Unions Take on the Housing Crisis

Construction of Ingram Place Apartments. Photo by Jack Fennimore.

Every day at The Overhead Wire we sort through over 1,500 news items about cities and share the best ones with our email list. At the end of the week, we take some of the most popular stories and share them with Urban Milwaukee readers. They are national (or international) links, sometimes entertaining and sometimes absurd, but hopefully useful.

Los Angeles is pretty spongy: Over the last several years Los Angeles has been trying to create more opportunities to collect rainwater to replace declining snowpack numbers. A recent 3 day storm from an atmospheric river brought 9 inches of rain to Los Angeles and water managers were excited to hear that they were able to collect 8.6 billion gallons, enough to supply water to 100,000 households for a year. (Matt Simon | Wired Magazine)

The great home compression: As housing gets more expensive people are looking for new ways to make homeownership a reality, developers are putting out new products including much smaller houses and much smaller prices. In suburbs outside of cities such as Bend Oregon and San Antonio Texas, new homes under 600 square feet are being sold in some instances for prices under $150,000. (Conor Dougherty | New York Times)

Exclusionary zoning or highway funding: The Federation of American Scientists has issued a housing ideas challenge for tackling the housing crisis. One idea is that federal highway funding could be conditioned on the adoption of zoning reform, similar to what happend with Louisiana where the drinking age was raised to 21 to save funding. The idea is that withholding of highway funds could occur in Metropolitan Statistical Areas with median incomes above the national average where more than 30% of the population are rent burdened. (Sam Maloney & Rohit Swain | Federation of American Scientists)

Canada to stop building new roads?: Canada’s Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault suggested that no more transportation money would go to large road projects across the country, saying that the money would be better spent on active transportation and fighting climate change. The comments sparked a debate over road funding from opposition parties and a continuation of the car oriented culture wars. (John Paul Tasker | CBC News)

U.S. unions target the housing crisis: Organized labor in the United States now sees housing costs as one of its biggest issues its members face as many workers are dealing with the shortage of affordable housing. But the problem isn’t just housing, it’s the long distance commuting that finding affordable housing creates for union members. In a number of union actions around the country, striking workers are demanding housing fixes in addition to specific labor related wage and benefits requests. (Steven Greenhouse | The Guardian)

Quote of the Week

The young people said they had never seen this before. When it started, they were so grateful and as word spread, more people would move to Nagareyama because we had these pick-up and drop-off stations. It’s not just the parents, but the grandparents who often take care of the children also felt it was a great system. The location at Otakanomori station is convenient if the daycare is far away, and it makes such a big difference for those coming back from Tokyo or for parents with multiple children.

–Yoshiharu Izaki, the mayor of Nagareyama, a Tokyo suburb discussing in Bloomberg CityLab a child care focus that has led to one of the highest birth rates in the country.

This week on the podcast, we’re joined by Elaine Clegg, CEO of Valley Regional Transit in Boise Idaho. We chat about how the Boise bus system is changing, the impact of fast regional growth, energy infrastructure and favorite transportation board games.

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