Posted on 10/30/2017 3:18:30 PM PDT by Jagermonster
PATHS TO PROGRESS Residents, who include formerly homeless people and those who were in foster care, pay low rent on houses that range from 250 to 400 square feet. After paying rent for seven years, they will be given the deeds to their homes.
DETROIT—In 2013, when Keith McElvee got out of prison after a 12-year stint for a drug conviction, he returned to a neighborhood in northwest Detroit that he didn’t recognize. “This is like Beirut,” he thought. “Like a war zone.”
Mr. McElvee is naturally gregarious and social-minded. Out of prison he struggled, but then found work doing homeless outreach at Cass Community Social Services (CCSS), a nonprofit. Four years later he’s a full-time employee tasked with helping more than a dozen clients secure housing and jobs, and speaks proudly of success stories, like the man he helped to curb alcoholism and earn his truck-driving license. “My passion is people,” he says. “I like to help people.”
But McElvee’s background and low salary meant his own housing was precarious: His apartment in the same neighborhood cost $450, nearly half his monthly income. In August, he moved into a new place, a “tiny house” that costs him significantly less per month – and that he’s on track to actually call his own.
“That’s the key,” McElvee said of his projected home ownership. “That’s a beautiful thing.”
Detroit’s Tiny Homes Project, run by the same organization, represents an innovative approach to low-income housing: Instead of high-density apartment buildings, residents pay low rent on well-constructed tiny houses that range from 250 to 400 square feet and include kitchens, washer/dryer units, and heating and cooling.
Tiny homes are a popular housing trend, popularized by shows like HGTV’s “Tiny House Hunters,” and have been . . .
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
Skin in the game - low income housing as a rent-to-own, instead of giant mega project crime concentrators. Seems like a good idea to me, and where successful, the taxpayers don't keep subsidizing rent forever.
The vast majority will not maintain the property, it will fall into disrepair and ruin, and they will encumber the property with as much debt as they possibly can before defaulting and ending up in public housing once more. It’s happened again and again in many parts of the country. Sounds good in theory but in practice it falls apart.
I must have missed the time warp. We are back in my childhood in the South.
We called these “shotgun” shack because you could fire a shotgun through the front door and hit everybody all the way to the back door.
This is history being re-purposed to a generation that forgot it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_house
Yup. Ask any landlord south of the 8 mile road in Deeetroit and they’ll tell you.
About 1 out of 100 are actually good.
McElvee patrols the area at night and helps out his elderly neighbor, watering her grass and taking up her garbage bin. When the residents’ washing machines had a glitch, another resident went around to each house offering to fix it.There was also a pretty stiff application process. I think that it can work when you can pick the people who get to join up.“That was the whole point,” says McElvee, “so that everybody knows each other and looks out for each other.”
Just as RC said, all the dopers and drunks just let the homes collapse and didnt make their payments. The houses were often badly vandalized by the residents. The program was a total failure and by the 80s many of those neighborhoods had none of the original inhabitants left and the homes were sold to middle class families looking for a cheap fixer upper. I spent a couple of years helping my dad remodel one at the same time every other family of new owners in that neighborhood was doing the same.
It might sound good but it doesnt work. A major part of the problem is the culture that these people bring with them. Substance abuse plagues these residents and anyone short on cash tends to fall back into old habits. This guy "used to" have a problem. He likely will in the near future too. Even worse are some of the ones that actually do kick the substances themselves, now theyre sober enough to run their own drug/theft/prostitution rings.
You might be right. Build the tiny concrete block units on slabs, not too much of an issue.
” A major part of the problem is the culture that these people bring with them.”
Exactly. It’s an attitude/approach/culture problem. Who says you can kick a drug problem that easily? If the dude actually placed a “visitation/inspection” clause just like any apartment and they find crack stuff in the apartment, it could work. But I doubt it.
Habitat for Meth Dealer homes...
.
Include a big hose to wash them down!
.
Tiny house = mini-pad?
He made a few mistakes and everything started coming out. He admitted to myself and a couple of others that he only worked with the single mothers because they were women who were known to make bad choices so they were easy to get into bed with. He was embezzling the funds from Boys&Girls. He had the job with the disabled so he could steal their meds and he sold the meds through the little dealers he met in the anti-gang office at the school. Turns out he was behind and instigating a number of the racial issues that suddenly begun occurring around town. When he offered to help make the racial problems go away if the town donated to the charity he set up and was the sole employee of then someone finally got smart.
He just up and disappeared one night, dont know where he went. I dont think anyone really misses him.
What a ripoff. I designed, built and live in my own 'tiny house'... About 380 square feet. Materials cost about 3,500, took me about a month, working alone, to build it.
It is very comfortable. So well insulated that I use about $240 in propane a year to heat, cook and heat water.
got any plans? or pics? sounds about my speed and price.
Isn’t rent-to-own much more likely to create a different mindset than that of people being in rental housing? Or are you saying the neighborhood would destroy the homes?
What are you talking about?
No, Sorry. I just ‘doodled’ the basic idea in a notebook, and made things up as I went along and encountered any problems.
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