homes and properties in the state).
It’s all part of an idea to make Buffalo economically viable again, which appears to be working: A newly revitalized city is bringing back tourists through its architecture and history, and the city’s nightlife and cocktail culture has been drawing in travel and leisure writers en masse.
But the money flowing into the city seems to benefit only certain people — or at least that’s what longtime locals and activists tell me.
“We cost the same as downtown Chicago right now,” says Sage Green, a community advocate at People United for Sustainable Housing, or PUSH Buffalo, a housing rights group.“That’s unreal; $1,500 a month in Buffalo blows my fucking mind.”
That should, indeed, blow everyone’s mind, if only for the fact that despite Buffalo’s current boom, it maintains its status as one of the nation’s poorest large cities.
The increase in the city’s property values and rents have made it one of the top 10 cities with the fastest-growing rents in the nation. Much of that bump has to do with the city’s real-estate boom: developers get close to 40 percent in tax breaks to build on Buffalo’s historic building stock — some of the most well-preserved architecture in the nation. And the state has coughed up $1 billion in a stimulus spending plan to help make Buffalo more attractive for tech manufacturers, including Tesla.
Despite an increase in popularity and interest in Buffalo, by and large the city’s residents haven’t seen the same benefits. Wages have only increased marginally, and employment in the city continues to be focused on retail and service work — much of which are by and large minimum wage jobs. As a result, people who could barely afford their mortgages or property taxes before are now in dire straits and at risk of losing their homes.
But Green’s group, PUSH, is working to keep residents in their homes by doing the most basic of renovations to the city’s old homes: insulating them.
***
October in Buffalo is a tense time for thousands of local homeowners. It’s the time of year when many find out if soon they will be homeless.
Every year, the city puts on an auction of homes whose homeowners have been in arrears with their property taxes or sewage fees. If you are behind any amount above $200, your home could be foreclosed on by the city.
“It used to be even lower than that,” says Gretchen Gonzalez, deputy director for the Volunteer Lawyers Project, a group that helps homeowners who have defaulted on their taxes work out payment plans to keep their homes. “A lot of our clients are economically disadvantaged people who live paycheck to paycheck. For those people, it just takes one tragedy or one lost job to end up behind. And these are people whose homes have been in their families for generations.”
Over a third of Buffalo’s residents are homeowners, with houses willed down or bought for cheap when the city’s economy was still spiraling downward.
And until recently, it was relatively cheap to be a Buffalo homeowner.
In 2013, most of Buffalo’s housing stock was priced between $30-60,000. Now, with Buffalo’s boom, more homes are now worth $70-90,000, according to recent ACS one-year survey numbers.
And with rising property values come a rise in property taxes, which are expected to dramatically increase with property reevaluations underway. The last time Buffalo did property reevaluations was in 2010, which has translated into less taxes — about 40 percent less than expected — coming into a city that has seen an exceptional boom in home values.
But increased property taxes is an issue for a city in which almost half of its residents live paycheck to paycheck and where 51 percent of its children live in poverty. As of now, between 2006 and 2018, an average of close to 3,000 homes every year are threatened on the auction block for failure to pay taxes.
Housing advocates worry that the number is sure to rise after the city finishes its reevaluation next year.
“We’re certainly thrilled to see Buffalo’s economic turnaround, but it’s going to affect homeowners. And if people are having a hard time making ends meet right now, it’s only going to get worse,” says Kevin Quinn, an attorney with the Center for Law and Justice who has been representing dozens of homeowners in the past few months leading up to the city’s foreclosure auctions, which happen in mid-October.
But the cost of home ownership in Buffalo goes beyond property taxes. Before the recent housing developments in Buffalo overtook the market, residential areas were made up of homes that were built at the turn of the last century.
“All of these homes are old, old, old,” says Luana DeJesus, a program assistant at PUSH. “You better believe many of them don’t have proper insulation… A lot of people don’t even know what proper insulation is. And without that, you’re looking at bills costing into the hundreds when in reality it should be a quarter of that.”
And that’s where PUSH has found a niche as a unique problem solver to impending tax foreclosures: Keep people within their homes by insulating the homes.
***
The houses on Prospect Street, on Buffalo’s West Side, are quaint. Each of the colonial-style homes are two stories tall, with green lawns, flagpoles and raised patios. They’re also very old, sometimes well over 100 years — back when it was relatively cheap to heat a home.
But that’s not the case any longer.
On a Wednesday morning in September, I’m meeting with DeJesus outside of a home on Prospect. The home, owned by a local family that I was told had a hard time paying their utility bills, didn’t have any insulation. And that’s not an uncommon story in Buffalo.
“These are old homes — so many of them don’t have the proper insulation they need to keep warm during the winter here, so the costs are way more than what you’d normally expect than from newer homes,” DeJesus says.
According to National Fuel estimates, since 2015, gas prices to heat a home for five months has gone from $500 in 2015 to an estimated $560 this year. But that’s for energy-efficient homes.
In order to make homes energy-efficient — a process that can include an inspection and attic and wall insulation — it can easily range in the thousands of dollars. And for a number of families in Buffalo, that’s just not a viable option.
The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority offers free weatherizing for families who meet income guidelines that are 60 percent below the state’s median income, but there is little outreach from the state to get families to apply and weatherize their homes.
That’s where PUSH comes in. Once a week, members of PUSH go into poor neighborhoods and talk to residents about weatherizing their homes. For families that can afford weatherizing on their own, PUSH gets them set up for the process. For families that can’t afford the initial audit or the insulation, they partner with homeowners to get the free services through the state.
The result is thousands of dollars in savings each year for each home — more than enough to help families who struggle with their tax payments.
“PUSH [has] made a world of difference for people who didn’t even know what was going on with energy issues,” says Lucy Velez, a volunteer with PUSH. “My community doesn’t think about those things, we’re trying to keep our homes and pay our bills.”
Anecdotally, the process is working. Green, the community advocate, points out that families that were formerly on the auction block are now able to stay in their homes and finance their tax bills and city usage fees.
But she recognizes that lowering bills serves only as a band-aid for a much larger problem: a lack of affordable housing in the Buffalo area.
“These are band-aids, and band-aids are really important things. But they don’t address the problem. It’s easy to say something is bad and try and quickly fix it. It’s harder to ask why,” she says. “We’re in this space now, where we can’t just yell about public infrastructure. The middle ground is building infrastructural assets that can be controlled, designed and owned by the community so that we can build long-term neighborhoods.”
Just a few miles east, that’s exactly what’s happening.
The Fruit Belt section of Buffalo has been plagued with a declining population since the ’50s. The area — named for its flowering fruit trees — dropped from 11,000 in the ’70s to just over 2,000 people currently.
The decline in population has also translated to blocks of empty and vacant lots. Until now.
As of May this year, residents of the Fruit Belt neighborhood have successfully petitioned to create a land trust that would ensure people are not being priced out of their neighborhoods.
Residents who buy properties through a land trust split the equity of the home — most of it stays within the trust — which then keeps the price low for the next homebuyer.
Denice Barr, a resident of the Fruit Belt, is one of those residents who were instrumental in advocating for the land trust.
“People just moved into our neighborhoods without any thought about us, who’ve lived there for decades,” she says. “Now, we have the ability to take a stand against people moving in and selling off our community from under us.”
This solution isn’t unique to Buffalo. Community land trusts have been created in cities including Washington D.C., New York City and throughout Florida. But with a city that has seen a tremendous amount of growth in industry and city spending to make Buffalo more attractive, it could be a helpful tool for residents who have felt left behind in the city’s self-proclaimed renaissance.
***
This is part two in a two-part series on how solutions can both help — and hurt — communities. To read part one, on how the city of Buffalo is using architecture to help fuel a tourism-boom, click here.
This Private Real Estate Developer Uncovers the Beauty of Aged Buildings
The late 2000s was a dark period for homeownership in America. Viewing the real estate bust as an opportunity to rethink affordable housing, childhood friends Jason Bordainick and Andrew Cavaluzzi pooled their entrepreneurial backgrounds and real estate experience to create the Hudson Valley Property Group.
The New York-based business works with property owners to rehabilitate blighted developments to improve the lives of existing residents and the surrounding community. Avoiding the types of projects that other real estate developers rush towards, HVPG builds upon existing infrastructure, utilizing investors with long-term financial goals.
See this unique public-private funding model in action by watching the video above.
It’s About More Than Just a Pipeline
Midway into Donald Trump’s third week in the White House, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced a stunning reversal on a decision made during the waning days of the Obama administration. The Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), a 1,170-mile duct to carry oil from North Dakota fields to an Illinois refinery, will proceed without an environmental impact review. Despite protestors camping out for months, the final phase of construction—burrowing underneath the Missouri River, which provides drinking water to the Standing Rock Sioux less than half a mile away— resumed last week. One of the pipeline’s most devoted protestors, however, is making his strongest stand back in his hometown.
On the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, Nick Tilsen, a 34-year-old member of the Oglala Lakota Nation and founding executive director of the Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation, is breaking ground on nearly three dozen homes and other amenities on 34 acres of land. The planned community for Porcupine, S.D., nearly a decade in the making, will incorporate the latest in sustainability: energy-efficient buildings, a local food network and a walkable, self-contained neighborhood — all elements of the traditional Lakota lifestyle made modern. As debate over the pipeline rages, Tilsen’s fighting on two fronts: protecting the waterway that will provide today’s drinking water to residents and preparing for a “post-petroleum future” tomorrow.
[ph]
A Regenerative Community Development
Judged by per capita income, Oglala Lakota County, one of five counties within the Pine Ridge reservation, is among the poorest places in America. With wages at a paltry $9,150 per person, almost half of all residents—44.2 percent—live in poverty. Only one-tenth of teenagers graduate from college, and barely half of adults are employed. Proponents argue that the pipeline would jumpstart the region’s economy, creating up to 12,000 direct jobs during construction and supporting up to 81,500 more workers tied to the petroleum industry.
Tilsen, however, believes a pipeline that rips through the landscape to deliver an increasingly antiquated energy source cannot restore economic independence. Infrastructure is needed, he agrees, but destitute pockets in the Dakotas need to bolster themselves by building sustainable communities instead.
Rising against what they see as a century of their people’s subjugation for gold and oil, Tilsen and other Lakota youth proposed the development in 2004. “People are facing the threat of resource extraction in many communities, in the form of dams, in oil and gas drilling, in nuclear storage,” he says. “But in the same breath that we talk about what we’re against and what we’re resisting, it’s important that people take back what solutions they want to have. If we’re against this pipeline and unsustainable projects, it’s just as important for us, as indigenous people, to define what we’re for, double down and start working toward the kinds of communities we want.”
[ph]
At numerous gatherings sponsored by the Thunder Valley CDC throughout 2006, members of the entire tribe debated what features make up an ideal town and whether to pursue constructing one. A few tribal elders scoffed at what looked like foolhardiness and doubted that Tilsen’s young cohort could overcome Pine Ridge’s longstanding poverty; others believed the youth needed to focus on pressuring the federal government to uphold existing obligations, not divert attention to a new project.
Tilsen’s persuasion proved effective, and the conversation shifted to what should be built, a discussion that lasted 10 years. As part of a grand vision articulated by the community, Thunder Valley CDC installed the infrastructure — roads, sewers, electricity and broadband internet — in the newly planned development, which is located in Porcupine, a small town roughly midway between the entry to South Dakota’s Badlands National Park and the Nebraska border. During the next decade, 30 single-family homes, 48 apartment units and up to 10 artist studios; a market, a geothermal greenhouse and coops for 400 chickens; a youth shelter and powwow grounds will be constructed. Foundations have been poured for the first seven houses, and one has a roof. This summer, construction will begin on a 4,000-square-foot community center, reports Kaziah Haviland-Montgomery, an architectural fellow.
In line with Lakota values, the affordable houses are highly insulated, both to keep out the bitter Dakota winds but also to retain energy from heating. Each will be built with a five-kilowatt-hour solar panel on the rooftop, installed by locals.
A Sustainable Form of Resistance
Thunder Valley’s plans gained momentum as the Standing Rock movement grew. Those who couldn’t join the protestors viewed working on the development or becoming more conscious of waste as their own forms of organized resistance, notes Cecily Engelheart, Thunder Valley CDC’s communications director.
“Instead of styrofoam or paper plates at a community feed, we [have discussed] bringing our own picnic box of plates and silverware…It’s those smaller scale actions, really individual choices,” Engelheart explains.
If Thunder Valley ends up alleviating the desperation, both economic and environmental, its lessons could be adopted well beyond tribal nations. “If we’re pulling up our sleeves to do it here, then absolutely New York City should do it, as should Boston, Houston and Los Angeles. Everybody should be finding the right way to build equitable and sustainable communities in their city. It’s not just for Indian Country, as much as for humanity,” Tilsen says.
[ph]
In Lakota mythology, there’s a prophecy about a great black snake that slithers across the heartland. Where it burrows underground, the tale goes, the serpent will poison the earth. To many tribal nations, the warning is clear: the impending Dakota Access Pipeline, which will travel under the Missouri River, embodies the creature that elders warned of. Protestors gathered at Standing Rock talk about massing together to kill the black snake.
But there’s a lesser-known story about how the serpent must be vanquished. Tilsen grew up hearing that its blood must be drained. In other words, to defeat the pipeline, Americans need to sever their dependence on oil, both foreign and domestic. Otherwise, “the black snake always rears its head,” Tilsen says.
The Dakota Access Pipeline may be built, endangering Lakota Nation’s water and sacred lands. But with Tilsen’s strategy, any construction will be a temporary setback. The snake can be outmaneuvered still.
MORE: How Do You Breathe Life into a Neighborhood That’s Been Forgotten?
How Running Got 6,000 Homeless People Back on Their Feet
Hector Torres’s world was shattered when he learned his 29-year-old son had died. The former Marine and avid runner was driving home from work when he fell asleep at the wheel and crashed. The loss sent Hector into a grief spiral as he abandoned his life as a truck driver in Connecticut to wander the streets of New York City without a home.
“In the process of losing my son, I lost reality,” Torres says. “For about a month, I was wandering the city not knowing where I was at.”
Ten months later, Torres began to piece his life back together. While residing in the New York City Rescue Mission, Torres became a member of Back on My Feet, a nonprofit that combats homelessness through running programs. Founded in 2007, the organization works with shelters in 12 cities nationwide to recruit members interested in changing their lives for the better. Teams meet three times a week at 5:45 a.m., and members who maintain at least a 90 percent attendance record for the first 30 days become eligible for job training, financial aid and other life-building opportunities.
“Nobody runs alone,” says executive director Terence Gerchberg. “The point of this group is not to outrun somebody; it’s to uplift somebody. It’s meeting people where they are.”
Watch the video above to see how running transformed Torres’s life.
Battling Blight With … Plastic?
Just one boarded-up home can disfigure an entire city block. Studies have shown that crime rates shoot up by 19 percent within 250 feet of a vacant foreclosure, while surrounding property values plummet by $7,386 — a huge blow to weakened housing markets. Perhaps worst of all, these unoccupied, unmaintained buildings can sever neighborhood ties, driving more residents to move out.
In May 2014, officials in Durham, N.C., tested out a novel idea to battle blight. The college town, home to Duke University, couldn’t afford drastic changes, like bulldozing every vacancy or subsidizing new home ownership. But they could disguise the eyesores. To do so, the city banned all plywood boarding on abandoned homes. Instead, they turned to clear, hard plastic.
“We’ve found that it makes an enormous difference for the feel and health of the neighborhood,” says Faith Gardner, a housing code administrator who enforces the ordinance. “It tends to let housing prices stabilize, even with a number of vacancies. We’re not seeing the same drop in real estate prices and increases in crime.”
To date, a construction company contracted by the city has installed the see-through, sturdy plastic sheets on 64 properties. (The high-density plastic, known as polycarbonate, is also used for eyeglasses, airplane windows and motorcycle windshields.) According to officials, the change to plastic has helped sell more of these vacant buildings. Back in 2011, when the city began targeting blight, there were nearly 500 boarded-up homes; as of the new year, the city has cleaned up 90 percent of the problem. Only 56 abandoned buildings remain.
The trend has also taken off in other cities, becoming official policy in Phoenix and Fort Lauderdale, Fla. This month, Ohio became the first to mandate “clear-boarding” statewide.
Back in Durham, officials hope that the new material will deter vandalism, prostitution and drug use in the empty structures. Durham’s police department did not respond to a request for the latest stats, but the reasons why public safety might improve are clear. For one, it’s harder for a wrongdoer to pick out which lots might make a good hideout. “You can look at a certain angle, and you might get a reflection [from the plastic] that clues you in. But, really, you have to look hard to figure it out,” says Gardner. Police, meanwhile, can easily look through the transparent plastic to check for illegal activity.
The new material is also far harder to break. Previously, “they’d rip off the back door and go in,” Gardner adds. But “you can hit the [polycarbonate] with a baseball bat, and it won’t shatter.”
The one downside? Polycarbonate doesn’t come cheap. A 4-by-8-foot sheet of plywood costs around $11, while a plastic window cover the same size runs closer to $115. A door with several locks boosts the price by another $395. But to Gardner, the benefit to homeowners is “immeasurable.” She only has one regret about how Durham has implemented the change: “We really wish we had done it sooner.”
Continue reading “Battling Blight With … Plastic?”
The Win-Win Solution for Baltimore’s Housing Crisis
Let’s examine Baltimore’s two big plights. First: The city’s housing crisis has resulted in 16,000 vacant homes, and second, on any given night, 3,000 people will experience homelessness.
For the sake of human dignity, isn’t the answer to both problems to simply put them together? Why can’t these empty homes be turned into housing for the homeless?
That’s the mission of Housing Our Neighbors, a group that’s part of the Housing Is A Human Right Roundtable organization that’s made up of anti-homelessness advocates. As the Atlantic reports, the Roundtable is hoping to “create a community land trust — a non-profit that will hold the title to the land in order to make it permanently affordable.” The same approach has worked to protect low-income residents from gentrification in places like Austin, Texas; Albany, Ga.; and Albuquerque, N.M., the publication says.
MORE: The National Movement to End Veteran Homelessness Continues in These Two Cities
“Why do we live in a city with tens of thousands of vacant homes and still have people who are homeless?” Father Ty Hullinger of St. Anthony of Padua, a local Roman Catholic Church, says in the Roundtable video below. “We have parishioners who have lost their homes to foreclosure. These are families that work hard to keep their homes but found themselves, like many American families, unable to get out from under the debt [from] financing their homes.”
Baltimore’s just a smaller example of what’s happening throughout the United States. As Amnesty International wrote in a blog post following the last government census, “approximately 3.5 million people in the U.S. are homeless, many of them veterans…at the same time, there are 18.5 million vacant homes in the country.”
Here at NationSwell, we’ve mentioned several times how the idea of providing “housing first” has taken off in Utah, a state where chronic homelessness has dropped 74 percent over the past eight years and is on track to become eradicated by 2015. Similar initiatives are also working in Atlanta and Nashville. (It’s even saving taxpayers’ money.)
Give a homeless person a safe shelter and an address, then he or she can go to work on finding a job and getting back on track. “Most people are homeless largely for economic reasons,” Nan Roman, the president of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, tells The Atlantic. “If there’s not enough affordable housing, people who have additional barriers are not going to be competitive in the market and they’re going to lose out.”
DON’T MISS: Yes It’s True. Subsidizing Housing for the Homeless Can Save Them — and Taxpayers’ Money
Portland is About to Get Tons of Tiny Homes That Can Shelter the Homeless
On any ordinary night in Portland, Ore., an estimated 4,000 people sleep on the city’s streets or in shelters, according to the Portland Housing Bureau.
This year, as the Rose City passes its deadline for the 10 Year Plan to End Homelessness, a growing number of locals are growing frustrated with a lack of solutions.
Which is why local entrepreneur Tim Cornell decided to repurpose a project designed for Haiti and retrofit a blueprint for urban areas such as Portland. Cornell’s company, Techdwell, builds tiny, economical homes that can be assembled in just a day’s time with limited construction experience.
The houses, which include just a small kitchen, a bathroom and a couch that turns into a bed, costs about $12,000 to build and can also accommodate families, according to Fast Company.
Thanks to Cornell’s persistence, this type of residence may soon be available to Portland’s large homeless population in less than a year. After months of zoning processes and meetings with citiy officials and community boards, Techdwell’s plan is expected to pass a final zoning approval. Should the plan get the green light, the city will break ground on the first tiny home community in February 2015.
“I said, look, we can do a community — 25 homes, 40 homes — in an infill lot, making it look acceptable,” Cornell tells Fast Company. “Not a camp, not tents, but aesthetically pleasing. Just do something — here’s a plan that’s feasible.”
The company is already selling homes to individuals looking for a simpler way of life, with eco-friendly features including solar panels, rainwater collection and composting toilets. Cornell is also in talks with Washington state officials to start erecting homes for disaster victims in the wake of the devastation left from recent wildfires and floods.
Of course Techdwell’s model is not the first of it’s kind. Similar projects for homeless have cropped up in Wisconsin and Texas, as well as New York state.
As Portland’s decade-old program to help the homeless expires, maybe Techdwell’s vision is the key to a future plan that’s affordable and sustainable — increasing its chance of success.
MORE: Social Enterprise Incubator Hatches in Portland, Oregon
Troubled by Urban Blight? What Other Cities Can Learn From Philadelphia
Abandoned buildings and vacant space in U.S. cities is nothing new. In fact, these problems have plagued cities across the U.S. for decades. In the wake of the housing crash, however, some urban initiatives have gotten creative: Painting boarded up windows and doors to blend in with other buildings in the area. But Philadelphia is taking a hard line on cracking down on property negligent owners.
A window and doors ordinance established in Philadelphia in 2011 prohibits buildings from having the hallmark of vacancy — plywood covering windows and doors. Property owners with boarded-up openings are fined $300 per day, per window or door. In turn, the ordinance has generated $2.2 million more in transfer tax receipts and Philadelphia has increased home values throughout the city by $74 million, the Los Angeles Times reports.
City officials use software used by the IRS to track down owners to take them to Blight Court, which was established along with the ordinance. The new policy even allows the city to attach liens to a property owner’s other property, which incentivizes owners to solve the problem quickly.
As a result, property prices have shot up 31 percent in the last four years. That’s in sharp contrast to the meager 1 percent rise in similar areas, according to a study by Ira Goldstein of the Reinvestment Fund, a community development financial institution.
Rebecca Swanson, who directs the city’s vacant building strategy, said the City of Brotherly Love had already spent millions in demolition to tear down abandon properties, to no avail. Instead, officials decided to take preemptive action by fining owners for “blighting influences.” “That was the whole point, to catch them early, cite them for doors and windows, and hopefully that incentivizes the owner to come out of the woodwork and do something,” Swanson said.
Philadelphia real estate lawyer Richard Vanderslice agreed the ordinance is making a difference. Vanderslice represents many of the landlords, and although they’re griping about the fines, many end up spending more money to develop property.
“They say, ‘How do I fight this?’ and I say, ‘Fix it. It’s going to cost you more to fight it, and by the way, why not just replace the door, rent it out and make some money from it?’ And sometimes a light bulb goes off,” he said.
The new code is working. Inspectors have probed 13,000 vacant properties and cited 9,000 of them for being in violation of city code. Property tax collection has increased in the areas investigated and the city is receiving more permit and licensing fees as building owners are starting to pay more attention, Swanson said. Owners are tearing down dilapidated property or selling it to developers rather than paying the fines. Philadelphia, which has lost more than a half million people since its peak of 2 million residents, has seen a slight uptick to 1.5 million in recent years.
As more cities cut back on budgets and look for new ways to revitalize blighted areas, Philly’s example reveals that sometimes all it takes is a little incentive.
These Seniors Needed Affordable Housing, and These Kids Needed Love. Together, They’re Beautifully Solving Both Problems
In Portland, Ore., there’s an idea so innovative that it has managed to bring together two sets of people with different problems — and solve them for both.
Welcome to the Bridge Meadows housing development, which helps elders and kids by providing a supportive environment for families that adopt foster kids alongside 27 units of affordable housing for seniors who agree to pitch in for 10 hours a week to help out with the kids. It’s a solution to a problem you don’t hear about often on the news: According to the PBS News Hour, 15 percent of seniors in America live below the poverty line, which often makes them struggle to find affordable housing. Meanwhile, families who adopt foster children face their own difficulties, as they are pressed for time, money and support.
Jackie Lynn, 60, is in the process of adopting her niece’s children because both of their drug-addicted parents are in jail. She works full time and felt she wasn’t able to give the kids the attention they needed until they moved to Bridge Meadows. Her family is partnered with neighbors Jim and Joy Corcoran, the “elders” who volunteer to spend time with the kids. “They are the reason that we thrive,” Lynn told Cat Wise of the PBS NewsHour. “Jim takes the boys every Sunday morning for about three hours. And they come home excited, with all these wonderful stories. You see children running up to them and giving them hugs. It’s just incredible to watch it.”
Meanwhile, the Corcorans experienced financial trouble after Jim lost his construction job, but now they live comfortably at Bridge Meadows with a $500 monthly rent payment. Joy Corcoran told Wise, “It was really difficult to find any decent housing that we could afford in any regard. And so when we had the opportunity to move here, it was just a godsend. It was like a huge relief.”
Bridge Meadows is funded by rents and donations from corporations and the community, and it provides a myriad of ways for kids and elders to interact every week. Elders lead story times, teach music lessons, tutor kids in school subjects, give them lifts to school and more. Derenda Schubert, the executive director of Bridge Meadows, said that there have been a few families who moved in and found the togetherness a bit too much, but for most of them it’s a perfect fit, and several seniors reported that their health improved through so much interaction. “Connections across the generations is critical, absolutely critical for aging well,” Jim Corcoran told Wise.
Plenty of people agree with Jim — which is why another intergenerational housing development like Bridge Meadows is currently under construction in Portland. But there’s good news for those who don’t live in Oregon, too: The staff of Bridge Meadows is consulting with people across the country who want to start their own such housing projects.
MORE: These Startups Offer Sleek Technological Innovations for the Elderly