Housing: In Your Community

In my town all of the subsidized housing is concentrated into a small urban area. This creates a vast cultural, political, and socio-economic divide between students who live in the more urban area, and the students who live in the richer, more conservative, suburban area. If subsidized housing was distributed throughout the town, I believe we would lose this divide and strengthen our community.

San Diego has a high homeless population and a new law prohibits people from leaving items in public places for over 3 hours. I think that instead of working to reduce the visibility of the homeless issue, we should work towards providing more low-income housing to address the initial problem of homelessness.

Recently, San Jose (the city I live in) voted to sell $100 million of public land to Google. While our city council claims that this development is going to create new jobs, in reality, it will push our community into further economic inequity driving up housing prices and the overall cost of living. Not to mention, we are one of the wealthiest counties in the world with one of the highest economic gaps.

I strongly believe that we need stronger legislation to protect community members in light of big tech company expansions as well as to increase the amount of nice affordable housing available and I wish this was a larger priority for our politicians.

I live in California's Bay Area, and it is one of the most unaffordable places to live in the United States. I agree with Prerna regarding stronger legislation to protect our community members. Another solution that should also be considered is to push for more housing, and I mean affordable housing, near public transit. The idea behind this would be that residents could spend less money on commuting by car. Of course, this is not a solution that would single-handedly fix the devasting lack of affordable housing, but I believe it would be a step in the right direction.