Street Spirit January 2005

Innovative Ways to Build Truly Affordable Housing

by Lydia Gans

It didn't take very long to tour the house that San Francisco activist Jim Reid built. The whole interior could be taken in with one glance. It is called "Shelter One," and takes up only 100 square feet, 10 feet long by 10 feet wide. The small house contains a kitchen and bathroom, including a bathtub, and a sleeping loft accessed by ladder. It cost a mere $10,000 to build.

The alternative housing tour was sponsored by the Campaign to Abolish Poverty (CAP) and the Senior Housing Action Committee (SHAC), a part of the Senior Action Network. The tour was intended to demonstrate the possibility of "Truly Affordable Housing," and was followed by a meeting at the Senior Action Network office on Mission Street with the builder, architect and activists.

The house, unoccupied at present, is sitting in the corner of a parking lot behind an industrial building at 13th and Mission Streets in San Francisco. Jim Reid has been trying for more than two years to get the city to help him locate it on a site so that a poor, currently homeless person can afford to rent or buy it.

Keith Savage has been living on the streets for more than 30 years. He is a poet, handyman, and articulate speaker on behalf of the poor and homeless. He hooked up with Reid a while back and has been looking forward to moving into the little house. But, he says, "Nobody would give him land to put it on, nobody would give him the support he needs to establish it or the funds to build it."

Savage has no illusions about why city bureaucrats aren't helping to make this kind of affordable housing available. "The reason they're not giving Jim the support is because it would knock out a lot of other housing which they're trying to sell at a high price," he says. "This is affordable housing. As well as the fact that they want people homeless because they can ask for funds to take care of the homeless. Then when the funds come, they disappear."

Savage works closely with Barbara Arms, the chief CAP organizer since the group was founded in 1991. Abolishing poverty is an ambitious goal, to say the least. CAP has been working toward that goal by organizing public actions and demonstrations, carrying out educational projects and wide-ranging media outreach, and participating in coalitions with other groups working for economic justice. Their original focus was on employment issues, but their current emphasis is on obtaining truly affordable housing.

Arms explains, "Our commitment is to abolish poverty, which is an ideal; and we also want to empower poor people, homeless people, working people. So as we develop as a coalition, we will insure that there are homeless people represented at each of these meetings, women, families, single men." Savage's participation is important, Arms says, "to represent the homeless people as an independent voice" and to do outreach to the community.

Barbara Arms and Barbara Blong, director of SHAC, organized the Truly Affordable Housing event together. About two dozen seniors participated in the tour and then gathered at the Senior Action Network office for take-out Chinese lunch and a discussion on affordable housing.

Lively presentations were given by Jim Reid and by Donald McDonald, writer, architect and builder of many small houses all over the city. The talks were followed by lots of audience participation.

The seniors in attendance generally agreed that the design of Shelter One was attractive and amazingly compact; but the exterior steps and the interior ladder to the sleeping loft make it inaccessible for most seniors and people with disabilities. However, that didn't dampen their enthusiasm or interest in the concept.

Donald McDonald then presented his ideas to the group. He has been building small houses since the early 1980s in San Francisco and nearby cities. The idea is to build a house cheaply enough so that the payments on the mortgage would be no more than rent.

"We've got a democracy where you have choices," he said. "You can either rent or buy." Many pieces of vacant land are scattered around the city, he maintained, on which one or more of the houses can be built. The really small houses can even be stacked one above the other.

McDonald has built about 300 houses in San Francisco, he said, "to show that by building small you can keep the cost down - just the construction, not the land. My theory was that CalTrans had all these freeway easements; the homeless are there anyhow half the time. I thought, why not give them something where they can live in that's warm and comfortable and it's their home."

Those houses lasted more than three years until CalTrans made him move them. Some of his houses are larger; for example, there are several 20-feet-by-20-feet houses in a row on the corner of Hermann and Steiner streets that are attractive and fit into the neighborhood.

McDonald said that he can build cheaply because there are no land costs and he can hire nonunion labor. This comment precipitated some vehement protests from the audience. He doesn't always use nonunion labor, he explained; but often, the difference in cost can be significant.

McDonald's proposals are not without precedent. In his book, Democratic Architecture, he described tiny cottages, 5,610 of them, that were built in city parks to house people left homeless after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. They were intended for people who had never owned homes. If they wished, they could then buy them for 60 dollars, and eventually move them to their own plot of land.

But now, bureaucracy has reared its ugly head. McDonald's chief complaint is with the planning department. There is plenty of land available, he maintained.

"We can take 20,000 units a year in this city and we build 1400" because of the Byzantine process for getting anything approved, he said. "San Francisco is the most conservative city when it comes to planning. The charter is written so the mayor can use the planning department as a political tool. It's sick!"

Reid agreed. He maintained that he can build his little houses so that anyone can afford them, but "it's government that's in the way. Government at every level - state, federal and city - adds obstacles that make housing very expensive."

Reid cited numerous examples of regulations that often require time-consuming and expensive inspections. "We could build my little houses densely, like 20 on a lot, so people could actually buy a house. If they were on welfare they could buy a house, or if you got $5.50 minimum wage, you could buy a house."

He went on to suggest that, in San Francisco, a person could buy such a little house and sell it a couple of years later for twice what it cost, using their equity to buy a larger house. In response, someone asked if he is encouraging speculation. He replied, "Absolutely!" This too, provoked some discussion.

But Reid is apparently not alone in his attitudes about property and entrepreneurship. He quoted a research study that showed that a vast majority of Americans, rich or poor, want to own their own homes. The alternatives, subsidized housing and housing built by nonprofits, he seems to consider problematic at best.

With all the attention being focused on homelessness these days, both by political officials and the public, the practical solutions proposed by Reid and McDonald call for serious attention. McDonald's book contains numerous detailed plans for different sized houses.

Reid is a contractor, and he is ready to build the kind of houses that can greatly alleviate the problem of homelessness. And he is committed. "I think homelessness is immoral in a Christian country," he declared. We echo that sentiment.

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