Remember when

I’m old enough to remember when I couldn’t pull together an evening meal. Pre-family, cooking is a secondary concern. There’s always takeout. And so much of one’s activity swirls around getting food with others. But once you have children in your household, then the daily routine of dinner is the mayflower pole that keeps everyone from flying off into hangry-land.

First, it’s the juggle of monitoring what everyone will and will not eat. Then there’s the learning curve of which groceries last and which perish. In addition to maintaining an inventory of groceries in the cupboards as well as the fridge, one must meter out prep and eat times to sync with everyones’ after school-activities. There were disappointments. There were complaints. And that’s how you get better.

For a bunch of years now, there’s been no thought involved. Perhaps a little discussion, “Do you want Marry Me Chicken or stuffed pork chops?” But the deroulement of the whole thing just happens. Senses, especially the sense of smell for foods underway, are much sharper. Listening to a podcast, unloading the dishwasher, and checking on the mail all can be dovetailed into the process that just seems to happen.

What I want to take from this is the memory of how hard it was to learn all those steps. Because then, when I see another, who could use a bit of a nudge, a kind word, a bit of encouragement, I’ll remember all those little steps and how long it took to master the basic task of dinner.

Tip #1 to the new Realtor

Never run half of a couple out to homes. Both will be making the final decision, hence both have to churn through the process.

It’s usually the woman. She has all the energy and ambition to drive around to eight homes over a two-and-a-half-hour window and consider their features. And then the spouse says that this suits him fine as she’ll make most of the calls. But this is almost always not true.

Both parties have their thing. One may care about the size of the center island and whether there is a pantry, but the other will absolutely not budge on the size of the lot. By looking at homes without a generous amount of verdure, Mrs. Buyer is getting a false sense of her choices. By disregarding one of the couple’s requirements, improper knowledge is gathered.

New realtor, do not be fooled! Mr. Buyer must join the hunt. In addition to holding some firm, albeit limited, requirements his impact on the decision is significant. Moreover, the process of looking, evaluating, of seeing which homes sell and which ones drag on the market creates an internal registry of pricing. People will not sign their names to one of the largest purchases of their lives without a sense of price.

So what I’m really saying to those of you just joining the profession, is that where a couple is concerned, the decision maker is the couple. It is not the addition of buyer one and buyer two. Through the discovery process of finding their new home, both individuals will find out their partner’s preferences as well as their own. And the final decision will include some combination of compromises between the two.

Pay attention to the children

I’m not a fan of the ‘cost-burdened’ framing used when discussing housing. The resulting claims just don’t sync with the other indicators. For instance, Minnesota Compass, a research organization funded by the Wilder Foundation claims that one quarter of Minnesotans ‘pay too much for housing.’ This doesn’t square with personal experience. One in four Minnesotans cannot pay their bills, purchase cars, or pay for groceries? That’s bunk.

If you want to talk about houses, talk about houses. Why does everything need to be framed with respect to income?

I’m interested in whether there are enough physical buildings to provide shelter for each breathing body who finds themselves within the state’s boundaries. The census lists the number of units to be 2,517,248 as of July 2021, which is up 31,690 units from the 2020 Decennial census. Of course, not all of those units may be in use. Some may be vacant or second homes.

According to the 2021 census, the number of households in the state is 2,281,033. So on the face of things, it appears there are enough shelters for the residents.

But that brings up the issue of whether the physical structures are the right kind for the width and breadth of the households that are housed there. If every building is meant to accommodate a large extended family yet the population numbers denote all single individuals wanting to live independently, then there is a serious mismatch. This makes it necessary to know how many dwellings there are and what type of households they most comfortably accommodate.

And then of course one must acknowledge that the state of Minnesota is the fourteenth largest in this big USA territory. This may mean that there is a lack of structures in Worthington (down by the Iowa border) to house agricultural workers even though there is an abundance of well-built craftsman bungalows up in the mining country. So already it is clear that a more specific accounting of houses is necessary to keep on top of this issue of housing.

But what must be our most pressing concern? Who needs help today? (And not the quarter of the cost-burdened gobbly gook.) The public attention on this issue goes to the homeless with children. The estimates vary but single parents with kids need to be settled today. Not tomorrow. Those kids need to be lined up with a school district community that is dedicated to making it so worth the parent’s while to stay put, that they don’t move for the twelve remaining years necessary to get those children through the k-12 education. Those are the numbers that need the public attention.

Weekend report on Real Estate

It was a busy work weekend. I have several new buyers starting out who are anxious to start reviewing choices. Inventory remains low so we keep the parameters a little loose to get into more neighborhoods to test out how they feel. One party also visited with a builder. The pace at the model home was light but not lifeless. Another family was finalizing choices while we found out about the few lots which were left in the neighborhood.

My open house today ran from 11-1pm (trying to get ahead of the Vikings game at noon). The property is a fair-sized one-level-living twin home in a development of eighteen similar homes. There was steady traffic starting at 11:20. All but one couple were late middle aged couples at various stages of getting ready to let go of their twenty-year family home. Common sense says do it. And most of them will get around to it.

If in these closing weeks of 2022 there are families sitting talking to builder reps and couples lining up to transition to one-level living, then we’ll be in good shape for 2023. These shifts will free up properties of new buyers, drawing them out of their apartment.

Disjointed arguments about wages

A minimum wage is likely to be a topic of political banter for the foreseeable future. In Minneapolis, small businesses must pay an employee a minimum of $13.50/hr and for large organizations (more than 100 employees) the minimum is $15/hr. One tweet that went rolling by made the claim that a living wage should be enough to pay for housing. The possibility of these numbers working out is well beyond reality in a large urban area, but let’s still consider its feasibility.

Consider a household with a couple and a high school senior. If each of these individuals were meant to earn enough to pay a mortgage or rent and then they each could secure a dwelling. Does it really make sense that everyone who wants some type of employment for money is tied to a job that supports a house? Because we certainly do not have the number of units. The US Census reports that we have just over 2.5 million housing units available to us in Minnesota.

Yet the labor force in the state is quite a bit larger than that. According to the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics, as of October 2022, there are about 3,073 million workers out bringing in a paycheck. There is enough of a shortage of housing without turning another half a million people out to look for their own place.

The spectrum of wages in the private labor market represents payment for a spectrum of skills, dedication, and commitment. The well-intended people who want a living wage for folks are really talking about a certain set of individuals. Those people are ones who, through no fault of their own, are trying to support a family on just one job. This is an unfortunate situation that does deserve support. Not only for insufficient dollars but also the insufficient hours one parent can provide in other support services.

The poverty rate in Minnesota runs around 9%. People in this category will be well served by a variety of aides necessary to boost them back into a stream of the functioning community. And then in turn the rest of the community is better off. But the solution isn’t achieved by warping the system. It is done by additional aid, provided with respect and dignity, in times of need.

Happy Thanksgiving 🦃

I’m thankful for all the turkey preparers!

Maps are information Rich

These population maps are from Jonathan Schroeder who is a cartographer with the Minnesota Population Center.

First, Twin Cities. The big boom around central Minneapolis is impressive, but the outskirts still grew more. In between, it’s interesting to see that more neighborhoods grew than declined.

That wasn’t the case in the 90s, when most of the established neighborhoods lost population.

Nor was it the case in the 00s…

It was only suddenly in the last decade that neighborhoods grew *all over the place*, and central Minneapolis was distinctly the biggest pocket of growth.

I started this series last month to showcase @nhgis data (centers of population & time series) for #NACIS2022, but I was only able to give a glimpse in my talk. Sharing now while Twitter lasts!

Originally tweeted by Jonathan Schroeder (@j_p_schroeder) on November 18, 2022.

Twin Cities market, in a snap

Aggregate numbers in real estate are best at showing large-scale trends, and that’s why I like this snapshot summary of some home sale indicators. The impact of the mortgage interest rate fluctuation a few months ago did indeed take the edge off the bidding wars that had become the norm in the past two years. Prices are rising, but at a far lesser pace. Inventory is gaining a bit of traction- even though there are still far fewer properties for sale than in past. Days on market have ticked up just a bit so buyers can take a breath before having to write an offer.

As long as rates don’t squeeze the life out of the market, the new dynamics are favorable to the home selling process.

What was normal then, may not be now

In recent years a ton of political capital is being invested in promoting the idea that homes are too expensive and virtually out of reach for most Americans. This seems like an exaggerated position, so I went to the US Census to see if the information is corroborated with data. The Minneapolis-St. Paul Metropolitan area is a geographic area that enlarged its composition to include thirteen counties. For the purposes of this chart, I pulled just the original five-county area.

Comparing the total number of households (1,112,883) to the total number of housing units (1,170,643) leaves a generous surplus of 57,660 units. Of course, there is a need for a certain number of vacancies so people can circulate. But as long as there are vacancies it is difficult to make the argument that sellers and landlords hold a monopoly in the marketplace. As long as there are landlords with empty units then tenants impact the pricing through their choices.

Perhaps more importantly than availability is how the monthly cost of housing stacks up to monthly income. And in all three counties, the median debt-to-income ratios fall in what bank underwriters consider a comfortable range of 21-27%.

The cost of homes has indeed been on the rise. Many argue that the prices are simply regaining their position after plunging so deeply following the great recession. Perhaps the complaints that we are hearing so much about has more to do with the framing of where people think they should be able to live, rather than price.

If we go back one hundred years, families found shelter in properties similar to this one.

According to the tax records, this home has a foundation size of 660 square feet and a total above-ground living space of 1120 square feet. For a point of reference, that footage allows for a living-dining room, kitchen, and small room on the main level and a loft bedroom or perhaps two sleeping spaces upstairs as it does have a dormer window. The lot runs right along the railroad tracks and there is an outbuilding in the back of the property where they kept chickens.

I happen to know the history of this home. It was built in 1923 with insurance money. The original structure housed my grandfather’s family of seven kids and was destroyed when lifted off its foundation by a tornado in 1919. In all, forty-four city blocks in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, were destroyed. Families lived in a state of disrepair over several years until the funds came through for construction.

By mid-century, the one-level home (we call them ramblers in Minnesota) was the dominant style of choice. Huge tracks of land were parceled out into what became known as suburbia. Some would have you believe this was the result of a conspiracy, an evil plot to spread out and consume a lot of land. But the only force in play were families’ desires to live in two- or three-bedroom dwelling with one bathroom on a parcel they could call their own. Tour the new construction homes of today and you will note the conformity to consumer demand.

Both of these types of homes are available throughout the Twin Cities. Some are expensive, some are not. It all depends on their location. The dissatisfaction in the available housing seems to be about more than the structures of the homes. People seem to want to have more choices between areas. It’s not that there is no housing, it is that they feel the housing they aspire to is too expensive.

This story is compatible with what we see in the census numbers, but it doesn’t help those who desire a higher standard of housing. The solution here is to better match households with the neighborhood amenities which benefit them the most. Because what is acceptable at different stages of life will dictate where one finds the most suitable housing. And this should make people feel there is more value in their living situation.

The outcome of all this political interest in the cost of housing can be damaging. Recently the city of St. Paul established the most restrictive rent controls in the US. The data doesn’t support it. And already there are signs of disinvestment in housing projects. Activism without a cause always leads to inefficiencies.

The Blind Men and the Elephant

I seem to come across two types of articles about real estate. The first is straightforward but rather boring as it simply reports the latest price movements in a ticker-tape-announcement sort of way. The other is a much more complicated, rambling article which touches on every aspect of housing that one could imagine. These remind me of a parable which originates out of the Indian subcontinent. The story describes a handful of men trying to address an issue by groping at it from all sides. It goes something like this.

A group of blind men heard that a strange animal, called an elephant, had been brought to the town, but none of them were aware of its shape and form. Out of curiosity, they said: “We must inspect and know it by touch, of which we are capable”. So, they sought it out, and when they found it they groped about it. The first person, whose hand landed on the trunk, said, “This being is like a thick snake”. For another one whose hand reached its ear, it seemed like a kind of fan. As for another person, whose hand was upon its leg, said, the elephant is a pillar like a tree-trunk. The blind man who placed his hand upon its side said the elephant, “is a wall”. Another who felt its tail, described it as a rope. The last felt its tusk, stating the elephant is that which is hard, smooth and like a spear.
Wikipedia

Pricing and homelessness and house maintenance and building restrictions and greedy developers and disgruntled renters and building equity and housing density and parking and so much more can all be jumbled into one passage about, real estate. It’s too much.

We need some rules.

Most of the population of the area under consideration navigates and open market system of securing housing. They are as much of a price setter as the sellers, including the developers. Who has the upper hand in the market goes through cycles and it noted by things like time on market or number of properties taking a price reduction before receiving an offer. We’ve been in a sellers’ market for a number of years and people have seemed to forget that a buyers’ market will be here in due course.

But the brings up a second category of conversation. The number of dwellings versus the number of households in the area of interest is rarely printed. It seems like looking into this metric would be helpful. Otherwise, it is unclear what happened to reduce the dwellings or to increase the households and thus forcing the increased expense. It would also bring into better focus what groups of people maybe hanging onto unused properties. For instance, if the issue were that older folks had transitioned into assisted care yet couldn’t come to terms with letting go of their property, perhaps there would be some inducement to make that happen.

The third category is around how groups of people learn to live side-by-side. This brings in all that comes before a city council. There are, and rightly so, rules made at the state level as well. In Minnesota we have an intermediate level of governance, the Metropolitan Council, which controls the expansion of the metro. Logistically the number of layers of governance from an HOA to a city to the Metropolitan Council to the State has led to some significant inefficiencies. There is work here to be done to better coordinate these providers of public services.

On the flip side you have all the private activities that go into building new and maintaining existing structures. This makes up category four. The motivations and markets that drive these efforts reside in the traditional economic realm, and rightly so. Contractors, plumbers, electricians, homeowners, carpenters, landlords, banks, and so on all how this operates, and for the most part it runs well.

However, at some point, someone decided that category five, those that need help with their housing, should be the wards of the housing developers. I think it came out of the political language: “We need to build more affordable housing.” New construction is not affordable, it is the most expensive type of housing. This destined-to-fail concept was laid at the feet of those that construct buildings. The real conversation here is not how to fit xx many affordable (by who’s standards?) units into a new project. It is who and how will the entire public (city, state) pay to subsidize the rent for those who can’t pay for themselves.

The final conversation is about taxation. But that’s too complicated to tackle on a Friday evening. But maybe we can turn the elephants back into the jungle?

Bonus to those who move

Cities around the US are paying people to relocate to their town. Marketplace recently ran a success story out of Bemidji Minnesota. They featured two families who took the city up on the offer of $2500 to cover the move. It seems that is enough money to risk the relocation expenses. Bemidji is getting pretty far north, not to the Canadian border but definitely that direction.

I pulled the demographics just to give you an idea of the landscape and was presently surprised by two things. First- the median age is a lot lower than I would have guessed. (For a generation or more these towns were aging) And furthermore, births are exceeding deaths by almost two to one. This is quite a switch.

Bemidji has a total of 11,917 people and of those residents there are 5,547 males and 6,370 females. The median age of the male population is 25.3 and the female population is 30.8. There are approximately 585 births each year and around 304 deaths.
https://www.movingideas.org/bemidji-mn/

These two families cited the work/life balance, a change of the pace of things, as the reason for moving to a smaller community from Topeka and Phoenix. Of course, the costs across the board are lower, but the lifestyle change is another way of saying they recapture more of their time. They can use their free hours to raise more children, get involved in civic projects, or simply have more fun pursuing hobbies which enrich their lives.

Since many writers and ambitious folks chose to live in the big coastal towns there is often this assumed bias that everyone wants to live in NYC or San Fransisco or LA too, they simply can’t. The reality is that a $2500 bonus will get people to choose a much different way of life.

Why watch a ’58 film with Loren and Grant?

My husband always groans when I delve into classic films. But watching Sophia Loren and Cary Grant team up in an endearing romantic comedy in the film Houseboat was worth it.

Here’s why:

Powerhouse lead actors are typically cast in strong films.
It was produced in 1958 yet the two marriages are far from nuclear family.
The painted backdrops are hysterical.
The audience must play along when a derelict houseboat is renovated in a snap by a family with three kids.
The adults leave for an evening at the country club without a thought given to a sitter.
Group gawking at Loren is entirely acceptable.
Bonus shots of DC as Grant works for the State Department.

Moving Chains Paper- offering new housing opportunities throughout Helsinki

City-wide effects of new housing supply:
Evidence from moving chains
by: Cristina Bratu, Oskari Harjunen, Tuukka Saarimaa*

Abstract
We study the city-wide effects of new, centrally-located market-rate housing
supply using geo-coded total population register data from the Helsinki Metropolitan Area. The supply of new market rate units triggers moving chains that quickly
reach middle- and low-income neighborhoods and individuals. Thus, new marketrate construction loosens the housing market in middle- and low-income areas even
in the short run. Market-rate supply is likely to improve affordability outside the
sub-markets where new construction occurs and to benefit low-income people.

As far as why a paper, which many would think of as addressing common sense, needs to be written. This tweet best explains it best:

New paper on the city-wide effect of new housing supply in Helsinki. Impressively, researchers secured access to the Finnish total population register, and were able to prove that newly built homes enable "moving chains" and free up more affordable homes.https://t.co/VaWJlrHCDj
— Anya Martin (@AnyaMartin8) January 14, 2022

This might seem obvious if you’ve ever read the literature (this process is normally called ‘filtering’) or indeed if you’re a renter who has moved around a lot, but the theory gets a lot of critique from those who don’t like what it suggests about the need to build more…
… And because you need access to the whole population address history in order to *prove* that market supply frees up more affordable homes for lower income households, it’s hard for researchers to do (lack of data/privacy issues). So good to have this extra empirical evidence!
The paper also has some interesting findings on the role of social housing as well. Tl;dr all new housing supply has a good impact across the city. Lots of interesting charts too!
Get the feeling most of the people giving me reasons it’s wrong haven’t read the paper, since they are arguing against points that a) this paper doesn’t make, and b) are irrelevant to the findings of this paper 🙃
I’ve had people saying “housing in Helsinki is expensive, so this paper is wrong & we need socialism” AND “the reason housing in Helsinki is cheap is because of socialism”.
… the paper is not about what prices in Helsinki are. And it supports both market and public housing.

Originally tweeted by Anya Martin (@AnyaMartin8) on January 14, 2022.

The USPS provides neighborhood data

If you are looking for micro level data on a particular neighborhood, you’ll be happy to know that it is available curtesy of the United States Postal Service.

As a service to businesses who would like to mail marketing pieces to homes, the Every Door Direct Mail program allows you to search by mail carrier route to get a feel for neighborhood composition and level of income.

In this first screen shot the light blue line delineates a collection of 246 residents on Lake Harriet, one of the lakes in the Minneapolis Chain of Lakes. The average income of the occupants is reported at $142.89K (if you are from a coastal region this may sound average, but it is high after cost-of-living adjustments).

A couple of miles away, another mail carrier route shows a different density and income level. With 392 residents contained in a similar surface area, we can imagine smaller lot sizes. The adjusted income indicates more modest housing.

When working with big data sets, the details are often averaged out. A tool such as this one allows you to test the numbers and see if they are consistent across a larger area.

Or you can just use it to check on your neighbors!

Checking in on Harvard’s real estate report

In June the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard puts out a national report. Six months on, I thought it might be interesting to check in on a few of the trends.

If you were involved with anything around new construction in 2021 you were acutely aware of the steep uptick in lumber prices. By spring market builders were writing upcharge clauses into purchase agreements allowing them to carry that cost back to the consumer at the end of the build. This did not always go over well.

I called a lumber yard recently regarding a bid on some pre-stained poplar for a tongue and grove ceiling. The guy on the other end of the line said prices had edged down a bit but he thought this particular product was still carrying a 22 percent surcharge over a year ago. He couldn’t predict into spring but said they all hoped the prices would ease and availability increase.

The other big news of the last eighteen months is the continued pressures on price. Even coming into the winter months new listings are selling in multiple offers. That said, I’m glad the study includes the second chart which shows how the cost of housing lines up with the income available to homeowners to make their payments. The cost of housing is not out pacing the potential to pay for it, but simply keeping pace. This should ease concerns around bubbles.

This last chart was news to me. I was not aware that new construction trends have been above historical averages for over a year. This is encouraging! I’d say we need an even bigger push for more units as millennials are finding their way to household formation. At least the numbers are trending upwards.

Several pieces of data that I would be interested in tracking is 1. how many units are idle and not in use 2. the trends for people aging out of home ownership making those units available, and 3. the number of units thought to be inhabitable. All of these numbers would help track ongoing availability of shelter.

Daybreak on the love of children

Daybreak on Christmas day was spectacular. The glittering golden beams broke the horizon with an explosion of color. How appropriate on the anniversary of the birth of the world’s most famous baby; the baby born in a manger; the baby who grew into a man who would bear the sins of His people upon a cross.

No matter whether you believe in this tradition, you can’t deny the mystery and magnitude of the feeling which takes hold of a parent upon the birth of their child. “Nothing like it,” one would say. “I thought I knew love when I married my spouse, but I had yet to lay eyes upon my child.” The magical relationship between parent and off-spring is undeniable and universal.

Yet for a generation or more, the west has argued against children, against large families and the hubbub that surrounds them. Too expensive. That’s the first objection. Some sort of calculation which tallies the dollars necessary to raise and educate a child. Stratospheric.

Too time consuming! Babies will change your life. True. But I don’t see how it is a bad thing to be transformed from a self-consuming single to a service provider to the next generation. Those sweet babies who, when you are 75, 80, 90 plus years of age, will be responsible for the upkeep of the world.

You will have to forgo your career, your passion, your ambitions! Maybe you could manage with one, but certainly not more. A combo of one child to two parents is doable. But a family would be too great a sacrifice. Then the children control the agenda not the adults.

And on it goes. It’s not the right time; they are not the right sort of parents; there are already too many people in the world! Reasons not to pursue the one extraordinary and unrelenting bond in the world- the love between a parent and a child.

A college educated adult maybe employed from the age of 22 to age 66, or over a 44-year time frame. To get a gaggle of kids through the high intensity young-years time of life might round into twelve or fifteen years. Then they are off with friends freeing up time for other pursuits. A third of the working career years are laden with child duties. Seems like a fair trade for help in the senior years, rather than a sacrifice.

Children are beneficial in the long game. We can find all sorts of motives behind a generation who only considered the short term. But that doesn’t matter now. It’s a new day and the beauty and mystery and enduring love between parent and child is a premise to hold onto.

Grateful for family

Sounds trite, doesn’t it? Of course you are grateful for your family. No more of a surprise than you love your kids, as fiercely as I love these two beach bums:

The term family is often reserved for those with whom we share a household. The people who do the housework for the daily routine of food and lodging. But as we sat around our Thanksgiving meal this evening it was clear that the genesis of our lovely circumstances originated beyond the four sitting at the table.

Being thankful for good health, for example, cannot only be a tribute to our personal efforts. One must reach back and be thankful for all the good genes that have been passed down through the generations. And the habits of selfcare that were taught with quaint proverbs, like an apple a day keeps the doctor away, didn’t just pop into the family routine one day. But saying isn’t doing. Those who came before also showed us they were willing to pay more for fresh fruits and vegetables; they were willing to dedicate resources to better health.

The multigenerational passthrough of profitable habits doesn’t stop there. When parents establish the custom of aiding with advanced education, the gift is meant to tumble on down to the next generation and then onto the one after that. The payment of tuition is done with long views over a whole life, not short returns.

But when these habits of investing across and over people, of participating in a system of beliefs and not of immediate returns, then we are no longer talking about family as a gathering of four people. When choices have been thought through and tradeoffs considered; when families have evaluated outcomes and set norms; when all this circulates through decades worth of relations, then we are talking about something else. We are talking about family as an institution, as an economic force.

That is the sense of family we were grateful for this evening.

I do to the Individual, or to the Union?

My daughter came home from high school the other day questioning the appropriateness of a teacher (a math teacher nonetheless) in some way incorporating ‘obey thy husband’ in a conversation with a female athlete. Daughter was sure this was out of line. But as in many cases, the story was missing context. The teacher had switched out his identity. He was on the field as the liaison for the high school’s chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Still, daughter was a little taken aback by the submissiveness language.

I shared my own story of how decades earlier, while still in the wedding season of life, I had sat up a little straighter in the pew when the bride utter the Missouri Synod version of the Lutheran marriage vows. ‘Obey my husband’ is still pegged in there between ‘honor him’ and ‘keep him in sickness and in health.’ For the most part the Lutherans church keeps in sync with current trends. Yet this blanket submission seemed as archaic as gilded lettering on a manuscript, then as it does now.

As the teacher was working outside of his day job, he was within his prerogative to reveal a small part of his belief system. My kids had experienced an elementary school era of celebrating every other religion by name, while deferring to their own as a holiday celebration. This has conditioned them to think something is amiss if anything Christian is actually voiced above a whisper. The act has become paramount to a missionary conversion of some sort.

But what bugs me more than propping Christianity in a dark corner, is this attention to minutia which distracts from form. The quick objection to a few words of a ceremony takes away from the conversation of what it means to marry. This drilling down of a few words under the assumption that they will fasten a female’s will to some objectional subjugation is a distraction from the more fruitful conversation of the nature of the binding of two individuals in marriage. What does it look like when offset within a community of mutual cooperation? What form do they become when unified before friends, family and God?

I think it would be helpful to view the new couple and ensuing family as a grouping, a new unit. And within that unit the work its members will get done will more likely be based on skill than specific assignment. But from the outside what that unit consumes or contributes is based on the collection of their activities. If they choose to present their views to the outside world by giving one partner the microphone, this would seem to benefit all of them.

No matter the form of a grouping–a couple, a minority, an association– there are frequently others, on the outside, trying to manipulate their public voice. Trigger topics are metered out to stop conversation about form, the basic building blocks of social arrangements. Those few short words, or few awful people, are set out to distract, so folks divert their time to manufactured issues. And in the confusion their voice is stolen.

It’s mine!

There’s a good chance that upon strolling by a pre-school classroom you’ll hear: It’s mine! The voice comes from a toddler who is grabbing the Preshool Playhouse plastic airplane from one of his chums. Ah- the battle over ownership starts young. There is a natural inclination, for some more than others, to own something. To be in charge of something. To have control.

Ownership around the house can be communal. The appliances don’t all have coin slots as the washer and dryers do in apartment buildings. Who ever is a part of the household makes use of most things. Perhaps within the confines of a bedroom, private items are stored which are off limits to the general public of the home.

Ownership of the upper-pay, prestigious jobs once belonged almost exclusively to ivy league educated men. Feminists from the 60’s and 70’s would have you believe that these jobs were public to all white men. But this is rather silly when you think about it. The club was a much smaller subset of men who smoked fat cigars in dark paneled rooms and who bought suits from the same clothier and who all shot below 90 on eighteen holes.

Isn’t the tussle over abortion about the ownership of the fetus? To whom does the baby belong: the mother or society?

Say hoodlums set up shop in a local park. Pretty soon none of the neighbors use the park as they are adverse to being mugged. The ownership of a wooded greenspace, that once belonged to a city, now is captured by a subset of the city. And they are not likely to relinquish their place of business voluntarily.

Ownership of a home maybe noted to a couple on the title in the county records, but all that space in between the homes is a joint concern. The effect even edges in over the maintenance of the front yards. Rules about grass height, number of vehicles in the drive all point to a view that the aesthetic of the street is owned by the neighborhood.

The Armed Forces will set you up with an education which you internalize for a private benefit, but not before you serve for four or six years. That way your employer can capture some of those employable skills. Other employers will match a stock option retirement investment in order to tie their employees into an ownership mentality.

The divorce courts have a lot to say about ‘That’s mine!’ Whereas each partner of the matrimonial union may be viewed as an individual by their employers, the court looks at the household when giving guidance on who owns what. You see you can be an individual as well as one member of a group all at the same time. And your ownership position maybe influenced simultaneously by this duality.

Ownership types are good to understand. Ownership by the individual or a group operate under different maintenance plans and incentives. So not only do we need guidance on the dissolution of group ownerships, but we can also be more effective in all sorts of trade once by utilizing the appropriate incentives and mechanisms for each type of proprietorship.

Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet

Taking full advantage of the long weekend here in the US, I read my softback copy of Maggie O’Farrell’s new book lakeside. It’s easy to find praise for this fictional story of Shakespeare’s domestic life in Stratford-upon-Avon, so I won’t dwell on the wonderful prose and endlessly interesting historical references.

Since this is a blog about home economics, I can’t help but key into the detailed transactions which are laid out in the book. Specifically the family relationships and obligations which landed Shakespeare in London. For without the The Globe to provide the stage, and the city to provide the audience, it is hard to say how the bard’s career would have evolved.

As a lad of eighteen, Will marries a woman eight years his senior. She has a dowry and a faithful brother to support her wishes. He comes from an established merchant family that has some financial struggles. They are both odd ducks-

Will’s mother Mary is required to make room for her daughter-in-law, to take her into her household and help with the care of the grandchildren. And it is Mary who objects the loudest at the plan for Will to set up an extension of the family glove business in London.

…At which Mary could say three things: Agnes is no girl. She is a woman who enticed a much younger boy, our boy, into marriage for the worst possible reason. And: You forgive her too much, and only because of that dowry of hers. Don’t think I don’t see this. And: I am also from the country, brought up on a farm, but do I run about the place in the night and bring wild animals into the house? No, I do not. Some of us, she will sniff to her husband, know how to conduct ourselves.

“It would help matters,” her son is saying, airily, insistently, “help all of us, to expand Father’s business like this. It’s an inspired idea of his. God knows things in this town have become difficult enough for him. If I were to take the trade to London, I am certain I might be able to “

Before even realizing that her patience has slipped out from under her, like ice from under her feet, she is up, she is standing, she is gripping her son by the arm, she is shaking it, she is saying to him, “This whole scheme is nothing but foolishness. I have no idea what put this notion into your father’s head. When have you ever shown the slightest interest in his business? When have you proved yourself worthy of this kind of responsibility? London, indeed!

The plan had been instigated by Agnes’ faithful brother. There is some outstanding obligation between the families which allows him to influence the father, to allow for Will’s departure. It is the extraction of a chit which he plays on behalf of his sister.

What if William Shakespeare, thought to be the greatest dramatist in the English language, had not made it to London? What if his life had been denied matrimony and fatherhood? What if one of the players in the economic distribution of inheritance and obligations to marriage and family had set an imbalance in the transactions?

What Maggie O’Farrell accomplishes is a flushing out of the possible infrastructures which may have contributed to a brilliant man reaching a pinnacle of performance.

Housing as a system not a product

I’m really looking forward to this paper, “The Effect of New Market-Rate Housing Construction on the Low-Income Housing Market”, by Evan Mast. Here’s the abstract:

I illustrate how new market-rate construction loosens the market for lower-quality housing through a series of moves. First, I use address history data to identify 52,000 residents of new multifamily buildings in large cities, their previous address, the current residents of those addresses, and so on for six rounds. The sequence quickly reaches units in below-median income neighborhoods, which account for nearly 40 percent of the sixth round, and similar patterns appear for neighborhoods in the bottom quintile of income or percent white. Next, I use a simple simulation model to roughly quantify these migratory connections under a range of assumptions. Constructing a new market-rate building that houses 100 people ultimately leads 45 to 70 people to move out of below-median income neighborhoods, with most of the effect occurring within three years. These results suggest that the migration ripple effects of new housing will affect a wide spectrum of neighborhoods and loosen the low-income housing market.

I checked at the Hennepin County Library, my resource for such things, only to notice on the National Affairs posting says that it is forthcoming in the Journal of Urban Affairs.

What is exciting about the author’s approach is that it illuminates the idea of housing, not as a one time purchase product, but as a system through which people cycle over the course of time. You would no longer have any interest in your student housing, for instance, but it was entirely adequate at the time you lived there.

To look at housing as a system acknowledges that people have different housing needs at different stages of life. Migration is a positive activity, to achieve better circumstances. This counteracts the politically popular concept of “building affordable housing” which is an oxymoron as new construction is the most expensive form of housing.

With this understanding of a system, the efforts to improve people’s lives maybe implemented at each stage by matching them to the community which offers the best support for their interests. By viewing housing as a system of placement within a community, more people can become community workers, and traders of services which benefit the group.

There’s no ‘i’ in housework

Aussie household are in turmoil after their census included this simple request.

“In the last week did the person spend time doing unpaid domestic work for their household?” the ABS asked.
Perth Now

I mean seriously, is there a better dog whistle to get couples yapping at each other over the perennial debate about who does what around the house?

“Include all housework, food/drink preparation and clean-up, laundry, gardening, home maintenance and repairs, household shopping and finance management.
The ABS asked Australians to estimate the amount of hours they’d spent on such unpaid work, offering five options ranging from none to more than 30 hours.

Social media was alight with debates on who gets credit for what in the ongoing partnership of domesticity. But I question if sorting by individual is more useful to a national government than sorting by household.

Call me nostalgic but I remember when people used to comment: “The Johnsons, they do so much for the community.” There was a time when couples were considered as a unit. And when you think about such things as unpaid work, a longer time frame, one that would allow each person to perform different duties at different times, makes more sense.

I know of several men, now in the twilight years of life, who were completely preoccupied with work-for-money jobs in their younger years, but are now fulltime caregivers to their spouses. There was a time when they would have been disdained for doing nothing within the household. Now they devote a majority of their time to enabling their household to stay together.

From the government’s point of view I would think this is the interesting unit of analysis: the household. How much time in unpaid labor is required to nourish a household? to educate, to retain good health, to keep in secure mental balance? These household averages could be quite useful.

Instead the census question seems to be provoking some fudging of the numbers.

Since last night, there have been countless reports of family rows over who spends the most time on chores — from who does the bulk of the cooking to whether putting your own dishes away can be used to bump up your “unpaid employment” tally.

But maybe more importantly it reinforces the ‘i’ in an arrangement that is about the ‘we.’

Chaucer’s henpecked husbands

The husbands portrayed by Chaucer are uniformly unromantic and pathetically unheroic. Rarely in literature have males been so roundly ridiculed, so easily cajoled, and so blandly cuckolded. Chaucer’s married men are regularly henpecked, humiliated, beaten, betrayed, and exhibited as objects of defenseless servility. In a few rare instances-“The Knight’s Tale” and “The Franklin’s Tale” are two of them-Chaucer allows that marriage and love can flourish in the same bed. But the poor husband is at peace only if he relinquishes the role of master and remains a servant to his termagant spouse.
Lives of the Poet’s, Louis Untermeyer

Apparently the macho male, master of his family, is a more modern creation. From the 1300’s to today, something changed in the power structure of marriage. Domestic power in the Middle Ages swilled around the women. And Chaucer didn’t mince words on how its influence appeared in the fairer sex.

Women as women, however-and, in particular, women as wives were terrible realities. They were not merely shrewish but shameless, garrulous, greedy, disloyal, and licentious. Worse, they were united in an un written but universally recognized conspiracy to subject their husbands to every possible indignity. The husband of Philippa cannot be definitely identified with the creator of The Canterbury Tales, but it is unlikely that a happily married author would speak so scurrilously of the marital state and take obvious pleasure in so many humiliating incidents, grimly detailing the triumphs ofSo wifehood and the ignominious capitulation of the woman’s miserable partner.

In the 600 years since Chaucer is thought to have wrote The Canterbury Tales (around 1380) household power dynamics made a mighty shift. Now that women have come back into their own, maybe it’s time to be on the watch once again for the hen pecked husbands.

Fenced In

Lack of progress is often addressed with the ‘we can do better’ call to action. Things will get better if we just man the boat and check the weather. There is an assumption that everyone is sailing on the same winds. When in fact, there are people in the boat tacking against the wind or dropping the sails completely.

The naysayers can have the best intentions in mind. The naysayers can further the direction of the journey by making others fight for it, define it even further than they had originally considered. The naysayers help refine decisions. But sometimes the naysayer simply sink the ship.

Fences, a play written in 1985, is set in a familial scene where a father naysays his son’s ambitions of becoming a ball player. It didn’t work out so well for him, he reasons, so success will elude his son as well. He will save him the pain. Or will he? Does a father use his power as an adult out of faithfulness to old anguishes, or is he truly acting to cushion his progeny from life’s hardships?

The playwright, August Wilson, doesn’t render judgement.

But anyone who has been around a decade or more knows, to misuse a position of power is to tread away from progress not towards it. In this story, father derails a chance at a football career, so son leaves home and makes good in a military life. You might say he overcame his naysaying father, but at the expense of any further family support through early adulthood. You might say son was better off without them, but at the expense of their greater community.

Wilson, who wrote this Pulitzer prize winner while living in St. Paul, provides more examples of how social exchanges can fence in a family. In business, once the money runs out, no one shows up for work. The business shuts down. In family, chits and obligations can continue to pile up. When left outstanding others must step up to pay the bills. And then possibly others still.

Timing a move

People move households a variety of times throughout their lives for a variety of reasons. Depending on your data source, Americans move every 7-9 years, with more frequent moves in young adulthood and more sedentary behavior in later life.

This makes sense. As folks move through different stages of life, both from an income stand point and a lifestyle standpoint, they want a different combinations of neighborhood amenities. These are not questions of ‘good’ things versus ‘bad’ things. These are simply mixtures of choices.

When you are young you may want to live near entertainment and restaurants. Once there are kids in the household, going out to shows and restaurants quickly takes a back seat to prioritizing daycare, schools, and after school activities. Stability of residence can be important at this stage as rearing children benefits from consistency.

If the norm is to move, to seek out new living arrangements that better suit new objectives, than wouldn’t incentives that lock people into a location be holding them back? Financial incentives such as rent control do exactly that. It discourages mobility.

And I’m not saying people who need help shouldn’t still receive help. I’m saying that paying people to live in the same set of living circumstance through all stages of their lives goes against the norm. Which leads one to believe it is a drawback in the long run, for a perceive protection in the short run.

More of that please

I listened in on a rent stabilization presentation today (another name for rent control) as it is an issue that is being brought before Minneapolis voters this fall. The Center for Urban and Regional Affairs did a nice presentation covering the issues.

Minneapolis’ population has gone from 382K in 2010 to an estimated 430K today, for an increase approaching 48,000 residents. Given all the gloom and doom around the decline of center cities back twenty years ago, this should be reason enough to celebrate. This growth was also achieved without substantial rent increases.

But the most optimistic data came from this slide.

Look at the income increases amongst the BIPOC population. Doesn’t it look like an increase of in excess of 25% between 2017 and 2019? Nice. Though as fantastic as that is, there is more work to do to bring those numbers even further along (and celebrate along the way).

I say–more of that please.

Don’t prop up wages–combine households

Biden’s infrastructure plan includes $400 Billion to fund home based care for boomers so they may age in their homes. Several aspects of this expenditure strikes me as errant. Borrowing money to pay salaries is not infrastructure, it is a subsidy. It seems about as unwise as mortgaging your house to pay your gas bill. At some point your heat gets turned off and you loose your house.

Part of the plan is to extend care provisions to less wealthy people. I don’t find this problematic. It’s the part where in home care givers wages are supplemented. These folks are paid in the $12/hour range as the work is simply about oversight, and basic needs. The administration does not feel this is an adequate life wage for a worker, and for that reason it should (the moral imperative should) to be augmented with tax dollars.

Although all home care workers care in some capacity for the elderly and disabled, workers vary widely in their training and educational level. The $12 an hour wage cited in the Biden job plan refers to workers also known as home health aides, nursing assistants, and personal care aides, whose work does not require education beyond a high school diploma.
https://www.businessinsider.com/bidens-400-billion-for-home-care-wages-will-affect-the-fragmented-industry-2021-4

Creating a working wage job that does warrant being a working wage job takes on a shine of a planned economy.

Let’s consider another scenario. What if the home health workers raised their wages, and charged more to the boomers for their services. Families of the elderly may decide it’s not worth having grandma and grandpa live alone in a 3000 square foot home, and every month pay the utilities to basically store a lifetime of possessions. At this new rate of care, maybe it would be best if the eldest daughter(or the youngest son, or whoever is best suited) took in mom and dad. More than likely, when these now octogenarians were children, some lived in multigenerational homes.

Think of what happens as households combine. We have many more single family homes available to sell and the price of housing stays within reach of the moderate middle class. Instead of spending infrastructure money on salaries, spend it on helping families retrofit their homes to accommodate intergenerational living. Instead of keeping houses off the market and driving up housing costs, release the boomer’s single family homes back out into the market.

An instance vs a life-time

The world of Twitter and Instagram promotes the power of a snapshot. It’s a small-package delivered to pack a punch. Not only is it how a lot of information is disseminated to audiences in the millions (in small frame, limited view, no historical placement setting) but has also become the most popular vehicle of public debate, or hollering.

Recently there has been lot of admonishing of our north star state with data claiming Minnesota has the largest achievement gap between majority and minority populations. Let’s consider how this datagram could mean something good instead of assuming it means something bad.

If Minnesota abruptly welcomed a large group of immigrants with no English language skills to the state, the state would be celebrated as humanitarian and good. But of course, for a number of years (how many? ten? a generation?) Minnesota’s numbers for minority education performance would be affected, as not knowing a language is a serious impediment to learning. That makes Minnesota a bad place for minorities.

Minnesota also achieves very high performance amongst children with long time residency, which makes Minnesota is a good place to live. But of course this exacerbates the difference between scores with those who have come more recently, less well equipped, which once again makes Minnesota a bad place for disparities.

It is like the comic strip with an angel and devil on each shoulder whispering their arguments in each ear. Each little creature gesticulating wildly while the face between them looks comically confused.

Raj Chetty is an economist at Harvard who studies, among other things, equality of opportunity over time and place. After all, what we want is a culmination of activity to produce a result. One time snapshots capture a measure at a particular time. A piece of information. They are woefully barren of any wisdom.

His research shows that the Minneapolis area is in the lead among large cities in cultivating the greatest income growth for children of poor families, by age 26.

The issue of time and setting must be made part of any half intelligent conversation about these issues. The public goods a city provide can’t possibly be evaluated in moment-in-time snapshots. And people who to try to navigate this path are more likely activists out to promote one point of view, not for a public benefit, but for their private initiatives.

Sorting

The national conversation around inequality is grounded in measuring an individual’s income or wealth. I question if this is really the way we want to sort the players in order to get down to the nuts and bolts of our concerns.

Many of those in the one percent are recent superstars: ball players, rock stars, blockbuster actors. None of the ones who come to mind are set to receive an inheritance. Derek Jeters of NY Yankees fame, qualifies as a one percenter with a reported $5 mil/year salary. His parents are not from the super rich stratosphere, nor are quarterback Russell Wilson’s (35 mil/yr), nor Serena Williams’ (78 mil/yr).

The purpose of a free and open society is for folks to be able to move between social and financial groups. If the majority of the one percenters are the first in their families to enter this income bracket, that is a win for the country not a loss.

There are plenty of examples outside of sports franchises and Hollywood too. Many of the tech giants don’t come from substantial wealth. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk all come from professional parents, but seemingly not one percenters. And Oprah (315 mil/yr) isn’t the only self-made woman that came from a modest background. There are plenty of self-made rich women in the US.

It is true that the wealthiest women in the US are beneficiaries of family fortunes. “Eight out of the 10 richest women in America are descendants or widows of the founders of some of the biggest companies in the country – from Walmart to Apple to Mars candy.” And I’m sure there are one percenters of the male persuasion who have lived a life of financial opulence.

It seems to me, however, that it is uncommon for family wealth to make it much past the second generation. Entrenched wealth is what we find objectional. Movement of people between the income brackets is desirable. It is the way connectors can move between groups and link resources to talent.

So I suggest we talk in terms of coupling parents and children. The greater difference between their life’s circumstance the healthier the environment. Taken together, as a grouping, and then ranked, will give a better snapshot of how income is stacking up across the country.

I realize there are already inter-generational studies of income, but these focus on upward mobility. These are concerned with lifting people out of poverty. While this is one aspect to consider, moving people up from low income to higher income bracket, I consider the reverse to be of equal importance.

Children of parents with financial means are best able to be entrepreneurs as there is greater financial security in their backgrounds. Friends and family usually fund the first round of investment in a start-up. Children of parents with means can afford to tinker in a garage, be creative, invent something new.

So as important as it is to couple generations for upward mobility, it is also important to see whether those with means are helping the next generation invest their work in progress and the arts. For all these reasons I thinking sorting bi-generationally reveals more insights into the financial status of our communities.

Housing as Infrastructure

Biden’s 2.5 trillion infrastructure plan has supply side incentives for getting additional housing up and running. The push is provided by grants to those who will eliminate restrictive zoning laws.

The fact sheet goes on to describe this zoning plan in two sentences, as follows:
CNS News

Eliminate exclusionary zoning and harmful land use policies. For decades, exclusionary zoning laws — like minimum lot sizes, mandatory parking requirements, and prohibitions on multifamily housing — have inflated housing and construction costs and locked families out of areas with more opportunities.
President Biden is calling on Congress to enact an innovative, new competitive grant program that awards flexible and attractive funding to jurisdictions that take concrete steps to eliminate such needless barriers to producing affordable housing.

The City of Minneapolis rezoned the entire city in 2019 to allow for multi-family dwellings across the city. What was discovered however, is that there are still many additional rules in place that restrict developers from completing the task. Things like height restrictions and underground parking. As most of the requests thus far have been in the high demand neighborhoods, the planners seem disinterested in working out the kinks.

The persistent thought that development for the wealthy is a negative, not a positive, continues to restrain people in power from acting.

The city gets full credit, however, for bringing back some old school methods of diversifying the composition of household formation. In November of 2019 a change in zoning was approved to allow for intentional housing clusters. This is a similar set-up to a rooming house where residents share a kitchen and one or more bathrooms.

The intentional community cluster development ordinance allows nonprofit organizations, government agencies or healthcare agencies to create collections of small housing units (tiny homes) and a common house or rooming houses with shared facilities on a city lot that is at least 10,000 square feet. The developments are allowed in any part of the city with the exception of industrial zoning districts.

Most recently, the county in conjunction with Avivo, a local non-profit, created “Avivo Village, an indoor community of 100 secure, private dwellings or “tiny houses” created to provide shelter to individuals experiencing unsheltered homelessness, has opened in Minneapolis’ North Loop Neighborhood.”

And the council continues to push through additional changes.

A few days ago “the Minneapolis Council Business, Inspections, Housing and Zoning Committee approved a provision that would remove language from the city’s Housing Code regarding occupancy requirements. Currently, the city’s Housing Code limits occupancy by restricting dwellings “to one family that must be related by blood, marriage or domestic partnership.”

All this undoing of how housing is built and used in the city is a start to allowing more people move into more space. More units leads to lower costs. But it is also necessary to keep the history of such restrictions close at hand. The reasons constituents blocked rooming houses were because they became problem spaces. So what’s the plan to prevent this from happening?

To revive old systems and proclaim them to be new solutions without any consideration of their history seems shortsighted. They do provide lesser expensive housing. But there needs to be an active and on-going companion piece to keep the public from turning on these ‘new’ solutions again, down the road.

Deals to be had

The condo market continues to have growing inventory in this fast hectic market. (Or maybe part of the market is hectic because condos are being ignored.)

Either way, this won’t last forever folks! The extra inventory allows for better selection and better pricing. But in that funny way markets work, this opportunity will be taken for granted until it’s gone. Then there will be regrets.

Example of ADU (accessory dwelling unit)

If you’ve been curious about accessory dwelling units–just a fancy name for an apartment on top of the garage- there’s a home for sale in Minneapolis that has one. The market has been hesitating a little bit with it as it has been on the market a week already, which is uncharacteristically long for a home in this condition.

The listing is offered by Lake Sotheby’s Realty and a full set of photos is found here.

Post Covid, what will be different?

Working from home will be just one of the inevitable changes that springs from the pandemic lockdown of 2020. At home, there will be a better understanding of domestic life. The demands of combining to work for pay with work for children has put in contrast two different types of work. The new perspective should facilitate tackling busy family life. But how about some others? What else will change?

Family formation appears to be on the rise amongst Millennials. Pre-pandemic Pew reports that only three in ten lived with family (a spouse and children), lagging behind other generations. But the recent mortgage application rates indicate an uptick in this cohort financing new home purchases. An extended stay with mom and dad may have hit a limit during the lockdown.

While some households are combining, others are coming apart. The New York Times ran an article in January providing testimonial of such things as the official statistics for divorce rates from last year are still unavailable. Lawyers, counselors, social workers, private judges all report an increase in activity. Perhaps the bright spot here is that 90 percent of the cases settled though mediation as a court time, in times of covid, is in short supply.

While the pandemic may extinguished the last flicker of love light for some couples, I have to think that all age groups are reflecting on the disadvantages of living alone. In Minnesota just under 30% of households are single person occupancy. Perhaps the stoic pride of self-sufficiency will take a back seat to the flat out desire for companionship. Zoom can make connections but nothing replaces the warmth of the human touch.

Human interaction plays into mental health, but I think an overall awareness of self-health will hover in everyone’s consciousness. After experiencing so much loss of life, loss aggravated by health risk factors, it seems like people will place greater value on looking after themselves. The most basic means of achieving this end is through food and diet and exercise.

An abundant use of parks and trails has opened up this avenue to fitness on several fronts. Due to all the walkers out and about, people don’t feel odd to go for a walk. People have discovered all the great trails nearby. People meet up and chat with neighbors on a walk, sometimes even cluster in driveways for that Thank God it’s Friday happy hour. It’s becoming a routine, a part of your day, a way to socialize. As well as exercise and a clearing of one’s head.

I also predict that the authority of science will no longer be given cart blanche in regulatory discussions. Whereas a loss of life used to trump all conversations, policy decisions during covid have forced the issue that there are trade-offs. It is time to unhinge the bolt across the gate which kept regulators in control of the conversations about health and welfare outcomes based on science. Many voices, particularly those in the industry at hand, deserve equal time to make a case in order for the system work properly.

It’s hard to believe we are coming up on the one year anniversary of being secluded from social life. A year, three hundred and sixty-five days, and we’re not done yet.

Suburban sprawl in the time of Jesus of Nazareth

The majority of the Greek Jews lived in the new section of the city which had sprung up on Mount Scopus outside the ancient walls, opposite the Sheep Gate. Accustomed to spacious houses, with gardens and colonnades, they could not find room in the old, crowded sections. The house of Miriam, sister of bar Naba, built in the Cypriot style, resembled a Greek temple; behind it was a garden, enclosed in a peristyle, and here she arranged frequent banquets for the leaders of the Greek-Jewish community of Jerusalem.
The Apostle by Sholem Asch

Try something new

The drum beating earlier in the week about cancelling student loan debt was abruptly muffled by the president. In response to Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass) proposal to forgive up to $50,000 in student loans:

“I will not make that happen,” Biden said when asked at a Milwaukee town hall hosted by CNN Tuesday night if he would take executive action on loan forgiveness beyond the $10,000 his administration has already proposed.
Biden Balks At $50,000 Student Loan Debt Forgiveness Proposal | HuffPost

Some people think student loan forgiveness falls into a moral category. Society has an obligation to advance citizens through education; that college is an extension of the k-12 necessity to set a youth up for a productive life. The debt should be waived on principle. Of course this gets a little messy post grade twelve, as vocational choices, and the education they require, vary tremendously. And for this reason I think free college will always be a non-starter.

But why waste good numbers when they are out there for consumption? The debt figures can be, and should be, put to good use. When aggregated up to the federal level they loose some nuance. But at the local level it maybe possible pull some levers and leverage a few social objectives at a time. The results maybe more interesting than a simple money transfer.

Case 1. Say there were two objectives on the table: student loan debt and career advancement. One would look for organizations at this intersection. There are hundreds of business associations in Minnesota. Local Chambers of Commerce might be first to mind, but there is the Iron Mining Association or the Minnesota’s Corn Growers Association or even local PTA’s. Say an association was given access to a pool of federal funds marked for student debt relief, with a catch. There is a trade involved. Once the Mining association, or corn growers, show proof of employment of a new-to-the-profession worker (for at least x-amount of time), then they can allocate relief to the student they deem eligible.

It’s a community grant (given to an individual) in exchange for making an effort to lift a worker up and into a new stage of professional development. Many of these associations have a history of giving out scholarships, and a process in place for evaluation. They are well regarded in their communities and have a reputation to protect in the administration of debt forgiveness.

The relief recipient advances economically from the removal of the debt. The business community can justify the extra work or training necessary to bring an inexperienced employee into their field. The new employee hopefully evolves to see the rewards of elevated employment and not just feel the demands of the additional expectations in a challenging position. All those who step outside their norms to make this happen find comradery with others not like themselves.

Case 2. Here’s another example. Say an elementary school attendance area is experiencing a sharp downward trend in enrollment–and the demographics confirm the trend to be long term. The risk of school closure is high. Closing a building is not only expensive for a school district, but the loss to a neighborhood can be devastating. Short term it brings angst to the families who now send their young children to a building out of the neighborhood. Long-term it can be difficult to reverse the negative impact from the closure.

Say the federal government allocated a pool of student debt relief money to the elementary school’s attendance area. Now imagine that there is a household with young children who would qualify to purchase a home in the area if a portion of student loan debt was forgiven. The local PTA in conjunction with a local mortgage bankers’ association could be in charge of distribution. This scenario leverages three objectives: debt relief, school support and housing.

Local control over distribution of funds could refine distribution in a way which engages incentives to accomplish other objectives within communities.

Valentine, Will you be true?

Despite all the shortfalls in American culture in the 50’s, one grossly overlooked foundational strength was community support for marital bounds. Sure– a lot of the outrage in the 60’s stemmed from strength of the marriage contract. Women were disproportionately dependent on their partners, due to male control of traditional economics within the family structure and the workplace. Cross-gender issues were squelched and hidden, leading to psychological detriments.

But as is still true today, activists needed to inflate the issues in order to have them recognized, filling the 60’s 70’s and 80’s with fervor for the dissollution of marriage.

Marriage and divorce in the US: What do the numbers say? (sas.com)

It’s wonderful to see the rates inch down in more recent decades. But I think there is a lot more work to do. The celebration of Valentine’s Day is about new love. A celebration of anniversaries and dedication to sharing the stages of family life with one partner is not only romantic, but provides vision to navigate family life with all its stresses and demands. Here’s to the Valentiniversary!

More measures that don’t add up

Cost burdened is the catchphrase of the day in housing. Over the last couple of years it has popped up everywhere. Articles posted on all sorts of sites use the phrase without specifics on how they came up with all their charts and graphs. Smart Asset was good enough to describe its methodology.

Data and Methodology
SmartAsset used Census Bureau data to determine the most and least severely housing cost-burdened cities. This data, which we found for 126 cities, breaks down residents into the following brackets based on the percentage of the total household income they are spending on housing: less than 20%, 20% to 24.9%, 25% to 29.9%, 30% to 34.9%, 35% to 39.9%, 40% to 49.9% and 50%. The data also lists the total number of households.
We took the number of households in each city paying more than 50% of their income on housing and divided it by the total number of households in that city in order to come up with the percentage of households that are severely housing cost-burdened. We then ranked each city based on this percentage. We also calculated the percentage of households in each city paying between 30% and 50% of their income on housing, but this did not impact the ranking.
Data comes from the U.S. Census Bureau 2017 1-year American Community Survey
Most and Least Severely Housing Cost-Burdened Cities (smartasset.com)

You can find more about the American Community Survey here. But I’m pretty sure the information about housing expenses is self-reported by the three and half million who receive the request.

As you do with ranking lists, I checked out my own community (childhood home of Senator Klobuchar no less) to see how we stacked up in the cost burdened arena. According to an extremely well regarded source of data and information to politicians and local officials, half of all residents of Plymouth, Minnesota are cost burdened. Seriously?

I’m not sure how this could be true for one of the more affluent parts of the western suburban Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area. So I checked another affluent area on the St. Paul side, Mendota Heights. Here it is reported that 75.4% of homeowners are cost burdened. Clearly there is an implementation problem with use of the data meant to determine those in need. More alarmingly, there it sits in bold bar graphs given to lawmakers and policy people.

But even if folks choose to pay thirty or even forty percent of their monthly cashflow for housing, who is the Census Bureau or the American Survey or HUD to say that it is too much? Consider these three scenarios.

I choose to live within blocks of my parents, even though their neighborhood is a little expensive. My parents are able to provide fulltime daycare for my toddler as well as before and after school care for my two elementary school children. Living in their neighborhood saves our family upwards of $2500/month.
I choose to live in the city which is noticeably more expensive than some first ring suburbs. This location allows me to take mass transit to work, shop and recreate. It’s easy and cheap and I don’t need a car. Between insurance, a loan payment and gas, I save $400-$500 a month.
I chose to live near my congregation despite the monthly rent being high in relation to my fixed retirement income. My apartment, however, is near my church and the fellowship is such a big part of my life. I am able to share transit to and from my doctor’s office which is close-by. Plus I feel safe.

(For some back of the napkin, points of reference, average rent in Plymouth is $1300. An income that is considered non-burdened (28%) is 4643$/mo. An individual is considered cost burdened (30%) at 4333/mo in income. A difference of $310. )

Evaluating housing based solely on monetary income and rent is grossly insufficient. Consumer housing choices are influenced -think back to your own choices- by all the services found in various neighborhoods. Each of these scenarios show how access to family help, transit infrastructure, and religious communities contribute people’s home economics.

Not only is the present methodology, (which is being projected in stereo as if on a national housing agenda of some sort) yielding reports declaring the poor rich as burdened, I argue the use of pecuniary measures, as the sole means of evaluating quality of housing, is starkly erroneous. If a ratio of rent to income is used (as it has been) as the primary driver in decision making, than less advantaged people will always be pushed into the least expensive rental markets. Surprising to no one is the market reality that these neighborhoods are lacking in support structures.

Home is your castle

A home is consider a private good–one that owned for one’s use and enjoyment. Its says so in the county recorders after all. It would follow that one could do whatever one wants with their home. Well almost.

That sidewalk, that runs along the street, you can’t block it. You have to let the neighbors walk their dogs and the kids to ride their bikes along it. And don’t be digging near any of the utilities that have easements across your lot to bring water, electric power and natural gas onto you property. If you wake up one morning (as in the photo) and there is a huge hole in your front yard, the city can do that too. The workers can dig down and see if your water connection to the street is leaking.

Ok- fine. The front yard has restrictions placed on it, but the backyard is all privately owed, to dig up and do what you wish with it. Not so fast. If you unearth an artifact from a native American tribe, it is not yours to keep. Despite being on your soil you maybe obliged to relinquish it for the public to enjoy and appreciate as part of their heritage.

But inside the house is all mine. Well, kind of. If you live in the state of MN than your spouse has rights to the home no matter if their name in on the title or not. Which isn’t a conflict, usually, as most couples jointly enjoy the fixtures attached to the land. It’s not like there is a penny slot to fill every time you toast a slice of bread, or the washer dryer is coin operated to divvy up the cost of its use. Couples and families use the features of a home in a public fashion, for all to enjoy.

So yes the home is primarily private to the person on the title. But there are all sorts of public interests that take a little nip out of ownership.

Some, like the utility companies, provide valuable, essential services. In fact the reliability of services, like high speed internet, can make an area more desirable. The reliability of a city to be responsive to snow removal and road maintenance can create increased interest in the neighborhoods they serve. Public utilities and city services are daily necessities, hence exhibit high impact. Whereas the likelihood of a pre-historic relic being dug up on a property is rare, and so, although the public has an interest, any practical impact is low.

These are just a few of the public interests in the very private investment of a home. There are many more besides the utility commissions, and the city utilities. There are a bunch of other public entities that make an appearance on your property tax bill. There are fees for police and firefighters, fees for school districts, fees for county services.

Your home is your castle. But your castle shares many commonplace interests with lots of other castles.

MN comes in at #2 to raise a family

According to research by Wallet Hub, here are the top five states in order:

Rank	State	Score	‘Family Fun’	‘Health & Safety’	‘Education & Child Care’	‘Affordability’
1	Massachusetts	60.88	9	10	3	6	21
2	Minnesota	60.57	14	5	8	11	5
3	North Dakota	60.10	33	7	2	14	1
4	New York	59.80	2	21	6	5	47
5	Vermont	59.16	40	1	5	27	4

Raising a healthy, stable family sometimes requires moving to a new state. And the reasons for moving are often similar: career transitions, better schools, financial challenges or a general desire to change settings. Wants and needs don’t always align in a particular state, though. For instance, a state might offer a low income-tax rate but have a subpar education system. However, families do not need to make these kinds of tradeoffs. They can avoid such problems by knowing which states offer the best combination of qualities that matter most to parents and their kids.

The column on the far right is title ‘Social Economics.’ The full report is here.

Probability title deed

In South Africa a start-up called Bitprop is helping with affordable housing by building and securing tenants for backyard rental units (in return for a percentage of the income stream from the rentals for a set number of years).

Our duties include locating investors, drawing up professional building plans, sourcing reliable local builders, and enforcing good environmental practices. Furthermore, we work with the homeowner to develop landlord, financial and entrepreneurial skills.
How micro property development could transform townships in a big way | OUR FUTURE CITIES

It is estimated that 30 million people in South Africa do not have formal property titles to their homes. So a significant outcome of the process is securing a recordable claim to the property for the owner.

Bitprop works to “Enable micro property development at a macro scale”. We want to prove that previously ‘invisible’ property assets, which are not recognised by normative legal or financial institutions, can be developed into valuable investment opportunities. We do this by taking each homeowner that we work with through the process of securing their title deed.
How micro property development could transform townships in a big way | OUR FUTURE CITIES

The focus is on generating income from the renters. But property ownership does more for homeowners including incentivizing repairs and improvements. Perhaps, more importantly, the titling process enables people to buy and sell their property more freely should their circumstances warrant a change. If Bitprop is as successful as they wish to be, they will create a valuable public good.

Our dream is that we do this so well—because we have the commercial incentives to do it well because if we do, the risk in our property investment goes down—that we, on a voluntary, private basis, start mapping land, step by step, and then we get the council to acknowledge this as a low-cost, digital- and- technology-based title deed.
20 Minutes With: Carl Sammeli, C0-Founder of Bitprop | Barron’s

This is a story to follow.

Book Club

One of the benefits of raising a child is that you get to follow them through their interests and endeavors. My college sophomore was required to tackle two novels for his class on colonialism: The Poor Man’s Son and God’s Bits of Wood. Feraoun is the product of French Algeria and Ousame is from Senegal, part of Afrique Occidental Francaise (AOF) until 1958. Both tell stories of the struggles of their countrymen and women during the era of New Imperialism.

Unlike the conversation of today, both authors describe many more groups than the simple division of colonial power and the colonized, of oppressor and oppressed, or of those who take what is not theirs and those who are left without. How exactly the goods, services and resources are shared and divided between all the players is a preoccupation for both men.

Details such as, 180 francs– the amount of Feraoun’s scholarship to Ecole Primere Superieure, and 100 francs–the amount he turns around and sends back to his family in Kabylia. Then there is 25 francs and a container of barley–the amount that shows his family’s extreme financial distress. And 600 francs–the amount the headmaster hands over to allow him to continue his education.

Both authors detail workplace struggles. Feraoun’s father leaves for a time to be a laborer in Paris. When a workplace accident lands him in the hospital he is able, after two attempts, to secure a settlement of $3000 francs along with a quarterly stipend. Ousame describes the 1947 railroad worker strike with specifics on pensions and wage scales and family benefits.

There is a counting amongst the women as well in the home life of the railroad workers. There is the rice that the local grocer is forbidden to sell them, and a fight with the french soldiers over a leg of mutton. Feraoun finds his financial obligations to his northern Algerian family growing as his sisters’ husbands leave them for greener pastures. He counts thirteen dependents on his teacher’s salary.

There are many groupings in these stories; there are the workers, and the women, and the missionary, and the soldiers, and the french educators, and the French who show up to help with the strike, and the elders who feel disregarded–all pulling in many different directions for people’s time, talent, and assets.

It’s as if these authors are trying to sort through two spheres of economic activity, particularly set in contrast by private affairs and public affairs, by looking after the individual and being obliged to the family, as well as by outsiders and insiders. And the good and the bad make an appearance in every cluster.

Without a doubt, the richness of these detailed accounts of choices is far more interesting than the conversations of today.

Home after Covid

Lots of folks are speculating about what the world will look like once people emerge from the Covid induced hibernation. Zoom, Teams and other internet mediums have shown how it is possible to run companies and services remotely. But will people use this flexible employment opportunity and choose to live elsewhere?

One way to consider this is to look at why people moved before Covid-19. Porch.com is a home remodeling site and tracks this information. On average people relocate every seven years, and people don’t take it lightly. As Porch explains:

Moving is a hassle. From boxing up one home to finding another, facing a move can feel like scaling Mount Everest. It’s no wonder Americans have been moving at decreasing rates since the 1980s. In fact, the moving rate in America reached its lowest in 2018 since 1948, when the U.S. Census Bureau began tracking moving rates.

Buyers diligently write out a list of wants and needs when they start their home search. Some of these criteria change of the course of evaluating all the amenities that different areas have to offer. One in four (on Porch’s sample of 1000) said that more space was the greatest driver for a move. Realtor Magazine broke the other reasons down by percentages:

Desire for a larger home: 26%
Desire to own, not rent: 19%
Downsizing: 12%
New job or job transfer: 11%
Desire for a better neighborhood: 9%
Separating from a significant other: 6%
Establishing own household (e.g. moved out of parents’ house): 6%
Desire to be closer to family: 5%
Desire for a shorter commute: 5%

Only 5 percent (said) they made a decision based on commute times. A job relocation prompts a greater response. Still–few buyers consider distance from employment as a significant determinant. Perhaps we should consider how many types of jobs are really affected by the ability to dial-in from a home office?

Anyone involved in the construction or maintenance of built structures (plumbers, sheet-rocker, bull doze drivers, HVAC contractors) will always drive to job sites. Then you have all the service providers who interact face-to-face and hence are tied to location such as k-12 school teachers and administrators, nurses and hospital staff, lab workers. People who build stuff like workers in a production plant are also anchored by their workplace location.

That leaves white collar jobs such as attorneys, accountants, mortgage underwriters, IT workers, architects, engineers and actuaries. Many of these jobs have already provided opportunities for their workers to work remotely. And as some of these jobs grow to include management and partnership opportunities, it is less clear that the full-time remote option would be available. A transition to more of a business ownership role would require better proximity to clients and/or employees.

I speculate that remote work won’t send homeowners off to new locations as much as their home’s floor plan. With more time spent at home, the functionality of their living space comes sharply into focus. Many will decide they need more space. Or it maybe the issue of how the space is distributed. An accountant might be fine with spending one day a week wedged in a cinder block space in the basement laundry room of a 50’s rambler, but becoming a full-time home office worker will demand a more comfortable office with appropriate buffers from family life.

This should make We Work types of built-place solutions more popular, especially in neighborhoods with smaller homes which are more difficult to expand due to limited lot sizes. Suburban neighborhoods may have more elbow room, but residents here may feel overwhelmed with the increased together-time. Whereas suburbanites used to enjoy their anonymity, perhaps this will diminish when a bunch of them no longer depart to their other lives across town. Those who seek the old sense of distance and privacy may shift out to the third tier suburbs and beyond.

Maybe the post-Covid environment won’t be about people moving away from their present communities as much as employers reaching across the country into a larger pool of talent. There will be community upsides to more folks working from home as well. Keeping people out of cars and airplanes will give back more time for family work, free up roads from congestion, and reduce pollution. Overall the great work-from-home experiment of 2020 will contribute to increased productivity in both the private and public spheres.

It’s not A Field of Dreams

According to NorthStar MLS, of the 699 duplexes or triplexes sold in the last year in Minneapolis only 14 of them were built after 1970. For fifty years this simple multi-family form of housing has more or less been ignored. They are few and far between in suburbs, undoubtedly for the same reason.

The numbers work in favor of affordability. Here is a developer’s breakdown:

So significant were the feelings against this type of housing that, despite having lifted single family zoning in Minneapolis earlier in the year, additional obstacles are preventing their creation. Restrictions such as building heights and parking throw enough of a question mark into the approval process, that developers are bailing on the idea before even approaching the planning commission.

Over the years I’ve heard of individuals using duplexes as their first steps to becoming real estate investors; then there was a story of elderly sisters going in together on a building so they could live out the remainder of their lives as neighbors. Small multi-family buildings fit right in with single family homes unobtrusively. It would be nice to see more of them.

Hillbilly Elegy

Like many Americans on Thanksgiving, we laid a rollicking fire in the hearth and watched a movie on an absurdly large TV. The feature film was Hillbilly Elegy, a Ron Howard film based on a true story. There is so much material here that is relevant to this blog: groups, public and private transactions, the externalities and the weighing of choices. The threads run fast and thick in this tale strung through several generations. I could fill a month of posts dissecting it all, but instead I’ll stick to just one scene.

JD Vance, the story’s author and lead character, has a tumultuous relationship with his mother played by Amy Adams (who did an excellent job as usual). The middle schooler asks to live with his widowed grandmother, Mamaw. The matriarch quickly starts to clip away at his juvenile delinquent friends and his poor school performance. But it isn’t the yelling nor the screaming nor the fist throwing that changes JD Vance’s perspective on his life and his future. It isn’t a hoo-ha in a shop over an expensive calculator or a potential run-in with the law.

The turning point for this youth, who eventually works his way to Yale Law School, occurs when he overhears a quite negotiation between his Mamah and the Meals-on-Wheels volunteer. JD listens as Mamaw makes a case to the volunteer for extra help in the care of her grandson. This plying of goodwill results in a handful of grapes, a pear and a snack size bag of chips. She brings the bounty back to their dinner table, slices a small chicken breast in two and tosses the chips his direction.

If you know anything at all about teenage boys, you know their stomachs are always begging for a refill. When the calculation of their predicament was tallied up in terms he understood, terms that made common and physical sense to him, the youth engaged. JD’s subsequent actions worked toward the goals that had been laid out for him, but only now he intrinsically understood.

The point is that everyone has to come to terms with their own trade offs and choices. No matter how much others (out of genuine concern or some protectorate fantasies) want to step-in and speak for another person, or another group; to make claims about what people need and all the should’s in the world that they should have; they simply can’t. To make productive choices, people have to understand the alternatives on their own terms.

Apparently the film is getting negative reviews (here and here) by many substantial outlets. I like what Amy Adams has to say in response:

Everybody has a voice and can use it how they choose to use it.

Maybe the open minded need to listen a little more closely.

Coming together

Politically outstate Minnesotans and Twin Cities urbanites maybe diverging, but demographically there are converging trends. Here’s #4 from MN Compass:

One theory offered to explain the tight housing market is that Covid has made it more precarious for this age group to complete a move; boomers who may have relocated to a new stage-of-life housing have stayed put. If true, then there should be a wave of availability coming up here in a few years in Roseville, Edina, Golden Valley and Mendota Heights.

Put me in title

In the is-it-private-or-is-it-public game, I agree that a home is a private good. The event which makes you a home owner is a closing, which in Minnesota, is usually held at a title company. On the chosen day the buyers and sellers sit down (pre-Covid) and the buyers sign up for a mortgage to finance the purchase while the sellers sign over a warranty deed. Done deal. No take-backs. The fees include a little state tax and filing fees so the documents are filed publicly in the county recorders office.

The process almost seems trivial but it so powerful. This singing over of a title and its public recording in a government office is the most significant feature of private wealth in the US system.

Interestingly, there are a whole assortment of local norms and customs revolving around closings across the United States. Most states either close at the table or over an escrow period. In Wyoming, however, real estate agents conduct the closings. Also specified and unique to almost every state is a foreclosure process. Most weigh heavily on consumer protection. And here is an interesting table breaking down all the nit picky processes and fees.

Owning a home is a staple of the American dream. Owning a home ties you to a community where you participate in measure of all public venues: public safety, pubic schools, public transportation, parks trails and the environment, governance and civic pride.

A public of Two

When I was young 50th wedding anniversaries were common. The local golf course was the venue for gatherings and cake, and for testimonials from friends and relatives. Stories about the young couple’s meeting and courtship, and then marriage and the crazy baby years, were spun out over the white table clothed tables. Maybe there were even stories of difficult times and persistence. In today’s world an announcement about an anniversary surpassing the 30 year mark is commented upon, oddly with: WOW! Congratulations!!

This most basic public of two, (as the property they share is available to them both and actions of one effect the health, wealth and well-being of the other) continues to be threatened by a considerable risk of dissolution. “About 90% of people in Western cultures marry by age 50. In the United States, about 50% of married couples divorce, the sixth-highest divorce rate in the world. Subsequent marriages have an even higher divorce rate: 60% of second marriages end in divorce and 73% of all third marriages end in divorce.”

You would think the benefits of a longer life would be an incentive for all those folks to stick together. The CDC reports: “Previous studies have found that married persons have lower mortality rates than unmarried persons, attributable to either selectivity in entering marriage (i.e., healthier people are more likely to marry) or health-protective effects of marriage, or a combination of the two (1,2). ” Even in the COVID numbers we find “strong and stable families seem to be more resistant to the pandemic.”

Things only get worse as people age and live alone which leads to a crisis of loneliness. In Minnesota the total number of housing units is 2,477,753. With the total population at 5,639,632 the average number per household ends up at 2.49. So everytime you can think of a household made up of more than two people, there is someone living alone. The estimates I saw came in at 20-23% of the population. That’s a lot of singles.

So what gives when the advantages of coupling are out there for all to see. I’m starting a list:

With both parties in the work force, the short term transactional nature of business sub-plants the long term ambitions of a social contract.
Fear of being duped -don’t take it.
The transactional measure of giving ‘enough’ should be replaced by the social measure of giving their best effort.
Lack of celebrations that recognize couples in front of an audience.
No standards for friends and family to support or constructively comment.
Avoid failing at marriage by not getting married.

The data proves that marriage is good for us. So why folks don’t invest a little more work in staying together is odd to me.

Changing Priorities in the Neighborhood

Crime has been on the rise since May of 2020. In Minneapolis more than 400 people have been shot and 64 killed so far this year. It’s common to hear residents say they know more people that have been carjacked in broad daylight than have contracted Covid-19.

One neighborhood is organizing to do something about it. When a building in their neighborhood was slated to become a Salvation Army run women’s shelter, the moms went into high gear. Their priorities had changed and the folks in Near North weren’t going to have bureaucrats telling them what they needed.

Residents were vigorously opposed. A Mother’s Love went door-knocking in a multi-block radius of the Gordon Center and found no one knew about the proposal. The Northside Residents Redevelopment Council—the official neighborhood association—filed an injunction to halt the process.

Council member Ellison showed up. Elected in 2017 on the promise “to imagine a future for the North Side authored by North Siders,” he apologized for poor public engagement and encouraged constituents to lay out their concerns. “I don’t at all take skepticism of this project as, like, an attack on homeless women,” he assured them.

Frustrated residents pulled no punches. There were already three homeless shelters within a mile of the Gordon Center, yet the North Side had been without a sanctuary for at-risk youth since the 1980s, they said. Many community-led proposals for the Gordon Center had been rejected over the years.

The residents, who were organizing on their own time, objected to the shelter not because they weren’t sympathetic to the cause. It’s just that in the ever changing landscape of neighborhood needs, the effect of increased crime was more damaging to the youth than the needs of the women.

“I’ve lived here for 43 years,” said Willard Hay resident Esther Adams. “I’ve seen kids shot on this corner, I’ve seen kids killed on this corner. We’re just trying to help the kids here.”

In addition to the granular differentiation of need, the resources necessary for a youth center is thought to be considerably less than the homeless shelter.

The Gordon Center (homeless shelter) will cost more than $4 million to convert into a shelter, but peace activists like Clemons’ group, A Mother’s Love, believe it would cost considerably less for a youth center because of the way the building is designed. For one, it already has a playground.

In this case the system worked. The neighborhood did the work to voice a preference between services for their group. It was close though. The building permit had already been approved for the homeless shelter. If the moms had been too busy to put in the time, or their council member too distance from his constituents or the county’s ambition too strong, there could have been four shelters and no youth center.

It just seems like there should be some general tracking of these things by neighborhood. A hospital wouldn’t go into an area with three other hospitals. Even a McDonald’s wouldn’t have four franchisees within a mile of each other. Some sort of indexing of the mix of services provided to not only serve residents, but also to be sure that various age groups and household formations are being supported.

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