Sad State of Housing for July 31,2009

Today I am unsure whether to be sad or mad with the state of housing in this country.  We have a city in the United States that is celebrating tearing down low income housing! I guess this is just another case of short sited city leadership.

The story is on MSNBC.com (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32176690/ns/us_news-life/) speaks specifically to large low income housing projects. I agree that these sites have often been a crime ridden mess, however tearing down any low income housing without a concerted and coherent plan for replacing it with smaller more manageable sites is nothing short of criminal.

In another article on Treehugger.com (http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/07/enough-empty-houses.php?dcitc=th_rss_design) we come up with an interesting statistic that we in the US have enough empty houses to hold the entire population of Britain! That’s 18.7 million houses.  Why do we have a homeless population problem in this country?  To get serious I am sure that there is certainly a mismatch in the population of homeless versus the location of a large part of the homes. Also I am sure that a significant portion of them are currently not up to any kind of habitable standard.

That being said I certainly wonder why the resource hasn’t even been seriously talked about as part of the overall solution. I wonder if there is a template for Google Earth that could be put together to graphically represent the inventory…hmmm?  Maybe then an enterprising person or three might start trying to match the resource to the problem.

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