The Pros And Cons Of Co-Housing

Cowan D & Marsh. 2001. A Two Steps Forward: Housing Policy into the New Millennium. Policy Press

Housing is one of the most pressing issues facing communities today. It effects practically all demographics, especially students, minorities, and low-income workers. College towns are often face the toughest challenges, with many students experiencing an extremely high cost of living. Without a detailed housing plan drafted by community members there is no chance of improving the conditions of housing or their related expenditures. So, what should be done about housing in college towns? How can we hope to provide for a municipality’s citizens while keeping costs down? Can neighboring institutions and cities assist or should they give communities the autonomy to improve themselves? The answers, I hope, will be found within the rest of this essay.

Many advocates and policymakers of housing for the poor believe that to achieve optimal human development of low-income households the location of the housing must be considered as well as the quality of the housing unit (Newman, 2008).

To judge the success or failure of Blumberg Apartments, we must first analyze the project as it works to provide good housing. Good housing should not just be regarded as a noun, it should also encompass housing as a verb. The commodity of the house as a shelter is the noun. This commodity should provide a place for redressing. It should hold the essential necessities that make for a comfortable and complete home. A place that balances privacy and social interactions. As a verb, good housing should be a utility that works to enhance one’s life (Turner, 1972). It should be a stepping stone towards opportunity. For Blumberg Apartments in the grand scheme, both of these facets can be regarded as failures. As the housing projects suffered through massive deterioration, it failed as a commodity. Residents described how their housing had “stairwells that reeked of urine and dirty diapers, constantly breaking appliances and elevators, and the frequent sounds of gunshots” (Colaneri, 2016). Furthermore, units were found to not meet minimum size standards and

“The home is the wellspring of personhood. It is where our identity takes root and blossoms, whereas children, we imagine, play, and question, and as adolescents, we retreat and try. As we grow older, we hope to settle into a place to raise a family or pursue work. When we try to understand ourselves, we often begin by considering the kind of home in which we were raised” (Desmond 2016, 293). Evictions! The root of poverty? Matthew Desmond’s novel “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in America City, portrays the lives of tenants, landlords, and house marketing on the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee. Desmond gives the reader overwhelming evidence and revealing testimony illustrating the major impact of inadequate housing on individuals, local, and national level. Desmond’s analysis and observation of his case study enables him to portray the reality of poverty, and to persuade the readers that evictions are a major consequence, and primary contributors in the relentless cycle of poverty. Desmond build his argument using two Aristotelian rhetorical appeals, ethos, logos and inductive reasoning to illustrates the importance of ending the cycle of poverty.

Another topic demonstrated in the book is inequality at home. For many, home symbolizes stability and physical security; for others it signifies an investment, an identity, or a crucial mark of citizenship. Yet, not every home and community offers all of these advantages, and not everyone takes the same path home. In recent years, buying a home has become more difficult as both wealth and race matter. High cost of home ownership is just one of the many reasons underlying the stratification of secure housing in a strong

It is often easy to castigate large cities or third world countries as failures in the field of affordable housing, yet the crisis, like an invisible cancer, manifests itself in many forms, plaguing both urban and suburban areas. Reformers have wrestled passionately with the issue for centuries, revealing the severity of the situation in an attempt for change, while politicians have only responded with band aid solutions. Unfortunately, the housing crisis easily fades from our memory, replaced by visions of homeless vets, or starving children. Metropolis magazine explains that “…though billions of dollars are spent each year on housing and development programs worldwide, ? At least 1 billion people

Initially, Matthew Desmond’s book Evicted represents a profound and realistic ethnography about people’s day-to-day experiences of poverty with a particular focus on the outcomes of housing instability within the state. He exploits the evidence from housing court administrative records, excerpts from the news, and different surveys of renters to support his point of view revealed in the book. In his work, Desmond raises questions why the state is introducing the housing policy that deteriorates the position of tenants renting from private landlords and how a person with the monthly income of $628 and rent of $550 can not only provide his family but also survive. In Evicted, Matthew Desmond reasonably criticizes the American housing system according to which most of the low-income tenants are left alone in the private rental market and have no options to receive affordable apartments.

In the communities I grew up in, there were frequent changing circumstances that actually left my family not really as part of the community. From dingy, cheap and tiny places for rent, there has been significant points brought to the attention of the reader in this book that could attribute to the failure and success of neighborhoods. In Suburban Nation, the opening pages give a lot of insight on the issues that can come from these big and fancy, new housing developments.

A second establishment built to battle the rising individualism in society, is co-housing communities, such as that mentioned in Tebrake’s article, All for One. This kind of community is one in which the residents can count on each other, as well as share living courters, meals, and many of their personal belongings. The closeness of this type of community

Toward the end of the 2015 meeting of the Indiana General Assembly (“Session”), it became evident that a few advocacy organizations were seemingly misinformed and disconnected from IHCDA policy positions. Rather than addressing these issues individually, IHCDA seized the opportunity to develop a much broader working group of advocates and experts that are connected to housing and community development in Indiana. After receiving strong support and encouragement from several organizations, IHCDA formally organized the oracle of advocates and industry experts dubbing it the Indiana Housing and Community Development Coalition (‘Coalition”).

Timberwoods Townhomes has recently converted from a co-op into a first time home buyers community. “A housing cooperative is a form of home ownership in which people join to form a cooperative corporation which owns the building in which they live” (Cooperative Housing,

The increasingly popular tiny house movement has been mooted as a potential solution to some housing affordability issues. The movement originated in the US in the late 1990s, largely in response to housing affordability problems, the global financial crisis and the desire to live more sustainably. At the time, the tiny house movement was very small and localised; in the past decade, it has become increasingly mainstream.

Now a day’s council and social housing estates are seen to be the epitome of substandard, inferior, second-rate living where disorder and irresponsibility run rife. Weather this view of social housing is correct or not public opinion has very little choice but to be on the side of the private rental sector as they are the largest sector within the UK. Mass social housing seems to be a thing of the past as aspirations of voters, in a country where there is a national obsession with property prices, have moved

“The best that can be said of the conception is that it did afford a chance to experiment with some physical and social planning theories which did not pan out. “ This quote reflects Jane Jacob’s philosophical ideas in an attempt to criticize the social housing’s design approach and its associated urban planning in modern era. “The physical and social theories” outlines the urban planning idea of social housing (Utopian idea) and according to Jane’s statement, such experiment of these theories were deem to be unsuccessful. It is inevitably certain to some extent that a provocative statement towards modern era social housing approaches would hold true due to the minimal success the plans brought to the city, such as solving the working class commendations temporarily. Nevertheless, it is a failure to deliver long-standing social improvements corresponded with the increasing suspicion of modernism, one cannot simply attribute ill fate to its “innovative physical features” (As Jane said, the Utopian and Utopia), but should rather considered a range of other elements in the larger aspect of society: factors such as difficulty of racial integration, problems of financing and management, lack of bridging between architecture and planning, as well as the increasing preference of suburban lifestyle from the rising mid class. These problems reflected evidently in some stereotypes of social housing communities built in the modern era such as Pruitt-Igoe, sunny side Gardens, Paul