OK, so I was cleaning out my inbox and came across this message I'd planned to respond to. Even though it's two weeks old, I'm pretty sure we didn't solve the affordable housing crisis during that time, so hopefully this will still be pertinent.
On 3/2/03 11:08 AM, "Craig Miller" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > There are least a thousand of these unit types open in the city of Mpls > right now. Someone mentioned earlier that if we have 8-10,000 units in the > metro open right now. Why so many people without stable housing? That is > a great question with a long answer. Now's not the time. We've heard some comments about why there are so many people without stable housing. Some have poor credit and cannot pass a landlord screening. Some have kids and cannot afford a place big enough for their needs. There plenty of other reasons besides. > Residents paid electricity & telephone. I paid the big bills garbage,gas, > heat, water. Residents paid elec and phone. The minimum housing cost was > about $700. Almost any single person with a $10 hour job could squeeze by > in a 1br. But that is all they would do, is squeeze by. Get a roommate, > bump up to a 2br, and the savings are readily apparent. Savings of almost > $300 per month. Take that times 36 months and you have $10,800. Come to > think about it, that's how I got the scratch together to buy my first house. > > The $10,800 gets you a down payment in many areas of Mpls. Oh BTW. To > anyone who asks. Your not supposed to raise a family and save for a house > on $5.15 an hour. If you are, teach your younger brothers and sisters how > tough that is and encourage them not to try. I agree with what Craig says here. I just finished Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed" recently and that was a strategy that came up often - find a roomie and split the costs. I did that as well while I was in college and the first year afterwards. I also agree with Craig that you're not supposed to raise a family on minimum wage. So now the question becomes how do we help get our Minneapolis neighbors better wages so we're not asked to subsidize housing so much? It appears we don't really have the money for it anymore and based on the statistics we see from Vicky Heller and others, the approach of subsidizing housing has not been very cost-effective anyway. > WAGE LEVELS > > If housing is out of reach for the entry level worker, and the government > refuses to ease the cost of housing through regulation and legal reform, > then we need to make the employer pay their employees more. While I'm still a little shocked to see this line of thinking coming from Craig, I agree with it completely. Now, how do we do that? We know from the Nicollet Ave. Target that requirements for businesses to pay livable wages are just going to get skirted by employers with enough friends on City Council to get exempted. So what else is there? One thought I had was whether it would be possible to create a voluntary program for businesses located in Minneapolis. The business pays a living wage to employees who are Minneapolis residents (maybe leave out teenagers that are working the after-school or summer job) and get a tax credit of some kind. I'm guessing it would probably have to be a property tax credit, since I don't know what other taxes business pay specifically to Minneapolis. Obviously, there would be folks who say we cannot afford to do something like this with the deficits we're facing, but I wonder. If our residents are earning a paycheck they can thrive on, how much would we save in not having to subsidize housing as much? Or not having as many social service needs to take care of? Or giving people a big reason to move into Minneapolis and fill some of those thousand vacant units Craig mentioned, which would presumably bring some additional sales tax revenues. And wouldn't it also bring in some property tax revenues since a commercial property such as an apartment building is valued in part by the income it brings in? Maybe we might even have businesses that would move into Minneapolis to take advantage of the program because they'd rather pay employees than property taxes? I realize there's a lot that would need to be worked out - what would a living wage be set at, for example. Would there be any legal impediments to such a program, for another. But that's what the smart folks downtown like John Moir and Patrick Born are for, right? I can also see folks arguing that this would be nothing more than a handout to businesses, and I'll admit that aspect doesn't really sit well with me either but I think it's apparent that we need to approach the affordable housing problem from another perspective than subsidies for developers or tenants. If something like this would actually help solve the problem better than what's been tried so far, I think that should be more important than who gets what. Mark Snyder Windom Park TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Send all posts in plain-text format. 2. 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