`Small housing' ideas make big difference
What, you may ask, is a “wicked” problem? Wicked problems, like climate change, have many causes and, thus, no one solution. The “silver bullet” doesn't exist.
When faced with wicked problems, we need solutions that effectively target and chip away at each specific driver. Addressing wicked problems with many, varied solutions affords the opportunity to walk the talk of a mindset committed to diversity, equity and inclusion. Identifying the unique needs of smaller segments of the population — like older people who are precariously housed — and developing interventions that meet those unique needs is essential for creating meaningfully inclusive communities.
Scale is of the essence in addressing a wicked problem. Drivers of the housing crisis (like insufficient capital to build subsidized affordable housing) must be addressed at regional, state and federal scales where billions of dollars can be generated.
Other housing-related problems can be addressed at local scales. It includes the growing gap between social security and the cost of living pushing older people into housing precarity, displacement and homelessness. It also includes the growing gap between wages for essential workers (like in-home supportive services caregivers) and the cost of living, which creates supply and retention issues in the labor markets. Towns, cities and counties can address those issues through funding innovative small-housing solutions like developing accessory development units (ADU), shared housing, community land trusts and shallow rent subsidies.
Shared housing comes in many forms. Programs like Home Match connect older people with an extra room in their home or apartment, or an ADU on their property, with community members seeking housing. This mutually beneficial relationship provides increased financial and social support for precariously housed low to moderate income home providers and increases access to affordable housing for low to moderate income home seekers.
Abode's San Franciscobased Housing Location Assistance Program takes a different slant on shared housing. Abode matches recipients of funds from the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing's problem-solving program. This allows single-member households to pool their resources and share the cost of a two-bedroom apartment, which is often more affordable than both households renting their own studio.
A growing number of cities in Marin, including Mill Valley and Corte Madera, have started funding Home Match services at roughly $20,000 per 10,000 residents. A number of other towns and cities in the county have included home-sharing services in their housing element and are considering how best to support implementation once their housing elements have been approved by the state. The pools of funding these towns and cities are using to support home sharing services are not large enough to fund brick and mortar projects — “big housing”— but they are sufficient to implement more targeted “small housing” initiatives like Home Match.
Shallow rent subsidies are small, long-term payments of roughly $300 to $1,000 per month designed to address long-term financial barriers to housing stability like the gap between social security and the cost of housing in the Bay Area.
This subsidy model fills a gap left by more prominent subsidy models like emergency rental assistance programs designed to address short-term financial barriers to housing stability. While we wait for shallow rent subsidy funding from the state through bills like Senate Bill 37 and regional measures like the Bay Area Housing Finance Authority's upcoming housing affordability bond, local actors are already at work.
The Community Housing Foundation of Mill Valley partnered with Home Match to pilot a shallow subsidy program where employees who work in the city and earn less than 60% of the area median income can receive up to $1,000 a month in rent support. This subsidy allows teachers, employees at local restaurants, caregivers and other such integral members of our community to live in the city their work makes possible.
Small housing solutions are attainable methods for chipping away at drivers of the housing crisis that provide immediate solutions for people who cannot wait years for support. Freedom, autonomy and a sense of empowerment are to be found in addressing seemingly insurmountable problems.
When we break large-scale crises down to individual drivers and thus circumvent the sense of powerlessness that arises from a futile search for the silver bullet in processes whose scale is too vast for us to effectively influence, we discover that there are many ways to address these problems right here, in our communities.